Lipovet S Kiĭ, M. N. - Wakamiya, Lisa Ryoko-Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature

Late and Post-Soviet Russian Liter ature
A Reader
Book 1
Pe r e s t r o i k a
and
t h e Po s t- S o v i e t Pe r i o d
C u lt u r a l S y l l a b u s
S e r i e s Edi to r : M a r k L i p o v e t s k y ( U n i ve r s i t y of Colorado-B oulder)
Late and Post-Soviet
Russi a n L i t e r at u r e
A Reader
Book 1
P e r e s t r o i k a and
the Post-Soviet Period
Edited by
Mark Lipovetsky
and Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya
B OS TO N / 2014
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
A catalog record for this book as available from the Library of Congress.
The book is supported by Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation

(translation program TRANSCRIPT).
Copyright © 2014 Academic Studies Press

All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-936235-40-7 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-61811-383-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-61811-397-9 (electronic)
Book design by Ivan Grave

On the cover:
“From the series ‘Kitchen Suprematism’” by The Blue Noses
(Alexander Shaburov and Viacheslav Mizin). Reproduced
by permission of Alexander Shaburov and Viacheslav Mizin.
Published by Academic Studies Press in 2014

28 Montfern Avenue
Brighton, MA 02135, USA
press@academicstudiespress.com
www.academicstudiespress.com
Contents
Acknowledgments 8
Introduction 10
Part 1. Rethinking Identities 18
Excerpts from Dehexing Sex,

by Helena Goscilo 26
Perestroika or Domostroika?:
The Construction of Womanhood under Glasnost 26
Inscribing the Female Body in Women’s Fiction:
Stigmata and Stimulation 43
Liudmilla Petrushevskaya 51
Hygiene 53
The New Robinson Crusoes:
A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century 63
The Fountain House 75
Vera Pavlova 83
From If There is Something to Desire 84
Linor Goralik 85
They Talk 86
Slava Mogutin 98
Invitation to a Beheading 99
My First Man: Sentimental Vomit 114
Dreams Come True: Porn 117
We Were All Dying of the Same Diseases 119
The Triumph of the Family 121
The Death of Misha Beautiful 123
Oksana Robski 133
Excerpts from “Glamour a’la Oksana Robski,”
by Tatiana Mikhailova 134
Part 2. “Little Terror” and Traumatic Writing 147
Excerpts from “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia:

Symbolic Development in Contemporary Russia,”
by Serguei Oushakine 152
Excerpts from “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied:

Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction,”
by Alexander Etkind 171
Lev Rubinshtein 187

Smoke of the Fatherland, or a Filter Gulag 188
Evgeny Grishkovets 191

How I Ate a Dog (excerpts) 192
Elena Fanailova 207

From The Russian Version 208
“… Again they’re off for their Afghanistan…” 208
Lena, or the Poet and the People 212
The Presnyakov Brothers 218

Terrorism (excerpts) 219
Andrei Rodionov 250

“A beauty and junkie with long legs…” 251
“Once a month, he fought or got beat up…” 252
Excerpts from Overkill: Sex and Violence in Russian Popular Culture,

by Eliot Borenstein 254
Overkill: Bespredel and Gratuitous Violence 254
Honor among Thieves 260
Part 3. Writing Politics 270
Vladimir Sorokin 276

“Russia is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire”:
Spiegel Interview with Vladimir Sorokin 278
Petrushka 285
Victor Pelevin 296
Critical Responses to Generation ‘P’ (Homo Zapiens, 1999) 298
Review of Generation ‘P,’
by Gregory Freidin 298
Russian Literary Postmodernism in the 1990s,
by Mark Lipovetsky 303
Survival of the Catchiest: Memes and Postmodern Russia,
by Eliot Borenstein 307
Eduard Limonov 311
A Heroic Attitude to Life 313
Aleksandr Prokhanov 317
Mister Hexogen (excerpts) 318
Excerpts from “The Legitimization of Ultra-Right Discourse
in Contemporary Russian Literature,”
by Ilya Kukulin 337
Sergei Lukyanenko 348
The Anti-Matrix (Take the Blue Pill),
by Aleksandr Tarasov 349
Boris Akunin 358
Excerpts from “A Country Resembling Russia”:
The Use of History in Boris Akunin’s Detective Novels,
by Elena V. Baraban 360
Dmitrii Bykov 373
The Fall 374
Acknowledgments
The editors are grateful to many people who made this project
possible. We are especially thankful to the authors who permitted
us to include their work: Elena Baraban, Eliot Borenstein,
Nadezhda Burova, Dmitrii Bykov, Vitaly Chernetsky, Sasha
Dugdale, Mikhail Epstein, Grigory Freidin, Keith Gessen, Linor
Goralik, Helena Goscilo, Alexander Etkind, Elena Fanailova,
Gerald and Susan Janecek, Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker, Ilya
Kukulin, Tatiana Mikhailova, Slava Mogutin, Serguei Oushakine,
Oleg and Vladimir Presnyakov, Valentina Polukhina, Robert
Reid and Joe Andrews, Aleksandr Prokhanov, Andrei Rodionov,
Lev Rubinshtein, Stephanie Sandler, Olga Sedakova, Aleksandr
Tarasov, Genya Turovskaya, and Matvei Yankilevich. Our thanks
to Eduard Limonov and Slavic and East European Journal for
permission to include their respective texts.
We owe Natasha Perova, Joanne Turnbull and GLAS New Russian
Writing our appreciation for their support and permission to
reprint Lev Rubinshtein’s essays.
No less deserving of acknowledgment are the translators whose
efforts enabled many works to appear here in English for the first
time: Boris Dralyuk, Sibelan Forrester, Brian R. Johnson, Sarah
H. Kapp, Matthew McGarry, Michelle Olson, Alexei Pavlenko,
Rebecca Pyatkevich, Eugenia Sokolskaya, and Molly Thomasy
Blasing. Special gratitude goes to Sibelan Forrester and Alexei
Pavlenko, who we are indebted to in more ways than we can
enumerate here.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks go to Igor and Kira Nemirovsky and Sharona Vedol

at Academic Studies Press for bringing this project to completion.
Grant funds from Transcript (The Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation)
and the Text and Academic Authors Association were essential
to the completion of this project, as were resources from The
Florida State University and The University of Colorado, Boulder.
The following publishers and institutions granted permission to
reprint and translate texts:
Excerpts from Helena Goscilo’s Dehexing Sex are copyright © 1996
University of Michigan Press. Reprinted with permission.
Excerpts from Terrorism are copyright © 2003 The Presnyakov
Brothers, and the translations are copyright © 2003 Sasha
Dugdale. Reprinted by arrangement with the publishers, Nick
Hern Books Ltd: www.nickhernbooks.co.uk
“Hygiene,” “The New Robinson Crusoes: A Chronicle of the End
of the Twentieth Century,” “The Fountain House,” from
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby:
Scary Fairy Tales by Liudmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by
Keith Gessen and Anne Summers, translation copyright © 2009
by Keith Gessen and Anne Summers. Used by permission of
Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
Excerpts from Alexander Etkind’s “Stories of the Undead in the Land
of the Unburied,” © Slavic Review, 68: 3 (Fall 2009). Reprinted
with permission.
“He gave me as a gift,” “The two are in love and happy,” from
If There Is Something to Desire: One Hundred Poems
by Vera Pavlova, translated by Steven Seymour, translation
copyright © 2010 by Steven Seymour. Used by permission
of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third
party use of this material, outside of this publication,
is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random
House, Inc. for permission.
Translations of Vladimir Sorokin’s “Petrushka” and an excerpt from
Evgeny Grishkovets’ “How I Ate A Dog” with the permission
of the Galina Dursthoff Literary Agency.
— 9 —
Introduction
Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader documents the

last several decades of cultural change in Russia. Technology,
media, political and economic policy, the arts, and the day-to-day
activities of ordinary citizens continually reshape Russia and its
culture. Sometimes these changes are monumental, with human
activity and ideas working together to influence many areas of
cultural endeavor at once. More characteristically, people engage
in divergent practices that communicate a range of ideas about
individual identity, community, and nation. These ideas often differ
substantially from each other, reflecting the needs and desires of
many individuals and groups simultaneously.
Given the multiplicity of views expressed at any given moment,
whose perspective should be considered representative of an era or
a nation? Who is entitled to define the times or change them? These
questions, which have engaged scholars in anthropology, history,
philosophy, sociology, and other fields, have shaped the study of
Russian literature as well. The events, ideas and works included in
this book illustrate how these questions have influenced the study of
Russian literature and why these questions remain relevant today.
When the question of who and what define a nation or an era
is considered in terms of multiple events, ideas, and behaviors,
rather than a single “who” or what,” art and our interpretations of
it become powerful forces because of, not despite, their interaction
with other fields of activity. By acknowledging the multiple
Introduction 11
and simultaneous events taking place during any given era, we

foreground their interaction. Literature, culture, and how we study
them are constantly shaping, and being shaped by, their social
and historical contexts. Cultural change is thus the model and the
subject of our study.
One of the goals of this reader is to capture the multiple voices
and meanings that have emerged in the last several decades of cul-
tural change in Russia. Literary texts, essays, and scholarly writ-
ings are all represented. Many of the works in this volume appear
in English translation for the first time, contributing new perspec-
tives to the broader picture of cultural change. By integrating li-
terary texts with the perspectives of politicians, journalists, and cul-
tural critics, this volume presents views that range from individual
needs, dreams, and agendas to efforts to understand those strivings
from alternative perspectives. In this way it attempts to address the
local and global meanings of the keywords that are used to describe
cultural change.
In keeping with its intent to accommodate multiple viewpoints,
Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader is modular in
structure. These volumes may be used on their own, but they
readily lend themselves to integration with other materials. This
first volume, which treats Perestroika and the post-Soviet era, easily
accommodates films (Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch), fiction
(by Vladimir Sorokin, Victor Pelevin, Boris Akunin, Dmitrii Bykov,
and others), performances (Evgeny Grishkovets’ How I Ate a Dog),
performative readings (The Presnyakov Brothers’ Terrorism), and
discussions of current events. Readers may pair the later volume
(on the Thaw and Stagnation periods) with a history of Russia
that chronicles events from the Thaw to the post-Soviet period in
order to further explore the relationship between cultural change
and broader developments in Russia’s economy, its practice of
democracy, and its participation in global affairs.
The themes that organize each volume allow for investigation
of a cross-section of perspectives on topics of global interest. By
layering literary and scholarly texts of the late Soviet and post-
Soviet periods within three thematically organized sections, the
present volume encourages discussion of the interaction between
12 Introduction
methodology, context, and content. Parallel with developments in

recent scholarship, it challenges binary constructions of culture—
such as Soviet vs. anti-Soviet, or Art vs. State—and emphasizes the
range of values, discourses, and activities that organize the lives of
ordinary citizens.
The tendency to encapsulate multiple events, ideas, and
behaviors using a single keyword reveals how we “chronicle
and capture cultural change by creating common categories of
meaning.”1 The period of de-Stalinization from the mid-1950s to
mid-1960s is called “The Thaw”; it was followed by the years of
“Stagnation,” when the reforms of the Thaw were revoked and
Stalinist policies were partially rehabilitated. The short period from
1987 to 1991, which witnessed the collapse of the Soviet ideological
and political order, was named perestroika. The term perestroika refers
to the policy of restructuring Soviet political, cultural, and economic
systems that was instituted in the 1980s. The term literally means
“restructuring,” but it also evokes a variety of events, experiences,
and ideas, ranging from Ronald Reagan’s 1987 exhortation to
Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” to the risky, but real,
possibility for Soviet citizens to publicly assert new social identities.
As readers, we may be attracted to keywords for their tendency to
“sum up” the spirit of an era. The broadly encompassing meaning
that the term perestroika holds for a global audience, however,
coexists with the diverse and individual meanings that it held for
those who lived through it. Keywords “proliferate in usages and
meanings” during times of cultural change, so that a single term
encompasses many individual “strategies of action.”2
The new keywords introduced during the mid- and late-
1980s—perestroika and glasnost’ (openness)—meant many different
things to Russians during this time of instability. Perestroika
initiated nothing less than a revolution in the cultural sphere.
1
Amin Ghaziani and Marc J. Ventresca, “Keywords and Cultural Change: Frame
Analysis of Business Model Public Talk, 1975-2000,” Sociological Forum 20, 4 (2005):
523.
2
Ibid., 528.
Introduction 13
Together with the policy of glasnost’, Perestroika empowered public

figures to take up the unfinished business of de-Stalinization that
had begun during the Thaw period, as well as analyze the failures
of communist ideology. They exposed the worst “achievements” of
the Party, such as the rampant corruption, the cruel methods used
to torture political prisoners, and other abuses that affected the
health and quality of life of ordinary citizens, and did so in public
forums where they could be discussed openly for the first time.
Unfortunately, this process did not lead to the persecution of any
former Soviet officials. In the absence of this crucial step, and with
the devastating economic collapse of the early 1990s, many began
to associate economic hardship and corruption with Perestroika. In
turn, many also began to nostalgically idealize the Soviet past. This
nostalgia continued into the 2000s, even after living standards for the
Russian population had significantly improved. Capitalizing on the
increased demand for oil and gas worldwide, some cultural figures
during the first presidency of Vladimir Putin worked to create
associations in the popular imagination between the increased role
Russia played in the world market in the 2000s and the dominance
of the Soviet Union in world politics in decades past.
In literature, perestroika and glasnost’ meant first and foremost
a steady relaxation of censorship laws and the gradual reinstate-
ment of a great number of literary works banned during the Soviet
period. Among these works were canonical texts by Russian mo-
dernists: Mikhail Bulgakov’s novellas, Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem,
Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, Osip Mandelshtam’s late poems, Andrei
Platonov’s novels and other works, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor
Zhivago, works for adults by Daniil Kharms and other absurdist
writers, the entire oeuvres of Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gumilev,
Mikhail Kuzmin, and many others. Also reinstated were realist
works from the 60s-80s, such as works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Everything Flows, and Anatoly
Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat, which became an international
bestseller. The works of underground and émigré writers from the
Stagnation period, including Venedikt Erofeev, Evgeny Kharitonov,
Dmitrii Prigov, and Andrei Sinyavsky, were now published for the
first time. As a result, a unique cultural situation emerged in which
14 Introduction
multiple literary voices and movements were entering the Russian

literary tradition all at once. For the first time, the history of Russian
literature could include the Silver Age (1900-1910s), the modernists
of the 1920s, and Soviet underground and émigré literature from
the 1920s through the 1980s.
This rapid expansion of the literary field was not an easy
process. Almost every publication in the Perestroika years had to
overcome resistance from censors and Party control. The reshaping
of the literary canon, coupled with the reevaluation of the Soviet
experience, generated heated debates among contributors to literary
journals. The discussions revealed irreconcilable contradictions
between liberal and nationalist approaches to Russian history and
culture. Both groups were critical of the Soviet regime, yet the
former interpreted the Soviet past as a brutal archaizing movement
that did not allow for the inclusion of Russian culture in the cultural
history of modern Western civilization while the latter blamed
communism for aggressive methods of modernization, resulting,
they claimed, in the invasion of foreign ideas (Marxism) and anti-
national forces (Jews) into the Russian national tradition. While
these debates continued, members of the artistic community became
divided in their attitudes toward literary experimentation and new
developments in postmodern writing. Some critics and writers
perceived these new trends in literature—represented by Liudmilla
Petrushevskaya, Victor Pelevin, and Vladimir Sorokin—as immoral
and detrimental to the development of Russian literature. Others
accused realist writers of being aesthetically conservative and, in
many ways, reproducing the banalities of Socialist Realism (except
that in these new realist works, the Soviet past was critiqued, rather
than valorized).
It is a curious fact that the period of cultural history following

Perestroika, stretching from the early 1990s to the present, has not
yet been identified with a unifying keyword. The “post-Soviet” era
remains dependent on the Soviet past, tethered to it by the hyphen
and prefix “post.” Perestroika effectively ended when the seventy-
year long reign of the Communist Party came to a close, but in the
post-Soviet era that has followed, links to the Soviet past in politics
Introduction 15
and culture remain relevant, even after the death of its ideology
and economic system. The modular structure of the present volume
accommodates this feature of late and post-Soviet literature and
culture: amid cultural phenomena that are shared between today’s
global and commodity cultures, for example, what seems to be
novel in the Russian context often turns out to be historic.
Current debates about new directions for Russian literature
reflect new cultural conflicts and divisions. The growth of popular
literature and the marginalization of so-called “serious” literature,
the financial troubles that threaten the existence of long-established
literary journals, the emergence of venues for distributing literary
texts online, and the general commoditization of the cultural sphere
have contributed to new paradigms for the development of post-
Soviet literature. At the same time, new ideological pressures
emerged when television stations, film studios, newspapers, and
other media were bought by the government or came under the
control of figures with close ties to the Kremlin. The post-Soviet
period presents at once the emergence of new literary voices and
the resounding echoes of Soviet-era ideologies.
How postmodern subjectivity interacts with gender and
sexuality is the focus of the section “Rethinking Identities.” By
the 1990s new categories of writing, such as “women’s prose”
and “gay literature,” had emerged in Russia, but these categories
assumed unified communities of writers and readers when in fact
the authors’ writing practices reveal highly individual approaches
to constructing gender and sexuality. Liudmilla Petrushevskaya’s
short stories, prose by Linor Goralik, and poems by Vera Pavlova do
not present a unified female subject. Moreover, their work presents
a challenge to the notion of a stable identity. Luce Irigaray’s
description of feminine language—“‘she’ goes off in all directions …
in which ‘he’ is unable to discern the coherence of any meaning”3—
helps to illustrate the degree to which rigid models of identity were
unsuited to writings about women, and also exposes the fact that
3
Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” New French Feminisms: An Anthology,
ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1980): 103.
16 Introduction
distinctly masculine uses of language had dominated the project of

redefining the nation, its people, and its mythologies. In his essay
“Invitation to a Beheading,” Slava Mogutin contrasts his dynamic
writing with the rigidity of the law. Told by a state prosecutor that
“you might be a good writer but the content of most of your articles
is criminal,” Mogutin determines that homophobia is so thoroughly
integrated into the imagined identity of the nation that his work,
despite its inclusive aims, becomes interpolated into binary
constructions in which one is either heterosexual and normative,
or homosexual and criminal. As new models for the expression of
identity emerged in the 2000s, so did the reaffirmation of stereotyped
gender roles; as Oksana Robski proposes, consumerism and the
subculture of glamour came to provide a viable and attainable, if
wholly commoditized, path to social freedom.
The section “‘Little Terror’ and Traumatic Writing” presents
approaches to defining the self through violent encounters with the
past and various Others. Evgeny Grishkovets’ play How I Ate a Dog
draws the spectator into the author-narrator’s efforts to reconstruct
his identity as he confronts the numerous iterations of his self which
emerged from the trauma he experienced while serving in the
Russian Navy. In the Presnyakov Brothers’ play Terrorism, the threat
of a possible terrorist attack generates nervousness and boredom,
a combination that destroys the play’s characters. Lev Rubinshtein’s
essay “Smoke of the Fatherland” reveals the violence concealed
inside everyday discourses of nostalgia, while Elena Fanailova’s
“Lena and People” and poems by Andrei Rodionov lay bare the idea
that post-Soviet society communicates through violence. Essays by
Serguei Oushakine and Alexander Etkind explore possible reasons
for the prevalence of violence in post-Soviet society and discourse.
The final section, “Writing Politics,” explores popular writings
by authors whose works appear at the intersection of politics,
media, and literature. Beginning with the influential postmodern
writers Vladimir Sorokin and Victor Pelevin—both of them
acutely aware of literature’s ability to appropriate and challenge
dominant cultural discourses—then introducing the nostalgic,
violent, nationalist ideologies of Aleksandr Prokhanov and Eduard
Limonov, this section presents writers’ diverse approaches to
Introduction 17
challenging reigning political ideologies, while emphasizing the

need for reading practices that see literature as more than a mere
market commodity or political propaganda. The participation of
the popular writers Dmitrii Bykov and Boris Akunin in the anti-
Putin protest movements that began in 2011, and their extensive
use of social media and websites to circulate their work, have
brought new readers to their already sizable audiences. Bykov’s
satire encourages a critical perspective on post-Soviet politics,
while Akunin’s detective novels criticize nostalgia for the past and
encourage engaging with institutional problems of the present. The
film director Timur Bekmambetov takes a different approach to the
problems of the present. His Night Watch series, based on the novels
by Sergei Lukyanenko, presents a world in which “everything is
clear, the beginning and the end, good and bad,” so that “terrifying
contradictions will be resolved in one way or another.”4 Aleksandr
Tarasov argues that “if The Matrix tells the viewer to ‘wake up and
revolt,’ the Night Watch series tells him to ‘sit quietly and obey the
regime.’” The popularity of all the works presented in this section,
their range of views and widespread distribution, require us as
readers to make responsible choices about how to engage with
them.
4
Timur Bekmambetov, Konstantin Ernst, Daniil Dondurei, and Lev Karakhan,
“Zhazhda novoi krovi: ‘Nochoi dozor’—tekhnologii kommercheskogo uspekha,”
Iskusstvo kino, no. 12 (2004).
Part 1
R e t h i n k i ng I de n t i t i e s
One of the goals of writing and reading literature is to represent

and understand perspectives that differ from our own. Writing can
create unique, self-ascribed literary identities: some of the works
presented in this volume proclaim the emergence of new attitudes
toward self-identity that confront previous writing practices and
demand to be read on their own terms. In addition to introducing
new identities and affiliations, the performance of identity in
literary texts can allow communities that traditionally have been
marginalized to assert their distinctiveness. These challenges to
dominant literary discourses can lead to the questioning of existing
value systems in the study of literature.
In addition to empowering new voices, however, writing and
reading practices can lead to the creation of stereotyped or otherwise
problematic identities that become imposed upon the writing
subject. For example, not all Russian women writers who published
their work during the late 1980s and early 1990s appreciated the
label “women’s prose” that was applied to their writing. Moreover,
using binary constructs such as “dominant” and “secondary,” or
“center” and “periphery,” as organizing principles is problematic.
As debates about identity politics have demonstrated, if we agree
that there is a center, then all of the diverse identities surrounding
that center become “peripheral.” This can lead to an unsystematic
consolidation of distinct identities based on gender, ethnicity and
sexual orientation, despite the fact that these categories clearly
are not analogous to one another. As David Palumbo-Liu has
observed, grouping “marginalized” people together constitutes
20 Part 1. Rethinking Identities
a form of typecasting in which individual identities become lost.

The discussion of “racial and other minorities and women is geared
to a set of historical narratives about ‘them’ precisely as groups,
rather than individuals.”1 This chapter considers some of the new
developments associated with the exploration of identity in Russian
literature, and encourages discussion of some of the problematic
ways these identities have been characterized.
Helena Goscilo observes that in the Russian literary tradition,
with the emergence of glasnost’ in the late 1980s editors and the
public began to take notice of women writers. The phenomenon
of “women’s prose” was heavily debated, but the term, as Goscilo
notes, did not refer exclusively to literature by or for women.
Female writers and critics alike defined “women’s prose” as writing
preoccupied with “emotional life” and characterized by “triviality,
coquettishness, and empty decoration.” If male writers could
retreat from politics to produce writing with “serious implications,”
women writers were perceived as writing about a petty world of
domestic concerns. It comes as no surprise, then, that women writers
often rejected the label of “women’s prose,” with the writer Tatyana
Tolstaya arguing that “bad” male writers could also produce
“women’s prose” when they tended toward the superficial. Despite
Tolstaya’s claim, the practice of labeling literature according to the
biological sex of the author continues. The literary critic and writer
Olga Slavnikova, when asked about the enduring popularity and
relevance of women’s writing, argued that women are “genetically
programmed” to be indispensable: “In extreme situations, when
men are obliged to die, women are obliged to survive.” In 2012
the provocative writer Zakhar Prilepin published 14, a collection
of women’s writing intended as a follow-up to 10, a collection of
writing by men published in the previous year. In a press statement
ostensibly intended to publicize 14, Prilepin characterized prose
by men as “full of a sensation of gloom and the burdens of life,”
while “women’s prose, in some indefinable way, escapes from this
1
David Palumbo-Liu, “Assumed Identities,” New Literary History 31, no. 4 (2000):
766-767.
feeling.” “But to be blunt,” he continued, “judging from the quality

of the texts, men’s prose is better.”2
The question of how to interpret such characterizations
of women and their writing is complex. Tolstaya’s negative
characterization of “women’s prose” argues for the separation of
gender and biology. Her dismissal of “women’s prose” as a mode
of writing suggests that for her, themes and styles conventionally
associated with women’s writing are not the inherent product of
women’s genes or chromosomes, but are simply characteristic of
bad writing. However much Tolstaya’s claim that “talent is talent”
expresses a healthy suspicion of the notion of genetically determined
identities, it also refuses to acknowledge the underlying biases that
associate “bad” writing with women.
Undoubtedly, the greatest of contemporary Russian women-
writers is Liudmilla Petrushevskaya, whose novel Time Night (1992)
we strongly recommend for courses on contemporary Russian
literature and who is represented in this volume by three short
stories written in the 1990s. Petrushevskaya’s prose (and dramas)
are usually treated as examples of “chernukha” (a dark and gloomy
hyper-naturalism that became popular in the years of Perestroika).
However, her contribution to Russian literature and her lasting
impact on future generations of writers (e.g., the New Drama
movement of the 2000s) can be better seen in the context of Russian
modernism. It is not only Petrushevskaya’s heroines who frequently
interpret their own lives in recurrent dialogue with the prominent
cultural figures of the past (most illuminating is the example of
Anna Andrianovna, the protagonist and unreliable narrator of Time
Night who sees herself as the reincarnation of Anna Akhmatova).
Petrushevskaya herself typically combines painstaking attention to
the details of everyday life with concealed (or obvious) references
to esteemed literary and cultural models. Such references are easily
detectable in the stories included in this volume: ”Hygiene” replays
both the Apocalypses and the Hollywood-inspired story of global
2
“Zakhar Prilepin sostavil antologiiu sovremennoi rossiiskoi zhenskoi prozy” [Zakhar
Prilepin compiled an anthology of contemporary womens’ proze] RIA Novosti,
July 11, 2012 (http://weekend.ria.ru/books/20120711/696772045.html).
catastrophe; “New Family Robinsons” refers to Defoe’s classic,

and “The Fountain House” not accidentally contains in its title the
address of Akhmatova’s residence. By this means Petrushevskaya
transforms the scene of everyday life, permeated by everyday
violence—mainly against and between those closest to each other—
and the mundane struggle for power and domination between
and within genders, generations, families, and the like into the
site where “eternal values” are rigorously tested and discarded.
The woman standing in the center of these global catastrophes
concentrated into the space of a two-room apartment, hospital ward,
remote hut, or similar small space, thus literarily appears to be the
one who carries the burden of responsibility for the stability and
future destiny of the entire world: her prosaic, meager decisions
and seemingly trivial choices immediately attain the importance of
mythological actions, eventually affecting everyone and everything
around her.
The poet, essayist, and prose-writer Linor Goralik directly
continues Petrushevskaya’s line of inquiry in her cycle “They Talk.”
Each snapshot of modern everyday speech included in this cycle
presents a climax of a mundane tragedy (or tragicomedy) that
invites the reader to restore the missing pieces of the puzzle in his/
her imagination. The very design of these intentionally fragmentary
stories, in which climactic conclusions are excluded from the text
but can be imagined by the reader, tangibly outlines the unifying
context shared by the characters and the reader. This context is
truly historical as it implies shared dramas, yet at the same time
it consists predominantly of the mundane and “a-historical.”
Goralik inherits this understanding of social history as the product
of everyday relationships between ordinary men and women from
Petrushevskaya.
Much like Petrushevskaya’s heroines, the poet Vera Pavlova, also
included in this chapter, has stated: “I am not a poet, I am a woman
in love.” Her statement, in its rejection of the gender-neutral “poet”
and embrace of the gender-marked “woman,” is consistent with the
accessibility and sensuality of her creative work. Pavlova has noted
that she began writing poems in a maternity ward, immediately
after the birth of her first child (“Poetry came at the same time the
milk did”), and she has not resisted interpretations of her work
that lean toward the biological (like DNA, “an ideal poem …
contains all the information about its author”3). The power of
her gendered poetic world has resonated with readers in Russia
and abroad. Reviews of her poetry, however, reveal that some
critics read her work as an affirmation of existing distributions of
power. The critic Boris Paramonov, for example, likens her work
to a “child’s album,” and the experience of reading her poems
to the pleasure of being seduced by a “talented imp”: “Imagine
Lolita twisting Humbert around her finger … and at the same time
writing excellent poems.”4
If we draw from the readings included in this chapter, we
can make the case that writings by women are so diverse that any
attempt to generalize about “women’s writing” should be met with
well-deserved suspicion. As we have seen, however, this has not
stopped critics and writers themselves from generalizing about
women’s writing in troubling ways. To enter into this debate is to
confront a question that remains central to discussions of identity
politics: individual identity and agency are important to maintain,
but have we emphasized individuality to such a degree that it has
become impossible to mobilize against essentializing discourses?
Challenging the very notion of a center is one way that women writers
have responded to this dilemma. This is not to say that Russian
women writers have united against oppression by embracing an
anti-patriarchal politics. Rather, they have circumnavigated, each in
her own way, the institutional structures that support essentializing
evaluations of their work. Pavlova and Goralik have experienced
emigration (Pavlova to the United States, Goralik to Russia after
periods in Ukraine and Israel) and expanded the linguistic, cultural,
and national parameters that might be used to evaluate their
3
Vera Pavlova, “Surdoperevod,” Oktiabr’ 9:2011, http://magazines.russ.ru/
october/2011/9/pa4.html
4
Sergei Iur’enen, Vera Pavlova, Boris Paramonov, and Lilya Pann, “’Nebesnoe
zhivotnoe’: V Ekslibrise Vera Pavlova” [A Heavenly Animal: Vera Pavlova at Exlibris],
Radio Svoboda, September 24, 2003 (http://archive.svoboda.org/programs/
ex/2003/ex.092403.asp).
writings. All three of the women under discussion have worked in

diverse media: Goralik is a columnist, visual artist, translator, and
author of comic books; Petrushevskaya performs as a cabaret singer;
Pavlova has authored libretti, collaborated with visual artists, and
explored new media as instruments for distributing poetry. They
have intervened in the processes and institutions responsible for
perpetuating assumptions about their work. The same cannot be
said for all who read them.
Slava Mogutin is explicit about challenging stereotypes with his
art and life. “I’ve always enjoyed breaking taboos and stereotypes,”
he writes. “I think that’s what real art is about, and I’ve paid my
dues for expressing myself in the most radical and honest way.”
In 1994 he attempted to register for the first same-sex marriage in
Russia with his American partner, the artist Robert Filippini. For
this, his writings, and his activism, he was compelled to leave
Russia in 1995. Mogutin’s art, inseparable from his life, aims to
trouble conventional assumptions about identity and its formation.
His poetic alter ego performs a kind of literary coming out in “My
First Man” with the words “I have never written or reminisced
about it,” but then subverts any notion of a unique identity with
the line, “I entered his life and unceremoniously appropriated it.”
If the poem is about discovering oneself, it also acknowledges the
role that appropriating another’s identity might have in shaping the
self. By challenging the notion that the self can only be defined in
opposition to an Other, the poem rejects the binary hierarchies that
serve to reinforce difference and oppression.
The so-called literature of glamour, epitomized by Oksana
Robski, offered another, more conformist, approach to re-shaping
one’s personal and social identity. About the lifestyle of the moneyed
class but addressed to a broader audience, this prose not only
promotes self-expression through the accumulation of material
signs of prestige and power, it also presents consumerism as a path
to individual and social freedom. The narrative fails to acknowledge
the contradiction present in the fact that buying consumer goods
makes the protagonist and her story subject to the whims of fashion
and the market. Nonetheless, it is a model for self-fashioning that
quickly moved into the cultural mainstream of the Putin era, mainly
through television shows and advertisements, magazines, and the

highly mediated lives of celebrities. Robski herself became such
a celebrity, as did Kseniia Sobchak, a former socialite who went on to
become an organizer in the anti-Putin protest movement. Like many
public personalities whose fame is to some degree dependent upon
their ability to showcase consumer goods (whether in magazine
photos, advertisements, or reality television shows, at sponsored
events, or on the red carpet) Robski’s popularity suggests, despite
multiple contradictions, that participation in consumer culture and
individual freedom are compatible ideals.
The various strategies of self-determination exhibited by the
artists found in this chapter include ignoring, confronting, and even
encouraging the expression of preconceived categories of identity.
In this, they reveal the limitations of existing institutions for the
distribution and evaluation of literature. These strategies, along
with the writers’ extensive work in other media, also confront the
idea that artists can only freely express their ideas within specially
designated venues, where women’s writing, queer literature, or
any other such cultural category that is set up in opposition to
a central “norm” can be safely explored. The editors of this anthology
considered whether concentrating these writers in a single section
constituted the creation of exactly this sort of venue and risked
contributing to the reductive reasoning that we can appreciate art
only to the degree that it challenges existing conventions. Ultimately,
it became clear that to consistently leave the work of dismantling
reductive categories to the artists themselves was to absolve readers
of literature of any responsibility in the process. We hope that the
readers of this volume will work toward reformulating some of the
problematic terms that have been used to evaluate their writing.
E xcer pts from D ehe x ing S e x
by Helena Goscilo
Perestroika or Domostroika?
The Construction of Womanhood under Glasnost1
To see ourselves as others see us!

—Robert Burns, “To a Louse”
So many representations, so many appearances

separate us from each other.
—Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together”
Messages from Russia:
A woman should primarily love, care [for], and cherish her own
family.2
Women by nature are destined to be weaker…. Men are women’s

major game…. A woman without a family is without a master, like
a stray animal.3
Women in the West [who] always ask why so few women in our
country hold government and other leading posts don’t imagine
how many women tyrants have made themselves comfortable in
these posts and are tormenting both sexes. Female bureaucracy is
more horrible than its male counterpart—a male bureaucrat can
still be moved to pity by one’s belonging to the fair sex [sic], whereas
a female bureaucrat can’t be moved by anything. I feel sorry
for our embittered women, running wild and tortured by the
burdens of life. But I pity the men just as much. In the West it
is now fashionable to fight men to the death. Nothing has been
heard about this yet in our country. Thank God. If women enter
1
From Helena Goscilo, Dehexing Sex: Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 6-18, 87-95.
2
Liliya Nikolayeva, “To Love, Care and Cherish,” Moscow News, 1987, no. 16: 2.
3
Sigrid McLaughlin, “An Interview with Viktoria Tokareva,” Canadian Woman Studies
10, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 76.
Helena Goscilo. Perestroika or Domostroika? 27
the lists, they will win. For they are more cunning, wily and
tenacious. And I would very much resent living in a land of
conquered men.4
Western women feminists have teeth like sharks.5
Clearly, from Russia without love.
These opinionated pronouncements emanate not from men but
rather from educated Russian women of the intelligentsia, whose
reflex response to the very terms woman writer and feminist recalls
Dracula recoiling from a cross. That seismic reaction symptomatizes
the fundamental discrepancies in assumptions and orientation
between Russian female authors and the majority of their Western
readers. The two operate by different, often antithetical, codes.
Witness the case of Natal’ia Baranskaia, whose story “Nedelia kak
nedelia” (A Week Like Any Other, 1969) impressed Western feminists
by its purported expose of patriarchal oppression. Some have even
dubbed this piece, which chronicles the dehumanizing effects of
women’s double duty on the professional and home fronts, the
angriest feminist cry to emerge from the Soviet Union.6 Yet during
an interview with me in spring 1988, Baranskaia (not having read
Roland Barthes and learned of the author’s death) asserted that her
story, far from exposing the heroine’s husband as a chauvinistic
exploiter, actually portrays the power of love. Although she
intended to document the hardships endured by today’s women
in Russia, Baranskaia protested, she deemed it unjust to hold men
responsible for conditions that she imputes exclusively if hazily to
the “system.” What Baranskaia did criticize was Western women’s
efforts to displace men from their “natural” position of superiority,
and the “unfeminine” tactics deployed in that campaign. Why, for
instance, did the British publishing house adopt the name Virago —
4
Tatyana Tolstaya, “In a Land of Conquered Men,” Moscow News, 24 September -
1 October 1989, 13.
5
Opinion of Viktoriia Tokareva, reported by Beatrix Campbell, “Writer’s Room with
a View,” Guardian, 21 February 1989, 35.
6
For a discussion of a story from such a viewpoint, see the competent survey of
Baranskaia’s oeuvre by Susan Kay, “A Woman’s Work,” Irish Slavonic Studies 8 (1987):
115-26.
which Baranskaia understood only in its secondary meaning, as

a termagant, a loud, overbearing woman, and not in its primary
dictionary definition, as a woman of great stature, strength,
and courage?7 As Baranskaia’s indignant bafflement evidences,
a Western audience reads according to a set of presuppositions and
assimilated imperatives that Russians manifestly do not embrace—
indeed, even find alien and repugnant.
As a result of the radical self-assessment by the educated
segment of society in the West during the last two decades, feminism
has fundamentally transformed people’s ways of perceiving and
thinking about women. That transformation in turn has influenced
the norms guiding the production and consumption of culture.
For the reconceived image of woman (womanhood “with a human
face”) has infiltrated not only the process of reading texts, watching
films, viewing paintings, and decoding advertisements and
commercials, but also the very environment that incubates these
artistic and media forms. In the United States, Germany, France,
and England, where awareness of gender problems inflects the
sensibilities of readers, viewers, writers, and directors alike, a more
or less shared set of cultural experiences allies authorial choices
with audience expectations and reactions. Recent fiction and film
in the United States and England, for example, draws on a cultural
context informed by the issues, if not necessarily the values, of
the twenty-year-old feminist movement.8 Examples range from
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Erica Jong’s series
of unzipped novels, and Fay Weldon’s mordant shockers to Alison
Lurie’s The Truth About Lorin Jones, David Lodge’s best-seller Nice
Work (1989), such films as Working Girl (1988), The Life and Loves of
a She-Devil (1989), and Switch (1991), and various media messages
(e.g., the commercial for Virginia Slims claiming “You’ve come
a long way, baby!”) that subliminally or overtly promote a more
self-conscious version of gender.
7
Interview with Natal’ia Baranskaia in Moscow, conducted and taped by Helena
Goscilo (13 May 1988).
8
Written in the early 1990s.
Recent Soviet films and prose authored by men or women lack

a comparable context and, consequently, the fund of referents avail-
able to Western artists and their public. Since discourses and artistic
codes and conventions partially derive from specific sociocultural
circumstances, it is critical to contextualize contemporary Russian
inscriptions of womanhood in order to grasp what underlies the
failure at communication, let alone agreement. Accordingly, my dis-
cussion offers a selective commentary that falls into four unequal
segments: (1) a summary of institutionalized concepts of gender in
Soviet society, with a glance at the status of feminism within that
structure; (2) an assessment of the impact glasnost has had on the
Soviet concept of womanhood; (3) an examination of how ortho-
dox Soviet views are reflected, challenged, or subverted in late So-
viet women’s writing in general; and (4) a necessarily brief, closer
look at three women writers whose heterodox authorial practices
discomfited Soviet readers in the late 1980s and provoked heated
debate.9
Context
Formally, Russian women in the Soviet Union enjoyed rights
that their Western counterparts might have envied. In the classic
Marxist conviction that women’s emancipation depends upon their
integration into productive labor, the egalitarian Soviet Constitution
guaranteed women not only full political and civil rights but also
access to most trades and professions, in addition to fixed equal pay
for equal work.10 Because an ongoing need for an expanding labor
force intensified the government’s efforts to retain female workers,
until de-Sovietization ninety percent of Russian women were
9
See particularly the famous dialogue between Sergei Chuprinin (“Drugaia proza”)
and Dmitrii Urnov (“Plokhaia proza”), Literaturnaia gazeta 6 (8 February 1989):
4-5; Evgeniia Shcheglova, “V svoem krugu,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 3 (1990):
19-26.
10
Gail Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1976).
employed (the highest percentage in the world)11 in areas ranging

from engineering and law to sanitation and construction. Women, in
fact, accounted for 52 percent of the labor force.12 Moreover, thanks
to the legislation written in 1988 by the Soviet Women’s Committee
under Zoia Pukhova, the state vouchsafed women two years of
maternity leave and job security for three years after parturition. It
also provided free public child care facilities and legal abortion and
divorce for a nominal fee.
As no less a figure than the once omniscient and now roundly
discredited Lenin declared, however, “Equality before the law
does not automatically guarantee equality in everyday life.” The
disjunction between the paper rights conferred upon women and
the bleak reality of their empirical experience dimmed the glow
of the pseudo-utopian picture implied by the Constitution. Ever
since the Stalin period, when the official culture joined women’s
economic role to the glorification of maternity and the reaffirmation
of women’s traditional familial duties, the Soviet state and the
society exhorted women to be both producers and reproducers. As
a consequence, they bore the double load of full-time work and all
domestic responsibilities. One might say that Russian women were
in labor wherever they turned. Men’s unwillingness to assume any
household or parental obligations left the woman alone to cope
with rearing children and cleaning house, cooking, laundering,
shopping, etc. Over a million women suffered the stress of single
parenting while holding down regular jobs.13 In a country in which
perpetual shortages of goods, shoddy products, lack of appliances,
poor medicine, deplorable services, and inefficiently run institutions
made everyday life a trial, women with a family had insufficient time
and energy for career advancement. Hence, in spheres considered
11
Figures vary, depending on source. In 1990 one of the most frequently cited
statistics was 86 percent of women were working outside of home. Broadcast by
Ted Koppel, “Sex in the Soviet Union” (January 1991).
12
See also Helena Goscilo, “Russian Women Under Glasnost,” New Outlook 2, no. 4
(Fall 1991): 45-50.
13
Kerry McCuaig, “Effects of Perestroika and Glasnost on Women,” Canadian Woman
Studies 10, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 12.
suitable for women, they disproportionately clustered on the lowest

rungs of the personnel hierarchy, even though employers readily
acknowledged that female employees were more reliable and quick
(not to mention sober) than their male counterparts. According to
a freelance journalist in Moscow, few women harbored ambitions
to assume top positions, knowing that prestigious establishments,
especially, strictly observed a quota system, based on the unofficial
but widespread formula: “We already have one Jew, two non-Party
members, and two women.”14 The writer Tatyana Tolstaya and others
deploring the so-called recent [i.e., during late Soviet period —
eds.] feminization of Russian society pointed out that women
account for over eighty percent of the country’s doctors and teachers,
but she overlooked the low prestige of these specializations in the
USSR as well as their links with nurturing and child raising. Women
constituted ninety percent of pediatricians, but only six percent of
surgeons; in the late 1970s the powerful USSR Academy of Sciences
boasted 14 women among its 749 members (Lapidus 188); in 1986
men made up over 84 percent of the influential Soviet Writers’
Union. Of the approximately 15 percent of women, none held key
executive posts. Editorial boards typically consisted of seven to
eight men, with one token woman, at best.
Under Soviet rule, most Russian women concurred that they
felt crushed by emancipation. They complained that the average
woman underwent twelve abortions during her lifetime (abortion
was the chief mode of contraception, and some women had as
many as thirty),15 and that she received no help from her husband
with the children or the housework yet was forced to work for
economic reasons, often under hazardous physical conditions, and
so lived in a state of unrelieved tension and exhaustion.16 Although
14
Index on Censorship 3 (1989).
15
Here, as elsewhere, discrepancies in statistics reflect different sources. The variously
reported averages seem to range from twelve to fifteen. […]
16
Nearly half of Russia’s female workers engaged in unskilled labor. In agriculture,
manual labor remained women’s province, for machinery tended overwhelmingly
to be entrusted to men.
women writers and sundry commentators repeatedly lamented

the arduousness of women’s lives in the USSR, few appeared to
make connections between official policy and women’s situation.
In that connection an article by the American journalist Robert
Scheer entitled “Where Is She, the New Soviet Woman?” expressed
outraged bemusement:
Many of my Soviet male friends tended to be primitive oppressors

as regards women, viewing them as a mixture of beast of burden
and sexual toy. More depressing, they seemed to find some
moral confirmation in the laws of nature for clearly supremist
and exploitative views that would be abhorrent [to them] in any
other arena of life. It seems never to have occurred to anyone
here that if women had political power in the Soviet Union one
result might have been the greater efficiency of shopping and
a vast increase in the production of labor-saving devices for the
household. Why has there been such scant improvement, after
decades of socialist organization, in the objective conditions that
women now find themselves in? The answer is that women in the
Soviet Union lack political power even to the degree experienced
in the capitalist West. The disenfranchisement of more than half
of the population is no minor discrepancy in a society struggling
with questions of freedom and representation.17
Gender disposition in the Soviet Union corroborated Simone de

Beauvoir’s aperçu that men have found more complicity in women
than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed. Russian women
internalized official propaganda and the traditional male system
of prerogatives so thoroughly that they themselves propagated
the very inequities that marginalized them. Even among the tiny
minority of self-proclaimed feminists, some believed that a woman
completely realized her essence and her destiny only through
motherhood; that domestic tasks were “unfitting for a man”; that
nature endowed women with the traits of nurturing, softness,
17
Moscow News, 30 April – 7 May 1989.
compliance, and patience.18 In short, they essentialized, by mistaking

social constructs (femininity) for biology (femaleness).[…]
In the springs of 1988 and 1990, while conducting interviews
in Moscow and Leningrad with some thirty female authors
encompassing the full spectrum of background, age, and worldview,
I repeatedly (and often in unexpected contexts) encountered the
refrain, “A woman shouldn’t lose her femininity.” When asked
what constitutes femininity, most cited gentleness, sensitivity,
maternal instincts, and the capacity to love. When I suggested that
these were not necessarily inborn traits, virtually all of the women
resisted the very concept of a constructed identity.19 Ironically, in
a country ruled by ideological impositions, women did not grasp
the politics of gender formation. In irrationally hoping that general
improvements in living conditions would ease their lot, without
agitating for a fundamental reassessment of entrenched female-male
roles, Russian women unwittingly reinforced gender stereotypes.
Whereas Western women sought a “room of their own,” years of
officially promoted self-sacrifice habituated Russian women to
‘’burdens of their own”—which they seemed reluctant to jettison on
the grounds (or, rather, quicksands) of a biologically ordained self.
Russian women frankly admitted that the majority of Russian
men scorned domestic tasks as an inherently female province,
proved often unsatisfying sexual partners (given to “premature
congratulations”), and were conspicuously absent parents (paternity
had virtually disappeared from the vocabulary); they likewise
recognized that conditions of employment invariably favored men,
even though they were less reliable workers. Yet, when exhorted
to seek redress through political action on their own behalf,
Russian women not only shied away from feminism but violently
denounced it. As Nina Beliaeva, a feminist lawyer, observed, the
18
See Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1990); and Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989).
19
[…] For instance, the cult of maternity, despite its complicity with official
demographic campaigns and the heritage of Stalinist coercion, persists as an
ineradicable fixture of Russian thinking.
very word “smacks of the indecent, the shameful,” and for many
was associated with masculinization or lesbianism (universally
despised).20 Feminism conjured up the specter of “bright, slovenly,
raucous women with blunt gestures, bugging eyes, and cigarette
smoke, in a small but vociferous procession of women declaring war
on the opposite sex.”21 Indeed, even otherwise enlightened Russians
conceived of feminists as vengeful, mustached hags or harridans
thirsting for the wholesale metaphorical (if not literal) castration of
men, intent on crushing or replacing them so as to gratify their lust
for power, compensate for their self-doubts, or enact their lesbian
inclinations.
In addition to equating feminism with the masculinization or
perversion of women, Soviets also stigmatized it on two counts:
for decades it had been discredited as springing from bourgeois
values. Many Westerners puzzled by Soviets’ uncompromising
rejection of it failed to realize that Russians entertained a reduced
and uninformed, or historically overmarked, concept of feminism.
[…] Second, given its manifestly political nature, feminism during
Glasnost had little chance of taking root in a country that had
suddenly lost faith in any political engagement as an activity. Many
women, in fact, maintained that they preferred to leave the “dirty
business” of politics to men, confining their energies to the more
“authentic” spheres of family and intimate circles of friends, in
a replay of Western Victorian scenarios.
Glasnost
Glasnost witnessed a growing receptivity on Soviets’ part to
Western tendencies and a readiness to assimilate what earlier
would have been dismissed as quintessentially Western phenomena
incompatible with Soviet principles. Indeed, one might reasonably
20
The few lesbians whom I have encountered in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, plus
several gay men, would represent exceptions. […]
21
Nina Belyaeva, “Feminism in the USSR,” Canadian Woman Studies 10, no. 4 (Winter
1989): 17.
attribute to Western influence the influx in the then USSR of

what in the West could signal a burgeoning feminist awareness:
(1) surveys of popular responses to questionnaires designed to
highlight possible gender differences, such as the opinion polls
reflecting attitudes to sexual practices, marriage, and divorce;22 (2)
articles in various publications devoted to women’s issues and
exhorting increased attention to them;23 (3) the opening in 1990 of
a Center for Gender Studies within the Academy of Sciences […];
(4) the formation of a separate women’s section within the Writers’
Union, headed in Moscow by Larisa Vasil’eva […]; (5) a sudden
spate of publications of neglected women’s literature from the
past (Ekaterina Dashkova, Nadezhda Durova, Karolina Pavlova,
Evdokiia Rostopchina) and various collections of contemporary
women’s prose that materialized in the late 1980s and early 1990s
(Zhenskaia logika, Chisten’kaia zhizn’, Ne pomniashchaia zla, Novye
Amazonki […]); (6) the emergence (and prominence in the media) of
individuals who committed themselves, despite formidable odds,
to the dissemination of feminist ideas, for example, the independent
Leningrader Olga Lipovskaia, editor of Zhenskoe chtenie, founded
in 1988 and consisting of articles, original poetry and prose by
women, and translations of texts pertinent to characteristic feminist
concerns; and (7) the proliferation of women’s organizations,
including Preobrazhenie, LOTOS (an acronym for the League for
Society’s Liberation from Stereotypes), the club SAFO, a network
of women’s councils […], and an international women’s press club
called 33 Women and One Man, the man being the rotating elected
“hero of the month,” ironically dubbed the “Knight of Perestroika,”
whom the thirty-three women interviewed collectively in an effort
to enhance mutual understanding between the sexes.
Parenthetically, it is worth noting that the reaction of a pro-
minent male political analyst on Soviet TV to the formation of
22
Many of these were published in Moscow News, a flagship of glasnost.
23
In 1988 Moscow News introduced a regular column entitled “She and We,” dealing
specifically with women’s issues and featuring diverse items ranging from letter
and opinion polls to editorials and “think pieces.”
this club drove home the dire need for consciousness-raising in

Soviet society. According to his “professional” judgment, women
could be reporters and good interviewers, “especially if they are
young and attractive, but never political commentators or serious
analysts because the latter are at variance not only with tradition,
but with the very makeup of women, their physiology [sic] and
way of thinking.”24 In a similar vein a lawyer deploring the morals
of prostitutes branched out into the following startling genera-
lization:
I respect the emancipation of women, but one perhaps ought to

think of restoring the old rule banning women from restaurants
in the evening unless accompanied by men. The woman who
hangs outside a restaurant waiting to be let in, who sits at a table
without a man, a glass of cognac in her hand, does not give others
any reason to have a flattering opinion of her.25
Items appearing in such publications as Moscow News in the late

1980s testified to a strong division of opinion among Soviets
regarding woman’s “proper niche” in life. That such issues were
being debated at all awakened moderate optimism among some
Soviets. […]
These, however, were miniature pockets of revolutionary
change, more cosmetic than systemic. Isolated developments on
a modest scale, they virtually drowned in countercurrents, some
new and imported from the West, others of immemorial domestic
origins. After years of essentially denying that sex and the body exist,
the Soviets discovered both — as a source of pleasure and economic
gain. Especially the exploitation of women’s bodies as marketable
commodities and objects of displaced male violence, which Western
24
Moscow News, 1-8 January 1988, 12. According to several feminists in Moscow,
the press club smacked of frivolity and “coquetry,” had no serious platform, and
contributed little to the betterment of women’s social status. Interview with
Natal’ia Filippova, former member of Preobrazhenie (Moscow, May 1990), recorded
by Helena Goscilo.
25
Elizabeth Waters, “Reading Between the Novosti Lines,” Canadian Woman Studies
10, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 34.
feminists (notably Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and

Susan Browruniller)26 have combatted, suddenly found unsavory
expression in diverse aspects of late Soviet culture: (1) the highly
publicized beauty contests that secured the then sixteen-year-old
Mariia Kalinina (Miss Moscow 1988) and seventeen-year-old Iuliia
Sukhanova (Miss USSR 1989) dubious fame; (2) a relentless barrage
of films onanistically relying on female nudity, explicit sexual acts,
and prolonged or repeated rape as a means of attracting viewers
so as to amass profits (e.g., Kh. Kaiziev’s Shakaly [Jackals, 1990],
A. Eidamadzhan’s Za prekrasnykh dam! [To Beautiful Ladies, 1990]);
(3) a wave of video parlors (videosalony and videokluby) trafficking
principally in sadomasochism and pornography; artistic milestones
with such subtle titles as Devushki, razdevaites’! (Take It Off, Girls!),
Obnazhennaia sredi kannibalov (Naked Among the Cannibals), Ty ne
oboidesh’sia bez nebol’shogo rasputstva (You Can’t Do Without a Little
Sluttishness), and Biust i taz—vot chto samoe glavnoe (The Bust and
Pelvis Are What’s Most Important) […]; (4) heavy metal concerts
during which female performers bared all (apart from musical
talent); (5) display of female bodies au naturel on covers of any
and all publications, ranging from fashion magazines to scholarly
economic journals (e.g., Eko), on dashboards of taxis, on posters
peddled in subway stations, and so forth; (6) the Soviet issue of
Playboy photographed by Sasha Borodanin, which raised hopes of
a profitable career abroad in many a pneumatic Soviet breast; and
(7) a dramatic increase in, and a cynical respect for, prostitution as
a ticket to material well-being and social prestige. In a 1990 survey,
Soviet women ranked prostitution eighth in a list of twenty top
professions; over one-third of high school girls freely admitted that
they would exchange sex for hard currency (Koppel).
The significance of these novelties in the Soviet Union could
not be compared to that in the West, given the primitive level of
26
See, for instance, Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1975); Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing
Women (New York: Putnam, 1981); and Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism
Unmodified (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). For more extensive
bibliography, see MacKinnon (231-36).
knowledge among Russians then about anything pertaining to sex.

Virtually no sex education existed in the USSR; condoms were in
disastrously short supply, and 70 percent of high school students
who engaged in sexual intercourse did not use contraceptives the
first time; owing to Russians’ fundamental ignorance of biology,
some women reached the fifth month of pregnancy before realizing
their condition; and, finally, every fourth abortion that occurred
in the world was performed in the USSR (according to Koppel’s
research). These were not ideal circumstances for the radical
sexual revolution of the type that took place under glasnost. […]
After decades of puritanism Russian males flocked in thousands
to inspect, and to parade their appreciation for, what the society
had denied them for so long. Within one social category, at least,
the politics of erogenous commitment ousted earlier political
idols: truck drivers quickly replaced the portraits of Stalin
decorated with medals, which they used to display routinely on
their windshields, with coyly pouting pinups free of any and all
decoration.
One might argue that such regressive sexist innovations
pervaded only popular culture, and a minority within it, without
impinging on “high culture,” the intelligentsia’s arena of significant
activity. Such arguments, however, do not withstand close scrutiny.
While pornography may he purchased by the proletariat, it is
produced by writers—not necessarily talented ones, but members
of the intelligentsia nonetheless. Surveys canvassing opinions
regarding sexual, marital, and familial issues during the late 1980s
unambiguously confirmed that both sexes across a broad social
spectrum upheld the double standard. […] Women’s organizations,
while affording members platforms for self-expression, not only
failed to be taken seriously by those empowered to change women’s
lot but also lacked the political weight to effect improvements
in women’s social and political status. And scholarly feminist
publications sparked enthusiasm in the West but left the educated
Russian public largely skeptical and indifferent.[…]
If beauty contests and pornographic videos propagated a de-
grading and reductionist image of womanhood, the titles of recent
prose collections [of the late 1980s-early 1990s], such as those
mentioned, likewise enforced hoary gender stereotypes through

their code-affirming implications: for example, Zhenskaia logika
(Female Logic, 1989) relied on the tiresome and tireless fantasy
of women as irrational, unpredictable creatures ruled by emotion
and whim; Chisten’kaia zhizn’ (A Clean/Pure Life, 1990) evoked the
hackneyed pseudo-ideal of woman as virgin or sterile/sterilized
housekeeper, and so forth. Editors continued not only to exclude
or drastically underrepresent women in anthologies of prose and
poetry but also to withhold their birthdates while supplying that
information for all the male contributors, on the understanding that
women, unlike men, wish to hide their age (according to the cliché
that women grow old, while men become distinguished […]). To the
perceptive reader the markedly different treatment of these authors,
who, moreover, served as isolated representatives of their gender,
set them apart—outside the “malestream”—and betrayed the deep-
rooted gender bias that for decades prevailed in all spheres of Soviet
cultural life and continued to do so during glasnost. Yet the majority
of Russians, including those trained in deciphering the values and
political allegiances attaching to ostensibly innocuous discourse,
seemed impervious to sexist language or strategies. Though
sensitized to the encoded sociopolitical connotations of literary
and journalistic statement, they could not detect the articulation of
gender politics in verbal formulations that any educated Westerner
would find crudely chauvinistic.
Women Writers
How do women born and raised in such a culture perceive and
inscribe themselves in their texts? The answer is, problematically.
Russian women’s reluctance to explore the liberating political
and psychological potential of feminism […] paralleled Soviet
female authors’ categorical disavowal of themselves as specifically
women writers, even though they and their society at every turn
underscored their Otherness. Whenever gender issues were raised,
irreconcilable self-contradictions riddled the impassioned reactions
of both. Asked by an American scholar how she felt as a woman
writer, Viktoriia Tokareva replied:
It is no disadvantage that I am a woman. I am different because

I write with humor. Humor is rare, even [sic] with male writers.
I prefer male prose, though often women’s prose is overloaded
with attention to detail. If the woman is talented this is delightful.
But I like terse literature, not babskaya [broads’ or typical women’s]
literature. (McLaughlin 75)
Liudmilla Petrushevskaya claimed to write in a “male mode,”

focusing on the essentials of plot and character, as opposed to
wallowing in the ornateness that she, like many others, associated
with women’s style.27 For Tatyana Tolstaya, women’s writing
was synonymous with superficiality and a philistine outlook,
with a saccharine air and a mercantile psychology. But her
revealing comment that men also write such “women’s prose”
left unanswered the question why hack work of this sort merits
a gendered label.28
Although the highly successful critic-journalist Natal’ia
Ivanova doubted the validity and usefulness of a gendered literary
category, she nonetheless proceeded to define “women’s prose” in
purely derogatory terms. For her it denoted a parochial outlook,
an exclusive preoccupation with women’s emotional life, and
a concomitant glut of weddings, infidelities, and divorces; its stylistic
earmarks were triviality, coquettishness, and empty decoration.29
Her contentious model recalled an earlier article (published in
1963) by the writer Natal’ia Il’ina, who summed up what she
ironically dubbed “ladies’ literature” as a stultifying succession of
narcissistic self-contemplations in mirrors breathless declarations
of improbable desires and aspirations, littered with pretentious
references to pseudolegitimating sources from Heraclitus to Kant
and unintentionally hilarious stereotypes of incarnated masculine
27
Sigrid McLaughlin, “Contemporary Soviet Women Writers,” Canadian Woman
Studies 10, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 77.
28
Tatyana Tolstaya. “A Little Man Is a Normal Man,” Moscow News, 1987, no.8: 10.
29
Natal’ia Ivanova, “Kogda by zhizn’ domashnim krugom…,’” Literaturnaia gazeta
4 (1986): 72-4.
and feminine ideals that flourish in Harlequin Romances today.30

In its derisive antipathy toward its subject the critique rivaled
Nabokov’s dismissal of Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises as
a book about bells, bulls, and balls. In fact, when Petrushevskaya,
Tolstaya, and Ivanova went on to assert that there is really only
good and bad prose, it became evident that the negative epithet,
for reasons suggested by the gender disposition in Russian society,
was interchangeable with women’s. Female authors vehemently
dissociated themselves from “women’s” writing, then, chiefly
because the seemingly innocent terms did duty for evaluative (or,
rather, devaluative) modifiers.
In their works, which favored the genre of the short story or
novella, Russian women authors under glasnost, not surprisingly,
tended to focus on what they knew best and what interested them
most: human interaction—often heterosexual relations, family
dynamics, generational conflicts, problems of self-fulfillment, and
the conflicting claims of job and home. Hallmarks of Soviet women’s
prose during the last two decades include a subordination of plot to
a preponderance of description; psychological exploration; a style
that eschews modernist technique; and a fairly stable perspective,
usually a female center of consciousness, conveyed through
quasidirect discourse (erlebte Rede)—a limited viewpoint in which
boundaries between author, narrator, and protagonist often become
blurred.
How have women’s narratives differed from men’s? Or, to cast
the query in terms of the classic Freudian penal/penile test, one
could ask, “What quintessential trait of male prose has women’s
fiction lacked?” Above all, a direct, focal treatment of political issues
and an immanent impulse to universalize. A nakedly politicized
system such as the Soviet Union’s appreciated all too well that the
personal is political, but not in the sense theorized by feminists
and other Western intellectuals. According to orthodox Soviet
principles, “retreat” into the private sphere signaled a repudiation
30
Natal’ia Il’ina, “K voprosu o traditsii i novatorstve v zhanre ‘damskoi povesti’,”
Novyi mir 3 (1963): 224-30.
of the obligatory participation in collective endeavors and thought

mandated by a monolithic ideology. In effect, then, the personal was
treasonable. But because of the a priori separation of masculine and
feminine arenas of activity—public for men, domestic for women—
male apostasy became female propriety. Women’s literary forays
into the private world followed so-called laws of nature (were
a desideratum), whereas literary evidence of men’s withdrawal
from political involvement carried serious implications.
The discrimination paralleled official supervision of sexuality
with male “deviance” (i.e., homosexuality) punished by a law
that left lesbianism unmentioned, for lesbianism was, presumably,
inconceivable or socially unidentifiable. In other words, the
exclusion of manifestly political matters from women’s fiction
and its emphasis on personal or familial aspirations coincided
with establishment expectations. In that regard women’s fiction
could be considered conformist. Its place in the culture paralleled
women’s time, from a masculinist viewpoint, as a pause in the
day’s occupations when serious business was set aside for a lighter
entertainment. Moreover, the cult of maternity and self-sacrifice, the
recurrent motif of guilt for striving to realize the self at the expense of
the family (when the two proved incompatible), and the avoidance
of formal experimentation all strengthened the impression that
women’s fiction was conservative, devoid of risk and color. […]
Helena Goscilo 43
Inscribing the Female Body in Women’s Fiction

Stigmata and Stimulation
In the novel I wanted to compensate for the

absence of corporeality in Russian literature.
—Vladimir Sorokin, Interview
Some time in the 1980s, Russian women’s fiction shed its threadbare
Romantic habits for new modes of gendered representation. Until
then the idealizing impulse of Platonism, bequeathed by the
Romantics, had shaped literary treatments of women’s physicality.
As the incarnation of the sublime ideal that tantalized and tormented
the male subject, woman (the dis-or misplaced Goal) was inscribed
metaphorically or metonymically according to the dictates of the
unitary aesthetic that Paul de Man justly attributes to the Romantic
imagination. Hence, her appearance intimated the transcendent
mysteries of that vague “beyond” that so beguiled Shelley,
Coleridge, Hoffmann, Lermontov, Gogol, and Odoevskii […], while
also permitting the Lavaterian observer to “read” and interpret her
physiological “text” according to conventions that unhesitatingly
extrapolated character traits from individual physical features. […]
Generalized into a vague blur of ethereal beauty, in Russia as
elsewhere, woman’s form was reduced to symmetry, delicacy, and
harmony, its specifics carefully confined to large, expressive eyes
(“mirror of the soul”), porcelain pallor, and clouds of hair.1 While
religious icons (angel, Virgin Mary) dominated the conceptualization
of womanhood, euphemism and lyrical effusions desexed any
1
On the standard female ideal constructed in the nineteenth century, see Martha
Vicinus, Suffer and Be Still (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1972).
bodily part associated with potential sensuality (e.g., breasts, hips,

feet). In that respect women’s writing of the 1830s intersected with
men’s, as amply evidenced by the narratives of Nadezhda Durova,
Elena Gan, Evdokiia Rostopchina, and Mariia Zhukova. […] For
the psychological process of internalization shaped women’s
self-perception in conformity to the gendered binarism that rules
malestream Russian thought in the spheres of social, political,
and cultural activity. While acquiescing to their relational identity
as lesser antithesis, female authors for the most part opted for
a double interiority, fictionally inscribing themselves from within
and, moreover, primarily as vessels of thought and above all
emotions.
The totalizing aesthetics of Romanticism demanded that
female virtue assumes a correspondingly attractive external form
(“beautiful inside and out”), and that vice signals its presence
through obverse (comparably visible) clues. That morally polarized
code entrenched itself so firmly that, as late as the second half of
the century, it dictated the descriptive particulars of the contrast
between Turgenev’s transparent innocents (“turgenevskaia
devushka” [the Turgenevian girl]) and his experienced sexual
predators, for example, the snake-haired Polozova (Veshnie vody
[Spring Torrents]); or between Tolstoy’s girlish, “truthful-eyed”
Kitty Shcherbatskaia and Anna Karenina, whose lush figure, springy
step, and riotous curls collectively implied an excess of sensual
appetite. […] According to this economics of the female body,
minimalism conveyed morality; voluptuousness evoked voluptuari-
ness. […]
If the 1890s witnessed a belated readiness to extend literary
possibilities for inscribing women’s bodies […], any developments
achieved by the 1920s were abruptly curtailed in the ensuing
decade. The imposition of puritanical caveats by the caretakers of
Soviet ideology, together with systematic official campaigns for
population increase, led to the exaltation of women’s maternal and
uxorial capacities at the expense of their sexuality. Accordingly,
Soviet literature adapted the Romantic aesthetic of the preceding
century to the pseudomodern Russian context, now highlighting the
maternal instead of the virginal aspects of the Madonna paradigm.
Helena Goscilo. Inscribing the Female Body in Women’s Fiction 45
Unlike her fragile Romantic counterpart, the new Soviet heroine

exhibited superhuman resilience and strength, but shared with
her swooning predecessor traumas that novelists invariably cast as
emotional, sometimes physical, but rarely sexual.
In the (post)glasnost era the young generation of female
authors producing so-called new women’s prose has reversed that
protracted trend. Writers such as Nina Gorlanova, Marina Palei,
Nina Sadur, Liudmilla Ulitskaia, Larisa Vaneeva, and Svetlana
Vasilenko have elaborated a strategy of externalization, of maximal
palpability, whereby not tearful lamentations but the female body—
as the text’s physical and tropological center—testifies to women’s
experience. Female bodies “document” their owners’ suffering
and degradation: they bruise, hemorrhage, and break; they endure
rape, childbirth, abortion, beating, and disease; they succumb to
substance addiction, incontinence, and sundry dehumanizing
processes—all painstakingly detailed in slow motion. Hence the
fastidious distress among Russian critics that current women’s
prose has betrayed women’s fabled uplifting mission of defleshed
inspiration—das ewig Weibliche or the Prekrasnaia dama—by sinking
into the muck and mire of physiology. From this viewpoint the
reassuringly euphemized connotativeness of the female body has
degenerated into the literalized dysphemism of gross, violated
flesh. Whereas the Romantic heroine’s defleshed body projected the
harmonious bliss of a paradise to be attained or regained, the body
of today’s heroine is inscribed with the torments of a living hell—
hence, the recurrent motif of the Dantesque circle (krug) in recent
women’s fiction. […]
As the site of a unitary aesthetic ideology, women’s earlier
corporeal self was generalized and sanitized into the classical
body—closed, disciplined, and permitted only two forms of effluvia:
picturesque tears of sorrow (with the Pietà as iconic precedent)
and maternal milk (nurture). The fluids now entering and exiting
women’s orifices, by contrast, are blood, semen, mucus, bile, urine,
and alcohol (Emma Bovary’s death sequence magnified to the nth
power and systematically intercalated throughout a text). If earlier
visual insignias of reformative immaculate beauty such as marble-
white foreheads, modestly downcast eyes, and ethereal grace
elicited the distanced aesthetic pleasure of contemplation, current

details of bruised faces, bloated stomachs, and bloodied thighs
provoke moral outrage or visceral revulsion on readers’ parts.
Whereas modified deviations from propriety-bound conventions
formerly reinforced those very conventions, inasmuch as they
invariably signaled infractions of a (putative) norm, those erstwhile
infractions now constitute the norm.
New women’s prose spotlights the grotesque body, the
uncensored, disruptive body of apertures and appetites—Bakhtin’s
lower bodily strata. It opens up the female body to “unsanitary”
activity. And it raises several related issues: (1) the possible functions
of body inscription in literature; (2) the probable motivation for
the current displacement of the classical body with its grotesque
counterpart; and (3) the potential benefits of the new modes of
fictionalizing female physicality as manifested in the prose of
women writers.
[…] As Wendy Steiner, among others, has observed, “painting
until very recently has been taken as mimetic, a mirror of the world.”2
Accordingly, visibility purportedly vouchsafed verisimilitude,
a transparent means of conveying the “truth of reality” through the
palpable medium of paint (a kindred accuracy was later attributed
to photography). Translated into the verbal—thus presumably
more labile—form of fiction, the illusion of visibility was rendered
primarily through accretion of concrete physical detail that
consorted with other modes of characterization, such as action and
dialogue, to produce the credible image of a person as well as of
a place and time.
Within this sphere the body, quite predictably, constituted the
chief information center or locus of verification, particularly after
the influential publications of Lavater’s physiological and Gall’s
phrenological studies. Hermeneutics of the body presupposed
a continuity between outer (visible) and inner (invisible) self to such
an extent that any disjunction carried shock value and warranted
commentary. […] Physical portraits as “speaking pictures” of
2
Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xii.
individuals, whether genred simply as physiological sketches (e.g.,

Lermontov’s “Maksim Maksimych”) or meta-genred as ekphrasis
(e.g., in Anna Karenina) […], attest to the saliency of a materialized
“body language” for the construction of fictional human identity.
The body language that proliferates in current Russian
women’s fiction, however, serves different ends. Rarely invoked in
order to characterize or to reinforce credibility along a continuum
of increasing verifiability (from intangible to material), it sooner
fulfills the rhetorical function of metonymically installing authorial
and authoring premises instead of pseudoconcretizing authored
beings. In other words, alcoholism in Liudmilla Petrushevskaya
and Vaneeva, rape in Vasilenko and Tatiana Nabatnikova, abortion
in Palei and Gorlanova do not so much index the moral laxity of
individual fictional personae as they inscribe the epistemological
and conceptualizing habits that produce specific fictions or texts.
Given the extraordinary power of body rhetoric in Russia
today, to read the debased body in women’s fiction as merely body
and thus symptomatic of physical brutality under deteriorating
living conditions is to ignore both the tropological properties of
the body and the highly differentiated interpolation of the body
as rhetorical device by various practitioners of womens’ prose.
[…] Petrushevskaya, for instance, reverses discursive traditions by
tabooing the emotional-spiritual dimension of experience privileged
in nineteenth-century prose and replacing it with a lexicon of
physiological processes as the sole permissible (unadulterated)
mode of discourse […]3 Tolstaya, à la Paul de Man, explodes the
assumptions behind totalizing readings by positing a definite
disjunction between body and soul (physical versus imaginary
or spiritual; outer versus inner). […] Valeriia Narbikova employs
sexual acts to spotlight textual practices, and so forth. […]
In Vasilenko’s fiction […] the female body resists stable
identification with any single phenomenon. It functions, in fact, as
the field through which passes every conceivable experience, open
3
For more detail see Goscilo, “Petrushevskaia’s Vision: No Ray of Light in the Kingdom
of Darkness” (paper delivered at AAASS Conference in Arizona, 1992).
to endless signification. A source of joy and suffering, the corporeal

self is both metaphor and material entity, subject and object,
depending upon the specifics of the given moment. As signifier, it
floats more freely than any other body in current women’s prose.
Although, in light of this multiplicity, to make claims for
the typicality of any Vasilenko text would be misguided and
misleading, her fictional body use emerges perhaps most forcefully
in her novella “Shamara,” a latter-day women’s revision of Nikolai
Leskov’s “Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda” (Lady Macbeth of
the Mtsensk District). Set in a labor camp polluted by radiation
(Vasilenko’s literary version of her native Kapustin Iar), the tale,
tellingly and tautologically labeled videopovest’, is profoundly
visual. In the course of its forty-odd pages the eponymous heroine’s
body undergoes every conceivable violation in an environment
ruled by “animal life”: married to the convict Ustin (one of the eight
men who earlier gang-raped her), Shamara is terrorized by a hard-
drinking albino soldier in an armored troop carrier, has intercourse
with him to save Ustin, terminates the resulting pregnancy in her
own bathtub, and gets brutally beaten by Ustin, slapped by her
coworkers and the local authorities, accidentally almost killed
on a rollercoaster by her hermaphroditic friend Lera, and almost
murdered by an escaped sexual psychopath. The entire world of
the narrative consists of people’s holding knives to each other’s
throats, randomly fondling others’ bodies, spying voyeuristically
on copulating couples, attempting murder and suicide, succumbing
to alcohol, and so forth.
Vasilenko, however, does not single Shamara out as victim,
thereby differentiating between her and other convicts and their
mates: Shamara herself resorts to violence, thievery, bullying, alcohol,
and magic spells (in the style of Nina Sadur), to prevent Ustin from
straying. And, more important, Vasilenko inscribes Shamara’s body
not only as an ambulatory testament to stoic suffering but also as
a center of pleasure and aggressive appetite. Collapsing the world
with her own subjectivity, Shamara recognizes in both a kindred
primordial, unappeasable will—a will that Vasilenko vigorously
sexualizes. Acknowledging her own needs, Shamara forthrightly
articulates her sexual desire for a man, enjoys a drinking spree, and
takes sensual delight in her own and others’ physical appearance;

in addition, she perceives her surroundings in terms of sexual
energy. Although shifting viewpoint within quasi-direct discourse
complicates the attribution of perspective, within Shamara’s
character zone inanimate objects become actively sexualized. Hence,
the sun kisses her, the armored troop carrier, driven by lust for her
(“okhvachennye pokhoi’iu”), flaunts itself, almost touching her with
its hot flank (“zharkim bokom”), and tears and soils her dress. Indeed,
this opening scene of the novella metaphorically foreshadows the
albino driver’s later sexual demands on her.
In “Shamara” as elsewhere (e.g., her first story, “Za saigakami”
[Going after Goat Antelopes]), Vasilenko resists both conventional
narrow troping and simple materialization of the female body.
Neither antithetical to mind or emotion nor a visible emblem
of them, woman’s body in Vasilenko has a capacity for multiple
signification, including nonsignification.
As these and other women’s texts evidence, the heart has lost its
status as the privileged organ of women’s experience, displaced by
the uterus and the bodily lower stratum that are the locus of women’s
pain and pleasure. And the specific terms and significance of that
displacement in recent women’s texts attest to the rehabilitation of
female physical appetite, which traditional concepts of femininity
stigmatized morally and aesthetically, regardless of whether that
appetite was alimentary or sexual. Fictional women have regained
their bodies and the expressive potential of their flesh. […]
Bodily discourse has acquired formidable political and
rhetorical powers in Russia through the longevity and inflexibility
of the comprehensive interdictions against it (Foucault 6). By
contrast, official abuse of lofty abstractions has wholly discredited
“idealization.” Thus, while eloquent flesh “speaks,” the conventional
voice stays mute or elusively deflective. “What formerly may
have occurred behind the scenes of textual representation now
solidly occupies center stage: rape in Tatiana Nabatnikova’s
“Shofer Astap” (The Bus Driver Astap), Ulitskaia’s “Bron’ka,” and
Vaneeva’s “Antigrekh” (Anti-Sin); prostitution, alcoholism, and
addiction in Vaneeva’s “Parada planet” (Parade of the Planets) and
Petrushevskaya’s “Takaia devochka” (A Girl like That); prolonged,
agonizing childbirth and/or abortion in Elena Makarova’s “Na

sokhranenii” (To Be Brought to Term), Vasilenko’s “Shamara,”
and Palei’s “Otdelenie propashchikh” (The Losers’ Division); loss
of control over body functions in Petrushevskaya’s “Ali-Baba,”
“Gigiena” (Hygiene), and Vremia noch’ (Time Night), and Palei’s
“Den’ topolinogo pukha” (The Day of Poplar Down). In visual
terms women’s prose has shifted from Botticelli to Daumier and
Toulouse-Lautrec. Rose-petal complexions bedewed by tears—the
sole permissible bodily effluvium in an age of sublimation—have
ceded to eyes rolling out of sockets, supurating wounds, blood
trickling down thighs, and buttocks smeared in excrement.
This poetics of gross externalization was pioneered by
Petrushevskaya, universally acknowledged as the patron saint
of the “new physiology.” Indeed, if all nineteenth-century male
authors came out from under Gogol’s overcoat, then today’s young
female prosaists have emerged from under Petrushevskaya’s skirt.
The vividness and wealth of concrete physical detail (regarding
bedwetting, defecation, brutal violence, etc.) in her works and
theirs have elicited revulsion, opprobrium, and bemusement
from critics accustomed to the decorum of omission, periphrasis,
or euphemizing tropes. To dismiss this phenomenon—what
Russians call “chernukha” (grime and slime)—as merely a vulgar
flaunting of newly acquired freedom in the interests of épatage is
to underestimate the profound metamorphosis in psychology and
aesthetics that women writers have sustained and written into their
texts. […]
Liudmilla Petrushevskaya
(b. 1938, Moscow)
An author of plays and fiction, Petrushevskaya graduated from

Moscow State University and began writing in the mid-sixties.
Her short stories were rejected from the major journals for their
“dark content.” Although in the Soviet period her plays were
published very rarely (Love was published in 1979; Three Girls in
Blue in 1984), they were popular among actors and directors and
were staged by small theaters. In the early eighties, her plays were
performed on the stages of such popular Moscow theaters as the
Taganka, the Sovremennik (dir. Roman Viktiuk), the Lenkom
(dir. Mark Zakharov), and the Moscow Art Theater (dir. Oleg
Efremov). Her favorite dramatic genre is the one-act play, which
in her hands usually combines intense psychological dialogue
with a grotesque plot (Cinzano, А Glass of Water, Colombina’s
Apartment). Since Perestroika, her plays and short stories have
been published widely, but the cruel and bleak plots of her short
stories of the past two decades caused a kind of aesthetic shock.
Petrushevskaya is often considered to be the leader of the wave
of neonaturalistic fiction called chernukha, and yet the goal of
both her fiction and her drama is to do more than merely reveal
the dark and disgusting aspects of Soviet or post-Soviet reality.
Most of Petrushevskaya’s plots are focused on the tragedies of
everyday life caused by poverty, housing problems, sicknesses,
alcoholism, and love affairs. In depicting these situations from
the inside, through the voices of unreliable narrators, she
consistently unveils the hidden “mythologism” of everyday life:

each of her short stories reveals the archetypal, mythological plots
within the bleak banality of the mundane. Her most important
works include “Our Crowd,” “Immortal Love,” “Across the
Fields,” “Observation Deck,” and the short novel The Time: Night.
Her oeuvre includes more fantastic genres, such as surrealistic
parables (including “Songs of the Eastern Slavs” and the novel
Number One, or In the Gardens of Alternative Opportunities), ironic
fables (Wild Animal Tales), fairy tales (such as Fairy Tales for the
Entire Family and The Doll Novel), and dystopias (such as “The
New Robinson Crusoes” and “Hygiene”). She also wrote the
script for Yury Norshtein’s famous animated film The Tale of Tales
(1979). Her short novel The Time: Night (1992) was short-listed for
the first Russian Booker Prize. Since the 2010s she has performed
her songs in Moscow clubs. She lives in Moscow.
Recommended for discussion

Petrushevskaya, Liudmilla. The Time: Night. Translated by Sally Laird. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2000.
------. “Our Crowd,” trans. by Helena Goscilo, Glasnost: An Anthology of Russian
Literature Under Gorbachev, ed. by Helena Goscilo and Byron Lindsey. Ann
Arbor: Ardis, 1990.
Also available
Petrushevskaya, Liudmilla. There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s
Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. Translated by Keith Gessen
and Anna Summers. New York: Penguin Books, 2013.
------. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy
Tales. Translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers. New York: Penguin
Books, 2011.
------. Immortal Love, Translated by Sally Laird. London: Pantheon, 1996.
H ygiene 1
One time the doorbell rang at the apartment of the R. family, and
the little girl ran to answer it. A young man stood before her. In the
hallway light he appeared to be ill, with extremely delicate, pink,
shiny skin. He said he’d come to warn the family of an immediate
danger: There was an epidemic in the town, an illness that killed in
three days. People turned red, they swelled up, and then, mostly,
they died. The chief symptom was the appearance of blisters, or
bumps. There was some hope of surviving if you observed strict
personal hygiene, stayed inside the apartment, and made sure there
were no mice around—since mice, as always, were the main carriers
of the disease.
The girl’s grandparents listened to the young man, as did her
father and the girl herself. Her mother was in the bath.
“I survived the disease,” the young man said simply, and
removed his hat to reveal a bald scalp covered with the thinnest
layer of pink skin, like the foam atop boiling milk. “I survived,”
he went on, “and because of this I’m now immune. I’m going door
to door to deliver bread and other supplies to people who need
them. Do you need anything? If you give me the money, I’ll go to
the store—and a bag, too, if you have one. Or a shopping cart. There
1
Texts in this section were initially published in Liudmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once
Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, trans. Keith
Gessen and Anna Summers (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 23-35, 45-60, 97-107.
are long lines now in front of the stores, but I’m immune to the
disease.”
“Thank you,” said the grandfather, “but we’re fine.”
“If your family gets sick, please leave your doors open. I’ve
picked out four buildings—that’s all I can handle. If any of you
should survive, as I did, you can help me rescue others, and lower
corpses out.”
“What do you mean, lower corpses out?” asked the grandfather.
‘’I’ve worked out a system for evacuating the bodies. We’ll
throw them out into the street. But we’ll need large plastic bags;
I don’t know where to get those. The factories make double-layered
plastic sheets, which we could use, although I don’t have the money.
You could cut those sheets with a hot knife, and the material will
seal back together automatically to form a bag. All you really need
is a hot knife and double-layered plastic.”
“Thank you, but we’re fine,” repeated the grandfather.
So the young man went along the hall to the other apartments
like a beggar, asking for money. As the R. family closed the door
behind him, he was already ringing their neighbors’ bell. The door
opened a little, on its chain, leaving just a crack, so the young man
was forced to lift his hat and tell his story to the crack. The R. family
heard the neighbor reply abruptly, but apparently the young man
didn’t leave, for there were no footsteps. Another door opened
slightly: someone else wanted to hear his story. Finally a laughing
voice said: “If you have some money already, run and get me ten
bottles of vodka. I’ll pay you back.”
They heard footsteps, and then it was quiet.
“When he comes back,” said the grandmother, “he should bring
us some bread and condensed milk, and some eggs. And soon we’ll
need more cabbage and potatoes.”
“He’s a charlatan,” said the grandfather. “But those aren’t burns;
they look like something else.”
Finally the father snapped to attention and led the girl away
from the door. These were his wife’s parents, not his, and he rarely
agreed with them about anything. Nor did they exactly ask his
opinion. Something really was happening, he felt: it couldn’t help
but happen. He’d been sensing it for a long time now, and waiting.
Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. Hygiene 55
For the moment he was experiencing a temporary stupor. He

walked the little girl out of the foyer—there was no need for her to
stand there until the mysterious stranger knocked again. The father
needed to have a serious talk with the stranger, man to man, about
treatment options, escape routes, and the overall circumstances on
the ground. The grandparents stayed at the door, because they could
hear that the elevator hadn’t been called up. The young man would
still be on their floor. He was probably asking for all the money
and shopping bags at once so that he wouldn’t have to run back
and forth. Or else he really was a charlatan and a crook and was
collecting the money only for himself, something the grandmother
knew a little about since the time a woman knocked at their door
and said she lived in the next entryway and that an old lady, Baba
Nura, had died there. She was sixty-nine. The woman was collecting
money for the funeral, and she held out a list of people who’d
donated, their signatures, and the sums they’d given: thirty kopeks,
a ruble, even two rubles. The grandmother gave the woman a ruble,
though she couldn’t actually recall anyone named Nura—and no
wonder, because five minutes later one of their nice neighbors rang
the doorbell and said that they should be careful, some woman no
one knew, a crook, was soliciting money under false pretenses. She
had two men waiting on the second floor, and they took off with the
money, dropping the list of names and sums to the floor.
The grandparents were still at the door, listening. Nikolai joined
them; he didn’t want to miss anything. His wife, Elena, came out of
the shower at last and started asking loudly what was going on, but
they hushed her up.
Yet they heard no more doorbells. The elevator kept going up
and down, and people got out on the sixth floor and made noise
with their keys and their door slamming. This meant it could not
have been the young man: he didn’t have any keys. He’d have had
to ring the doorbell.
Finally Nikolai turned on the television, and they had supper.
Nikolai ate a great deal. He ate so much the grandfather felt
compelled to make a remark. Elena came to her husband’s defense,
and then the little girl asked why everyone was arguing, and family
life went on its way.
***
That night, on the street, someone shattered what sounded like
a very large window. “It’s the bakery,” said the grandfather, looking
down from the balcony. “Run, Kolya, get us some supplies.”
They began to collect equipment for Nikolai to go out. A po-
lice car drove up, arrested someone, and drove off, leaving a police
officer posted at the bakery door. Nikolai went downstairs with
a backpack and a knife. By then a whole crowd had gathered
outside. They surrounded the policeman, knocked him down, and
then people began jumping in and out of the bakery. A woman was
mugged for a suitcase filled with bread. They put a hand over her
mouth and dragged her away. The crowd kept growing.
Nikolai returned with a very full backpack—thirty kilos of
pretzels and ten loaves of bread. Still standing on the landing, he
removed all his clothes and threw them down the trash chute. He
soaked cotton balls in eau-de-cologne, wiped down his body, and
threw them down the chute as well. The grandfather, very pleased
with the new developments, restricted himself to just one remark—
the R. family would have to budget their eau-de-cologne.
***
In the morning, Nikolai ate a kilo of pretzels all by himself.

The grandfather wore dentures and dipped the hard pretzels
lugubriously into his tea. The grandmother seemed depressed and
didn’t say anything, while Elena tried to force her little daughter to
eat more pretzels. Finally the grandmother broke down and insisted
that they ration the food. They couldn’t go out robbing every night,
she said, and look, the bakery was all boarded up—everything had
already been taken away!
So the R. family’s supplies were counted up and divided.
During lunch Elena gave her portion to her daughter. Nikolai was
as gloomy as a thundercloud, and after lunch he ate a whole loaf of
black bread by himself.
They had supplies enough for a week.
Nikolai and Elena both called into work, but no one answered.
They called some friends: everyone was sitting home, waiting. The
television stopped working, its screen blank and flickering. The

next day the phone stopped working. Out on the street, people
walked along with shopping bags and backpacks. Someone had
sawed down a young tree and was dragging it home through the
empty yard.
It was time to figure out what to do with the cat, which hadn’t
eaten in two days and was meowing terribly on the balcony.
“We need to let her in and feed her,” said the grandfather. “Cats
are a valuable source of fresh, vitamin-rich meat.”
Nikolai let the cat in, and they fed it some soup—not very much,
no need to overfeed it after its fast. The little girl wouldn’t leave the
cat’s side; while it had been on the balcony, the girl kept throwing
herself at the balcony door to try and touch her. Now she could feed
the little creature to her heart’s content, though eventually even her
mother couldn’t take it. “You’re feeding her what I tear out of my
mouth to give to you!” she cried. There were now enough supplies
for five days.
***
Everyone waited for something to happen, some sort of

mobilization to be announced. On the third night they heard the
roar of motors outside. It was the army leaving town.
“They’ll reach the outskirts and set up a quarantine,” said the
grandfather. “No one gets in, no one gets out. The scariest part is
that it all turned out to be true, what the young man said. We’ll have
to go into town for food.”
“If you give me your cologne, I’ll go,” said Nikolai. ‘’I’m almost
out.”
“Everything will be yours soon enough,” the grandfather said
meaningfully. He’d lost a lot of weight. “It’s a miracle the plumbing
still works.”
“Don’t jinx it!” snapped his wife.
Nikolai left that night for the store. He took the shopping bags
and the backpack, as well as a knife and a flashlight. He came back
while it was still dark, undressed on the stairs, threw the clothes
into the trash chute, and, naked, wiped himself down with the
cologne. Wiping one foot, he stepped into the apartment; only then
did he wipe the other foot. He crushed the cotton balls together
and threw them out the door, then dipped the backpack in a pot of
boiling water, and also the canvas shopping bags. He hadn’t gotten
much: soap, matches, salt, some oatmeal, jelly, and decaffeinated
coffee. The grandfather was extremely pleased, however—he was
positively beaming. Nikolai held the knife over a burner on the
stove.
“Blood,” the grandfather noted approvingly before going to
bed, “that’s the most infectious thing of all.”
***
They had enough food now for ten days, according to their
calculations, if they subsisted on jelly and oatmeal, and all ate very
little.
Nikolai started going out every night, and now there was the
question of his clothing. He would fold it into a cellophane bag
while he was still on the stairs, and each time he came in he would
disinfect the knife over a burner. He still ate plenty, though without
any remarks, now, from his father-in-law.
The cat grew skinnier by the hour. Her fur was hanging loose
on her, and meals were torturous, for the girl kept trying to throw
bits of food onto the floor for the cat as Elena rapped the girl on the
knuckles. They were all yelling, now, all the time. They’d throw the
cat out of the kitchen and close the door, and then the cat would
begin hurling itself against the door to get back in.
Eventually this led to a horrifying scene. The grandparents
were sitting in the kitchen when the girl appeared with the cat in
her arms. Both their mouths were smeared with something.
“That’s my girl,” said the girl to the cat—and kissed it, probably
not for the first time, on its filthy mouth.
“What are you doing?” the grandmother cried.
“She caught a mouse,” said the girl. “She ate it.” And once again
the girl kissed the cat on the mouth.
“What mouse?” asked the grandfather. He and his wife sat still
with shock.
“A gray one.”
‘’A puffy one? A fat one?”
“Yes, it was fat and big,” said the girl happily. The cat, in the
girl’s arms, was trying to free herself.
“Hold her tight!” yelled the grandfather. “Go to your room now,
girl, go on. Take the kitty. You’ve really done it now, haven’t you?”
His voice was growing louder. “You little tramp! You brat! You’ve
played your games with your kitty, haven’t you?”
“Don’t yell,” said the girl. She ran quickly to her room.
The grandfather followed, spraying her path with cologne. He
secured the door behind her with a chair, then called in Nikolai,
who was resting after a sleepless night outside. Elena was sleeping
with him. They woke up reluctantly; everything was discussed and
settled. Elena began crying and tearing out her hair. From the child’s
room they could hear knocking.
“Let me out, open up, I need to go to the bathroom!”
“Listen to me!” yelled Nikolai. “Stop yelling!”
“You’re yelling!” cried the girl. “Let me out, please let me out!”
Nikolai and the others went into the kitchen. They were forced
to keep Elena in the bathroom. She was beating on her door, too.
***
By evening the girl had calmed down. Nikolai asked her if she’d
managed to pee. With difficulty the girl answered that, yes, she’d
gone in her underwear. She asked for something to drink.
There was a child-sized bed in the girl’s room, a rug, a locked
wardrobe with all the family’s clothing, and some bookshelves.
It had been a cozy room for a little girl; now it was a quarantine
chamber. Nikolai managed to hack an opening high up in the door.
He lowered a bottle filled with soup and bread crumbs through the
hole. The girl was told to eat this for dinner and then to urinate in
the bottle and pour it out the window. But the window was locked
at the top, and the girl couldn’t reach, and the bottle turned out to
be too narrow for her to aim into. Excrement should have been easy
enough: she was to take a few pages from one of the books and
go on those, and then throw this all out the window. Nikolai had
fashioned a slingshot and after three attempts had managed to put

a fairly large hole in the window.
But the girl soon showed the signs of her spoiled upbringing.
She was unable to defecate onto the pages as she was supposed
to. She couldn’t keep track of her own needs. Elena would ask her
twenty times a day whether she needed to go poo; the girl would
say no, she didn’t; and five minutes later she’d soil herself.
Meanwhile, the girl’s food situation was becoming impossible:
There were a finite number of bottles, and the girl was unable to
retie the ones she had used to the rope. There were already nine
bottles scattered on the floor when the girl stopped coming to the
door or answering questions. The cat must have been sitting on her,
though it hadn’t appeared in their line of vision in a while, ever
since Nikolai started trying to shoot it with the slingshot. The girl
had been feeding the cat half of every ration—she’d simply pour it
out on the floor for her. Now the girl no longer answered questions,
and her little bed stood by the wall, outside their line of vision.
They’d spent three days innovating, struggling to arrange
things for the girl, attempting to teach her how to wipe herself (until
now Elena had done this for her), getting water to her so she could
somehow wash herself—and pleading interminably for her to come
to the door to receive her bottle of food. One time Nikolai decided
to wash the girl by pouring a bucket of hot water on her, instead of
lowering the food, and after that the girl was afraid to come to the
door. All this had so exhausted the inhabitants of the apartment that
when the girl finally stopped answering them, they all lay down
and slept for a long, long time.
***
Then everything ended very quickly. Waking up, the

grandparents discovered the cat in their bed with that same bloody
mouth—apparently the cat had started eating the girl, but had
climbed out, the makeshift window, possibly to get a drink. Nikolai
appeared in the doorway, and after hearing what had happened
slammed the door shut and began to move things around on the
other side, locking them in with a chair. The door remained closed.
Nikolai did not want to cut an opening; he put this off. Elena yelled
and screamed and tried to remove the chair, but Nikolai once again
locked her in the bathroom.
Then Nikolai lay down on the bed for a moment, and began to
swell up, until his skin had distended horribly. The night before,
he’d killed a woman for her backpack, and then, right on the street,
he’d eaten a can of buckwheat concentrate. He just wanted to try it,
but ended up eating the whole thing, he couldn’t help himself. Now
he was sick.
Nikolai figured out quickly that he was sick, but it was too late—
he was already swelling up. The entire apartment shook with all
the knocks on all the doors. The cat was crying, and the apartment
above them had also reached the knocking phase, but Nikolai just
kept pushing, as if in labor, until finally the blood started coming
out of his eyes, and he died, not thinking of anything, just pushing
and hoping to get free of it soon.
***
And no one opened the door onto the landing, which was too
bad, because the young man was making his rounds, carrying bread
with him. All the knocking in the apartment of the R. family had
died down, with only Elena still scratching at her door a little, not
seeing anything, as blood came out of her eyes. What was there to
see, anyway, in a dark bathroom, while lying on the floor?
Why was the young man so late? He had many apartments
under his care, spread across four enormous buildings. He reached
their entryway for the second time only on the night of the sixth
day—three days after the girl had stopped answering, one full day
after Nikolai succumbed, twenty hours after Elena’s parents passed
away, and five minutes after Elena herself.
But the cat kept meowing, like in that famous story where the
man kills his wife and buries her behind a brick wall in his basement,
and when the police come they hear the meowing behind the wall
and figure out what happened, because along with the wife’s body
the husband has entombed her favorite cat, which has stayed alive
by eating her flesh.
The cat meowed and meowed, and the young man, hearing this
lone living sound in the entire entryway, where all the knocking
and screaming had by now gone silent, decided to fight at least for
this one life. He found a metal rod lying in the yard, covered in
blood, and with it he broke down the door.
What did he see there? A familiar black mound in the bathroom,
a black mound in the living room, two black mounds behind a door
held shut with a chair. That’s where the cat slipped out. It nimbly
jumped through a primitive makeshift window in another door,
and behind that door the young man heard a human voice. He
removed a chair blocking the way and entered a room filled with
broken glass, rubbish, excrement, pages torn out of books, strewn
bottles, and headless mice. A little girl with a bright-red bald scalp,
just like the young man’s, only redder, lay on the bed. She stared at
the young man, and the cat sat beside her on her pillow, also staring
attentively at him, with big, round eyes.
T he N ew Robinson C rusoes :
A C hronicle of the E nd of the T w entieth C entury
So my parents decided they would outsmart everyone. When it

began they piled me and a load of canned food into a truck and
took us to the country, the far-off and forgotten country, somewhere
beyond the Mur River. We’d bought a cabin there for cheap a few
years before, and mostly it just stood there. We’d go at the end of
June to pick wild strawberries (for my health), and then once more
in August in time for stray apples and plums and black cranberries
in the abandoned orchards, and for raspberries and mushrooms
in the woods. The cabin was falling apart when we bought it, and
we never fixed anything. Then one fine day late in the spring, after
the mud had hardened a little, my father arranged things with
a man with a truck, and off we went with our groceries, just like
the new Robinson Crusoes, with all kinds of yard tools and a rifle
and a bloodhound called Red—who could, theoretically, hunt
rabbits.
Now my father began his feverish activity. Over in the garden
he plowed the earth—plowing the neighbors’ earth in the process,
so that he pulled out our fence posts and planted them in the
next yard. We dug up the vegetable patch, planted three sacks of
potatoes, groomed the apple trees. My father went into the woods
and brought back some turf for the winter. And suddenly too
we had a wheelbarrow. In general my father was very active in
the storerooms of our neighbors’ boarded-up houses, picking up
whatever might come in handy: nails, old boards, shingles, pieces
of tin, buckets, benches, door handles, windowpanes, and all sorts

of useful old things, like well buckets, yarn spinners, grandfather
clocks, and then not-so-useful old things, like old iron tea-kettles,
iron oven parts, stove tops, and so on.
Three old women were the village’s sole inhabitants: Baba
Anisya; Marfutka, who had reverted to semi-savagery; and the red-
headed Tanya, the only one with a family: her kids would come
around and bring things, and take other things away—which is
to say they’d bring canned food from the city, cheese, butter, and
cookies, and take away pickled cucumbers, cabbage, potatoes.
Tanya had a rich basement pantry and a good, enclosed front yard,
and one of her grandchildren, a permanently ailing boy named
Valera, often stayed with her. His ears were always hurting, or else
he was covered with eczema. Tanya herself was a nurse by training,
which training she received in a labor camp in Kolyma, where she’d
been sent at the age of seventeen for stealing a suckling pig at her
collective farm. She was popular, and she kept her stove warm—
the shepherdess Vera would come from the next village over and
call out (I could hear her in the distance), “Tanya, put the tea on!
Tanya, put the tea on!” Baba Anisya, the only human being in the
village—Marfutka didn’t count, and Tanya was a criminal—said
that Tanya used to be the head of the health clinic here, practically
the most important person around. Anisya worked for her for five
years, for doing which she lost her pension because it meant she
didn’t complete the full twenty-five years at the collective farm, and
then five years sweeping up at the clinic don’t count, especially with
a boss like Tanya. My mom made a trip once with Anisya to the
regional Party headquarters in Priozersk, but the headquarters had
been boarded up long ago, everything was boarded up, and my
mother walked the twenty-five kilometers home with a frightened
Baba Anisya, who immediately began digging in her garden with
renewed vigor, and chopping wood, and carrying firewood and
twigs into her house—she was fending off a hungry death, which is
what she’d face if she did nothing, like Marfutka, who was eighty-
five and no longer lit her stove, and even the few potatoes she’d
managed to drag into her house had frozen during the winter. They
simply lay there in a wet, rotten pile. Marfutka had nibbled out of
Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. The New Robinson Crusoes 65
that pile all winter and now refused to part with these riches, her
only ones, when one time my mother sent me over with a shovel
to clean them out. Marfutka refused to open the door, looking out
through the window that was draped in rags and seeing that I was
carrying a garden spade. Either she ate the potatoes raw, despite her
lack of teeth, or she made a fire for them when no one was looking—it
was impossible to tell. She had no firewood. In the spring Marfutka,
wrapped in layers of greasy shawls, rags, and blankets, showed up
at Anisya’s warm home and sat there like a mummy, not breathing
a word. Anisya didn’t even try to talk to her, and Marfutka just sat
there. I looked once at her face, which is to say what was visible of
her face under the rags, and saw that it was small and dark, and that
her eyes were like wet holes.
Marfutka survived another winter but no longer went into
the yard—she’d decided, apparently, to die of hunger. Anisya said
simply that, last year, Marfutka still had some life left in her, but this
year she’s done for, her feet don’t look straight ahead but at each
other, the wrong way. One day my mother took me along, and we
planted half a bucket of potatoes in Marfutka’s yard, but Marfutka
just looked at us and worried, it was clear, that we were taking over
her plot, though she didn’t have the energy to walk over to us. My
mother just went over to her and handed her some potatoes, but
Marfutka, thinking her plot was being bought from her for half
a bucket of potatoes, grew very frightened, and refused.
That evening we all went over to Anisya’s for some goat milk.
Marfutka was there. Anisya said she’d seen us on Marfutka’s plot.
My mother answered that we’d decided to help Baba Marfa. Anisya
didn’t like it. Marfutka was going to the next world, she said, she
didn’t need help, she’d find her way. It should be added that we were
paying Anisya for the milk in canned food and soup packets. This
couldn’t go on forever, since the goat made more milk every day,
whereas the canned food was dwindling. We needed to establish
a more stable equivalent, and so directly after the discussion about
Marfutka, my mother said that our canned foods were running out,
we didn’t have anything to eat ourselves, so we wouldn’t be buying
any more milk that day. Clever Anisya grasped the point at once
and answered that she’d bring us a can of milk the next day and we
could talk about it—if we still had potatoes, that is. She was angry,
apparently, that we were wasting our potatoes on Marfutka instead
of paying her. She didn’t know how many potatoes we’d invested
in Marfutka’s plot during the hungry spring. Her imagination was
working like a little engine. She must have been calculating that
Marfutka didn’t have long to go and that she’d gather her harvest in
the fall, and was angry in advance that we were the rightful owners
of those planted potatoes. Everything becomes complicated when
it’s a matter of surviving in times like these, especially for an old,
not particularly strong person in the face of a strong young family—
my parents were both forty-two then, and I was eighteen.
That night we received a visit from Tanya, who wore a city
coat and yellow rubber boots, and carried a new bag in her hands.
She brought us a little piglet smothered by its mother, wrapped in
a clean rag. Then she wondered if we were officially registered to
live in the village. She pointed out that many of the houses here
had owners, and that the owners might want to come out and see
for themselves what was happening, say if someone were to write
them, and that all that we beheld was not just riches lying by the
roadside. In conclusion, Tanya reminded us that we’d encroached
on the plot of our neighbor, and that Marfutka was still alive. As
for the piglet, she offered to sell it to us for money, that is for paper
rubles, and that night my father chopped and pickled the little pig,
which in the rag looked like a little baby. It had lashes above its eyes
and everything.
After Tanya left, Anisya came by with a can of goat’s milk, and
over tea we quickly negotiated a new price—one can of food for
three days of milk. With hatred in her voice Anisya asked why Tanya
had come by, and she approved of our decision to help Marfutka,
though she said of her with a laugh that she smelled bad.
The milk and the piglet were supposed to protect us from
scurvy, and what’s more Anisya was raising a little goat, and we’d
decided to buy it for ten cans of food—but only a little later, after
it had grown some more, since Anisya knew better how to raise
a goat. We never discussed this with Anisya, though, and one day
she came over, full of insane jealousy at her old boss Tanya, and
proudly showed us that she’d killed her little goat and wrapped it
up for us. Two cans of fish were the answer she received, and my
mom burst into tears. We tried to eat the meat—we broiled it—but
it was inedible, and my father ended up pickling it again.
My mom and I did manage to buy a baby goat. We walked ten
kilometers to the village of Tarutino, but we did it as if we were
tourists, as if it were old times. We wore backpacks, and sang as we
walked, and when we got to the village we asked where we could
drink some goat’s milk, and when we bought a glass of milk from
a peasant woman for a bread roll we made a show of our affection
for the little goats. I started whispering to my mother, as if I wanted
a goat for myself. The peasant woman became very excited, sensing
a customer, but my mother whispered back no, at which point the
woman began speaking very sweetly to me, saying she loved the
little goats like her own children and because of this she’d give them
both to me. To which I quickly replied, “No, I only need one!” We
agreed on a price right away; the woman clearly didn’t know the
state of the ruble and took very little, and even threw in a handful
of salt crystals for the road. She obviously thought she’d made
a good deal, and, in truth, the little goat did begin to fade away
pretty quickly after the long walk home. It was Anisya again who
got us out of it. She gave the baby goat to her own big goat, but first
she covered it with some mud from her yard, and the goat took it as
one of her own, didn’t kill it. Anisya beamed with pride.
We now had all the essentials, but my indomitable father,
despite his slight limp, started going out into the forest, and every
day he went farther and farther. He would take his ax, and some
nails, and a saw, and a wheelbarrow—he’d leave with the sunrise
and come back with the night. My mother and I waded around the
garden, somehow or other kept up my father’s work of collecting
window panes, doors, and glass, and then of course we made the
food, cleaned up, lugged the water for laundry, sewed, and mended.
We’d collect old, forgotten sheepskin coats in the abandoned houses
and then sew something like fur ponchos for the winter, and also
we made mittens and some fur mattresses for the beds. My father,
when he noticed such a mattress one night on his bed, immediately
rolled up all three and carted them away the next morning. It looked
like he was preparing another refuge for us, except this one would
be deep in the forest, and later on it came in very handy. But it also
turned out that no amount of labor and no amount of foresight can
save you, no one and nothing can save you except luck.
In the meantime we lived through the hungriest month, June,
which is when the supplies in a village usually run out. We shoved
chopped dandelions into our mouths, made soup out of weeds, but
for the most part we just gathered grass, pulled handfuls of it, and
carried it, carried it, carried it home in sacks. We didn’t know how to
mow it, and anyway it hadn’t really risen high enough for mowing
yet. Finally Anisya gave us a scythe (in exchange for ten sackfuls of
grass, which is not nothing), and Mom and I took turns mowing.
I should repeat: We were far from the world, I missed my friends
and girlfriends, and nothing reached us anymore. My father turned
on the radio sometimes, but only rarely, because he wanted to
conserve the batteries. The radio was full of lies and falsehoods
anyway, and we just mowed and mowed, and our little goat Raya
was growing and we needed to find her a boy goat. We trod over
to the next village again, but the peasant woman was unfriendly to
us now—by this point everyone knew all about us, but they didn’t
know we had a goat, since Anisya was raising it, so the woman
thought we’d lost Raya, and to hell with us. She wouldn’t give us
the other goat, and we didn’t have any bread now—there wasn’t
any flour, so there wasn’t any bread—and anyway her little goat
had grown, too, and she knew three kilos of fresh meat would mean
a lot of money in this hungry time. We finally got her to agree to
sell the goat for a kilo of salt and ten bars of soap. But for us this
meant future milk, and we ran home to get our payment, telling the
woman we wanted the goat. “Don’t worry,” she answered, “I’m not
bloodying my hands for you.” That evening we brought the little
goat home, and then began the tough summer days: mowing the
grass, weeding the plot, grooming the potato plants, and all of this
at the same pace as experienced Anisya—we’d arranged with her
that we’d take half the goats’ manure, and somehow or other we
fertilized the plot, but our vegetables still grew poorly and mostly
produced weeds. Baba Anisya, freed from mowing grass, would tie
up the big goat and its little kindergarten in a place where we could
see them, and then scramble off into the woods for mushrooms
and berries, after which she’d come by our plot and examine the
fruits of our labor. We had to replant the dill, which we’d planted
too deeply; we needed it for pickling cucumbers. The potatoes
flourished mostly above ground level. My mother and I read The
Guide to Planting and Sowing, and my father finally finished his work
in the forest, and we went to look at his new home. It turned out to
be someone’s hut, which my father had refurbished by putting in
window frames, glass, and doors, and covering the roof with tar.
The house was empty. From then on at night we carried tables and
benches and crates and buckets and iron pots and pans and our
remaining supplies, and hid everything. My father was digging
a basement there, almost an underground home with a stove, our
third. There were already some young vegetables peeking out of the
earth in his garden.
My mother and I over the summer had become rough peasants.
Our fingers were hard, with tough thick nails, permanently
blackened with earth, and most interesting of all was that at the
base of our nails we’d developed some sort of calluses. I noticed
that Anisya had the same thing on her fingers, as did Marfutka, who
didn’t do anything, and even Tanya, our lady of leisure, a former
nurse, had them too. Speaking of which, at this point Tanya’s most
frequent visitor, Vera, the shepherdess, hung herself in the forest.
She wasn’t actually a shepherdess anymore—all the sheep had been
eaten long ago—and also she had a secret, which Anisya, who was
very angry with Tanya, now told us: Vera always called for tea when
she was coming into the village, but what Tanya gave Vera was
some kind of medicine, which she couldn’t live without, and that’s
why she hung herself: she had no money anymore for medicine.
Vera left behind a little daughter. Anisya, who had contact with
Tarutino, the neighboring village, told us that the girl was living
with her grandmother, but then it emerged that the grandmother
was another Marfutka, only with a drinking problem, and so the
little girl, already half insane, was brought home the next day by
our mother in an old baby stroller.
My mother always needed more than the rest of us, and my
father was angry because the girl wet her bed and never said
a word, licked her snot, didn’t understand anything, and cried at
night for hours. Pretty soon none of us could live or sleep for these
nighttime screams, and my father went off to live in the woods.
There wasn’t much for it but to go and give the girl back to her failed
grandmother, but just then this same grandmother, Faina, appeared
and, swaying on her feet, began demanding money for the girl and
the stroller. In reply my mother went inside and brought out Lena,
combed, showered, barefoot but in a clean dress. At this point Lena
suddenly threw herself at my mother’s feet, without a word, but
like a grown-up, curling herself up in a ball and putting her arms
around my mother’s bare ankles. Her grandmother began to cry
and left without Lena and without the baby stroller—apparently, to
die. She swayed on her feet as she walked and wiped her tears away
with her fist—but she swayed not from drink but from hunger,
as I later figured out. She didn’t have any supplies—after all, her
daughter Vera hadn’t earned anything for a long time. We ourselves
mostly ate stewed grass in different forms, with plain mushroom
soup being the most common.
Our little goats had been living for a while now with my
father—it was safer there—and the trail to his house had almost
disappeared, especially as my father never took the same path
twice with his wheelbarrow, as a precaution, plotting for the future.
Lena stayed with us. We would pour her off some milk, feed her
berries and our mushroom soups. Everything became a lot more
frightening when we thought of the coming winter. We had no
flour and not a single grain of wheat; none of the farms in the area
was operating—there hadn’t been any gasoline or spare parts in
ages, and the horses had been eaten even earlier. My father walked
through the abandoned fields, picked up some grain, but others had
been by before him, and he found just a little, enough for a very
small sack. He thought he’d figure out how to grow wheat under
the snow on the little field near his house in the woods. He asked
Anisya when he should plant and sow, and she promised to tell him.
She said shovels were no good, and as there weren’t any plugs to be
found anywhere, my father asked her to draw him a plug on a piece
of paper and began, just like Robinson Crusoe, to bang together
some kind of contraption. Anisya herself didn’t remember exactly
how it worked, even though she’d had to walk behind a cow with
a plug a few times, in the old days, but my father was all aflame with
his new engineering ideas and sat down to reinvent this particular
wheel. He was happy with his new fate and never pined for the life
of the city, where he’d left behind a great many enemies, including
his parents, my grandmother and grandfather, whom I’d seen only
when I was very little and who’d since been buried under the rubble
of the arguments over my mom and my grandfather’s apartment,
may it rot, with its high ceilings and private bathroom and kitchen.
We weren’t fated ever to live there, and now my grandparents were
probably dead. We didn’t say anything to anyone when we left
the city, though my father had been planning his escape for a long
time. That’s how we managed to have so many sacks and boxes
to take with us, because all of this stuff was cheap and, once upon
a time, not subject to rationing, and over the course of several years
my father, a farseeing man, collected it all. My father was a former
athlete, a mountain climber, and a geologist. He’d hurt his hip in
an accident, and he’d long ago dreamed of escape, and here the
circumstances presented themselves, and so we did, we left, while
the skies were still clear. “It’s a clear day in all of Spain,” my father
would joke, literally every morning that it was sunny out.
The summer was beautiful. Everything was blossoming,
flowering. Our Lena began to talk. She’d run after us into the forest,
not to pick mushrooms but to follow my mother like she was tied
to her, as if it were the main task of her young life. I taught her how
to recognize edible mushrooms and berries, but it was useless—
a little creature in that situation can’t possibly tear herself away
from grown-ups. She is saving her skin every minute of the day, and
so she ran after my mother everywhere, on her short little legs, with
her puffed-out stomach. She called my mother “Nanny”—where
she picked up that word we had no idea; we’d never taught it to
her—and she called me that, too, which was very clever, actually.
One night we heard a noise outside our door like a cat meowing
and went outside to find a newborn baby wrapped in an old,
greasy coat. My father, who’d grown used to Lena and sometimes
even came during the day to help around the house, now simply
deflated. My mother didn’t like it either and immediately went
over to Anisya to demand who could have done this—with the
child, at night, accompanied by the quiet Lena, we marched over to

Anisya’s. Anisya wasn’t sleeping; she had also heard the child’s cries
and was very worried. She said that the first refugees had already
arrived in Tarutino, and that soon they’d be coming to our village
too, so we should expect more guests from here on out. The infant
was squealing shrilly and without interruption; he had a hard,
puffed-out stomach. We invited Tanya over in the morning to have
a look, and without even touching him she said he wasn’t going to
survive—he had the infant’s disease. The child suffered, yelled, and
we didn’t even have a nipple for the bottle, much less any food for
him. My mother dripped some water into his dried-out mouth, and
he nearly choked on it. He looked like he was about four months
old. My mother ran at a good clip to Tarutino, traded a precious bit
of salt for a nipple, and returned full of energy, and the child drank
a little bit of water from the bottle. My mother induced stool with
some softening chamomile brew, and we all, including my father,
darted around as fast as we could, heating the water, giving the
child a warm compress. It was clear to everyone that we needed to
leave the house, the plot, our whole functioning household, or else
we’d be destroyed. But leaving the plot meant starving to death. At
the family conference my father announced that we’d be moving
to the house in the woods and that he’d stay behind for now with
a rifle and the dog in the shack next door.
That night we set off with the first installment of things. The boy,
whose name was now Nayden, rode atop the cart. To everyone’s
surprise he’d recovered, then began sucking on the goat’s milk, and
now rode wrapped in a sheepskin. Lena walked alongside the cart,
holding onto the ropes.
At dawn we reached our new home, at which point my father
immediately made a second run and then a third. He was like
a cat carrying more and more of his litter in his teeth, which is
to say all the many possessions he’d acquired, and now the little
hut was smothered in things. That day, when all of us collapsed
from exhaustion, my father set off for guard duty. At night, on his
wheelbarrow, he brought back some early vegetables from the
garden — potatoes, carrots, beets, and little onions. We laid this all
out in the underground storage he’d created. The same night he
set off again, but limped back almost immediately with an empty
wheelbarrow. Gloomily he announced: “That’s it!” He’d brought
a can of milk for the boy. It turned out our house had been claimed
by some kind of squad. They’d already posted a guard at the plot,
and taken Anisya’s goat. Anisya had lain in wait for my father on
his escape path with that can of milk. My father was sad, but also
he was pleased, since he’d once again managed to escape, and to
escape with his whole family.
Now our only hope lay in my father’s little plot and in the
mushrooms we could find in the forest. Lena stayed in the house
with the boy — we didn’t take her with us to the forest now but
locked her in the house to keep her out of the way. Strangely enough
she sat quietly with the boy and didn’t beat her fists against the
door. Nayden greedily drank the potato broth, while my mother
and I scoured the woods with our bags and backpacks. We no longer
pickled the mushrooms but just dried them—there was hardly any
salt left now. My father began digging a well, as the nearest stream
was very far.
On the fifth day of our immigration we were joined by Baba
Anisya. She came to us with empty hands, with just a cat on her
shoulder. Her eyes looked strange. She sat for a while on the porch,
holding the frightened cat on her lap, then gathered herself and
went off into the woods. The cat hid under the porch. Soon Anisya
came back with a whole apron’s worth of mushrooms, though
among them was a bright-red poisonous one. She remained sitting
on the porch and didn’t go into the house: we brought her out
a portion of our poor mushroom soup in a can from the milk she used
to give us. That evening my father took Anisya into the basement,
where he’d built our third refuge, and she lay down and rested and
the next day began actively scouring the forest for mushrooms.
I’d go through the mushrooms she brought back, so she wouldn’t
poison herself. We’d dry some of them, and some we’d throw out.
One time, coming home from the woods, we found all our refugees
together on the porch.
Anisya was rocking Nayden in her arms and telling Lena,
choking on her words: “They went through everything, took
everything…. They didn’t even look in on Marfutka, but they took
everything of mine. They dragged the goat away by her rope.”

Anisya remained useful for a long time to come, took our goats out
for walks, sat with Nayden and Lena until the frosts came. Then one
day she lay down with the kids in the warmest place in the house,
on the bunk above the stove, and from then on got up only to use
the outhouse.
The winter came and covered up all the paths that might have
led to us. We had mushrooms, berries (dried and boiled), potatoes
from my father’s plot, a whole attic filled with hay, pickled apples
from abandoned gardens in the forest, even a few cans of pickled
cucumbers and tomatoes. On the little field, under the snow, grew
our winter crop of bread. We had our goats. We had a boy and
a girl, for the continuation of the race, and a cat, who brought us
mice from the forest, and a dog, Red, who didn’t want to eat these
mice, but whom my father would soon count on for hunting rabbits.
My father was afraid to hunt with his rifle. He was even afraid to
chop wood because someone might hear us. He chopped wood
only during the howling snowstorms. We had a grandmother—the
storehouse of the people’s wisdom and knowledge.
Cold desolate space spread out around us on all sides. One time
my father turned on the radio and tried for a while to hear what was
out there. Everything was silent. Either the batteries had died, or we
really were the last ones left. My father’s eyes shone: He’d escaped
again!
If in fact we’re not alone, then they’ll come for us. That much
is clear. But, first of all, my father has a rifle, and we have skis and
a smart dog. Second of all, they won’t come for awhile yet. We’re
living and waiting, and out there, we know, someone is also living,
and waiting, until our grain grows and our bread grows, and our
potatoes, and our new goats — and that’s when they’ll come. And
take everything, including me. Until then they’re being fed by our
plot, and Anisya’s plot, and Tanya’s household. Tanya is long gone,
but Marfutka is still there. When we’re like Marfutka, they won’t
touch us either.
But there’s a long way to go until then. And in the meantime, of
course, we’re not just sitting here. My father and I have commenced
work on our next refuge.
T he F ou nta in House
There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life.
That is, her parents were told that the girl was dead, but they
couldn’t have the body (they had all been riding the bus together;
the girl was standing up front at the time of the explosion, and her
parents were sitting behind her). The girl was just fifteen, and she
was thrown back by the blast.
While they waited for the ambulance, and while the dead were
separated from the wounded, the father held his daughter in his
arms, though it was clear by then that she was dead; the doctor on
the scene confirmed this. But they still had to take the girl away,
and the parents climbed into the ambulance with their girl and rode
with her to the morgue.
She seemed to be alive, as she lay on the stretcher, but she
had no pulse, nor was she breathing. Her parents were told to go
home, but they wouldn’t—they wanted to wait for the body, though
there were still some necessary procedures to be done, namely the
autopsy and determination of the cause of death.
But the father, who was mad with grief, and who was also
a deeply religious man, decided to steal his little daughter. He took
his wife, who was barely conscious, home, endured a conversation
with his mother-in-law, woke up their neighbor, who was a nurse,
and borrowed a white hospital robe. Then he took all the money
they had in the house and went to the nearest hospital, where he
hired an empty ambulance (it was two in the morning), and with
a stretcher and a young paramedic, whom he bribed, drove to the
hospital where they were keeping his daughter, walked past the
guard down the stairs to the basement corridor, and entered the
morgue. There was no one there. Quickly he found his daughter
and together with the paramedic put her on their stretcher, called
down the service elevator, and took her to the third floor, to the
intensive care unit. The father had studied the layout of the hospital
earlier, while they waited for the body.
He let the paramedic go. After a brief negotiation with the
doctor on duty, money changed hands, and the doctor admitted the
girl to the intensive care unit.
Since the girl was not accompanied by a medical history, the
doctor probably decided that the parents had hired an ambulance
on their own and brought the girl to the nearest hospital. The doctor
could see perfectly well that the girl was dead, but he badly needed
the money: his wife had just given birth (also to a daughter), and all
his nerves were on edge. His mother hated his wife, and they took
turns crying, and the child also cried, and now on top of all this he
had of late been assigned exclusively night shifts. He desperately
needed money for an apartment. The sum that this (clearly insane)
father had offered him to revive his dead princess was enough for
half a year’s rent.
This is why the doctor began to work on the girl as if she were
still alive, but he did request that the father change into hospital
clothing and lie down on the cot next to his daughter, since this
apparently sick man was determined not to leave her side.
The girl lay there as white as marble; she was beautiful. The
father, sitting on his cot, stared at her like a madman. One of his
eyes seemed out of focus, and it was only with difficulty in fact that
he was able to open his eyes at all.
The doctor, having observed this for a while, asked the nurse
to administer a cardiogram, and then quickly gave his new patient
a shot of tranquilizer. The father fell asleep. The girl continued to
lie there like Sleeping Beauty, hooked up to her various machines.
The doctor fussed around her, doing all he could, though there
was no longer anyone watching him with that crazy unfocused
eye. In truth, this young doctor was himself a fanatic of his pro-
fession—there was nothing more important to him than a diffi-
Liudmilla Petrushevskaya. The Fountain House 77
cult case, than a sick person, no matter who it was, on the brink
of death.
***
The father slept, and in his dream he met his daughter—he went
to visit her, as he used to visit her at summer camp. He prepared
some food, just one sandwich, and that was all. He got on the bus—
again it was a bus—on a fine summer evening, somewhere near
the Sokol metro station, and rode it to the paradisial spot where
his daughter was staying. In the fields, among soft green hills, he
found an enormous gray house with arches reaching to the sky, and
when he walked past these giant gates into the garden, there, in
an emerald clearing, he saw a fountain, as tall as the house, with
one tight stream that cascaded at the top into a glistening crown.
The sun was setting slowly in the distance, and the father walked
happily across the lawn to the entrance to the right of the gate,
and took the stairs up to a high floor. His daughter seemed a little
embarrassed when she greeted him, as if he’d interrupted her. She
stood there, looking away from him—as if she had her own, private
life here that had nothing to do with him anymore, a life that was
none of his business.
The place was enormous, with high ceilings and wide windows,
and it faced south, into the shade and the fountain, which was
illuminated by the setting sun. The fountain’s stream rose even
higher than the windows.
“I brought you a sandwich, the kind you like,” said the father.
He went over to the table by the window, put his little package
down, paused for a moment, and then unwrapped it. There lay his
sandwich, with its two pieces of cheap black bread. He wanted to
show his daughter that there was a patty inside, and so he moved
the bread pieces apart. But inside he saw—and right away he knew
what it was—a raw human heart. The father was terrified that the
heart had not been cooked, that the sandwich was inedible, and
quickly wrapped the sandwich back up. Turning to his daughter
he said awkwardly: “I mixed up the sandwiches. I’ll bring you
another.”
But his daughter now came over and began looking at the
sandwich with a strange expression on her face. The father tried to
hide the little bag in his pocket and press his hands over it, so his
daughter couldn’t take it.
She stood next to him, with her head down, and reached out her
hand: “Give me the sandwich, Papa. I’m really hungry.”
“You can’t eat this filth,”
“Give it to me,” she said ponderously.
She was reaching her hand toward his pocket—her arm was
amazingly long all of a sudden—and the father understood that if
his daughter ate this sandwich, she would die.
Turning away, he took out the sandwich and quickly ate the
raw heart himself. Immediately his mouth filled with blood. He ate
the black bread with the blood.
“And now I will die,” he thought. ‘’I’m glad at least that I will
go first.”
“Can you hear me? Open your eyes!” someone said.
The father opened his eyes with difficulty and saw, as through
a fog, the doctor’s blurry face.
“I can hear you,” he said.
“What’s your blood type?”
“The same as my daughter’s.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
They carted him away, tied off his left arm, and stuck a needle
in it. “How is she?” asked the father.
“In what sense?” said the doctor, concentrating on his work.
“Is she alive?”
“What d‘you think?” the doctor grumbled.
“She’s alive?”
“Lie down, lie down,” the wonderful doctor insisted.
The father lay there—nearby he could hear someone’s heavy
breathing—and began to cry.
***
Then they were working on him, and he was carted off again,
and again he was surrounded by green trees, but this time he
was woken by a noise: his daughter, on the cot next to him, was
breathing in a terribly screechy way, as if she couldn’t get enough
air. Her father watched her. Her face was white, her mouth open.
A tube carried blood from his arm to hers. He felt relieved, and tried
to hurry the flow of blood—he wanted all of it to pour into his child.
He wanted to die so that she could live.
Once again he found himself inside the apartment in the
enormous gray house. His daughter wasn’t there. Quietly he went
to look for her, and searched in all the corners of the dazzling
apartment with its many windows, but he could find no living being.
He sat on the sofa, then lay down on it. He felt quietly content, as
if his daughter were already off living somewhere on her own, in
comfort and joy, and he could afford to take a break. He began (in
his dream) to fall asleep, and here his daughter suddenly appeared.
She stepped like a whirlwind into the room, and soon turned into
a spinning column, a tornado, howling, shaking everything around
her, and then sunk her nails into the bend in his right arm, under the
skin. He felt a sharp pain, yelled out in terror, and opened his eyes.
The doctor had just given him a shot to his right arm.
His girl lay next to him, breathing heavily, but no longer making
that awful screeching noise. The father raised himself up on an
elbow, saw that his left arm was already free of the tourniquet, and
bandaged, and turned to the doctor.
“Doctor, I need to make a phone call.”
“What phone call?” the doctor answered. “It’s too early for
phone calls. You stay still, or else I’m going to start losing you,
too….”
But before leaving he gave the father his cell phone, and the
father called home. No one answered. His wife and mother-in-law
must have woken up early and gone to the morgue and now must
be running around, confused, not knowing where the daughter’s
body had gone.
***
The girl was already better, though she had not yet regained
consciousness. The father tried to stay near her in intensive care,
pretending that he was himself dying. The night doctor had left
already, and the poor father had no money anymore, but they gave
him a cardiogram and kept him in intensive care—apparently the
night doctor had managed to speak with someone. Either that or
there really was something wrong with his heart.
The father considered what to do. He couldn’t go downstairs.
They wouldn’t let him call. Everyone was a stranger, and they were
all busy. He thought about what his two women must be going
through now, his “girls,” as he called them—his wife and mother-
in-law. His heart was in great pain. They had put him on a drip, just
like his daughter.
He fell asleep, and when he awoke, his daughter was no
longer there. “Nurse, where is the girl who was here before?”
he said.
“What’s it to you?”
“I’m her father, that’s what. Where is she?”
“They took her into the operating room. Don’t worry, and don’t
get up. You can’t yet.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dear nurse, please call the doctor!”
“They’re all busy.” An old man was moaning nearby. Next door
a resident was putting an old lady through some procedures, all the
while addressing her loudly and jocularly, like a village idiot: “Well,
grandma, how about some soup?” Pause. “What kind of soup do
we like?”
“Mm,” the old woman groaned in a nonhuman, metallic
voice.
“How about some mushroom soup?” Pause. “With some
mushrooms, eh? Have you tried the mushroom soup?”
Suddenly the old woman answered in her deep metallic bass:
“Mushrooms—with macaroni.”
“There you go!” the resident cried out.
The father lay there, thinking they were operating on his
daughter. Somewhere his wife was waiting, half-mad with grief, his
mother-in-law next to her, fretting…. A young doctor checked in on
him, gave him another shot, and he fell asleep again.
***
In the evening he got up and, barefoot, just as he was, in his

hospital gown, walked out. He reached the stairs unnoticed and
began descending the cold stone steps. He went down to the
basement hallway and followed the arrows to the morgue. Here
some person in a white robe called out to him:
“What are you doing here, patient?”
“I’m from the morgue,” replied the father. “I got lost.”
“What do you mean, from the morgue?”
“I left, but my documents are still there. I want to go back, but
I can’t find it.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re saying,” said the white
robe, taking him by the arm and escorting him down the corridor.
And then finally he asked: “You what? You got up?”
“I came to life, and there was no one around, so I started
walking, and then I decided I should come back, so they could note
that I was leaving.”
“Wonderful!” said his escort.
They reached the morgue, but there they were greeted
by the curses of the morgue attendant on duty. The father
heard him out and said: “My daughter is here, too. She was
supposed to come here after her operation.” He told the man his
name.
“I tell you she’s not here, she’s not here! They’re all driving
me crazy! They were looking for her this morning! She’s not here!
They’re driving everyone nuts! And this one’s a mental patient! Did
you run off from a nuthouse, eh? Where’d he come from?”
“He was wandering around the hallway,” the white robe
answered.
“We should call the guard in,” said the attendant and started
cursing again.
“Let me call home,” said the father. “I just remembered—I was
in intensive care on the third floor. My memory is all confused;
I came here after the explosion on Tverskaya.”
Here the white robes went quiet. The explosion on the bus on
Tverskaya had happened the day before. They took him, shivering
and barefoot, to a desk with a telephone. His wife picked up and

immediately burst into tears.
“You! You! Where have you been! They took her body, we don’t
know where! And you’re running around! There’s no money in the
house! We don’t even have enough for a taxi! Did you take all the
money?”
“I was—I was unconscious. I ended up in the hospital, in
intensive care.”
“Which one, where?”
“The same one where she was.”
“Where is she? Where?” His wife howled.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m all undressed—bring me
my things. I’m standing here in the morgue, I’m barefoot. Which
hospital is this?” he asked the white robe.
“How’d you end up there? I don’t understand,” his wife said,
still weeping.
He handed the phone to the white robe, who calmly spoke the
address into it, as if nothing at all strange was happening, and then
hung up.
The morgue attendant brought him a robe and some old, ragged
slippers—he took pity finally on this rare living person to enter his
department—and directed him to the guard post at the hospital
entrance.
His wife and mother-in-law arrived there with identically
puffed-up, aged faces. They dressed the father, put shoes on him,
hugged him, and finally heard him out, crying happily, and then all
together they sat in the waiting room, because they were told that
the girl had made it through her operation and was recovering, and
that her condition was no longer critical.
Two weeks later she was up again walking. The father walked
with her through the hospital corridors, repeating the whole time
that she’d been alive after the explosion, she was just in shock, just
in shock. No one noticed, but he knew right away.
He kept quiet about the raw human heart he’d had to eat. It was
in a dream, though, that it happened, and dreams don’t count.
Translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers

Vera Pavlova
(b. 1963, Moscow)
Vera Pavlova graduated from the Gnesins Musical Academy

as a historian of music. She worked as a guide at the Shalyapin
Museum and has published essays in musicology. Pavlova started
writing poetry when she was 20, after the birth of her daughter.
Her poems create a lyrical biography of a contemporary woman,
resonating with the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva. In 2000 she
received the Apollon Grigoriev Prize for her book of poems The
Fourth Dream. She lives in Moscow and New York.
F rom I f T her e is S omething to D esir e 1
He gave me as a gift.
What can I give in return?
My poems.
I have nothing else.
But then, are they mine?
This is the way, as a child,
I would give birthday cards
to my mother: I chose them,
and paid with my father’s money.
The two are in love and happy.

He:
“When you are not here,
it feels as though you
had just stepped out
and are in a room next door.”
She:
“When you step out
and are in a room next door,
it feels as though
you do not exist anymore.”
1
From IF THERE IS SOMETHING TO DESIRE: ONE HUNDRED POEMS by Vera Pavlova,
translated by Steven Seymour, translation copyright © 2010 by Steven Seymour.
Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third
party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested
parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.
Linor Goralik
(b. 1975, Dnepropetrovsk)
In 1989-2000, Goralik lived in Israel, where she graduated from

the Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, majoring in computer
science. Since 2001 she has lived in Moscow. Goralik has worked
as a columnist for a number of online and print publications,
including Grani, OpenSpace, Russian Journal, Snob, Theory of Fashion,
Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Vedomosti, Vozdukh, and others. She is
also a popular blogger and the author of several books of poetry,
three books of short prose, and two books of essays, fairy tales,
and comic books, as well as two novels: N.E.T. (2004, with Sergei
Kuznetsov) and Half of the Sky (2004, with Stanislav L’vovsky).
T hey Ta lk 1
“… Do you know how I knew spring was here? I found a skull in

the garden. I immediately looked for a bullet hole in it. Nope, no
hole. Just some stupid fucker croaked in the garden.”
***
“… this, you know, sort of middle-aged lady, not really old, the kind
of one, like, actually quite beautiful, with this, like, mink boa with
little tails on it, well made-up, and with her also a young girl, maybe
about twenty or so. And it’s such a pleasure for me, you know, to
look at them, that they are sitting together in a coffee shop, drinking
coffee, during the day, on December 31. I’m sitting there, half
listening to them while I’m reading the menu, and I’m thinking this
could be, like, for example, an aunt and her niece. They’re truly close,
and so they’ve met to congratulate each other with the New Year.
There’s something very beautiful in this, somehow, and then the girl
probably will go to meet friends to celebrate—well, in other words,
a pretty clear picture. And the girl is telling the lady, you know,
about what’s going on in her life and whatnot, and I’m listening,
I generally like to listen in on strangers’ conversations. And so she’s
1
Published in Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, ed. Mikhail Iossel and Jeff
Parker, with an Introduction by Francine Prose (New York: Tin House Books, 2009),
21-32.
Linor Goralik. They Talk 87
telling her something about some Anya, that this Anya’s seeing her
boss, and he took her somewhere, and now somebody’s been fired,
and the lady keeps nodding, and then this girl says: ‘And Anya—
her mother also abandoned her, but not like you did me …’—and
then the rest of the sentence. But this I already couldn’t make out; at
this point my hearing switched off.”
***
“… still, like, shaking all over. And the whole day, you know, I’m
like ill, totally turning inside out. And I decide I’m not going home
‘cause I’ve finally fucking had it with her. No, come on, six years I’m
living with this woman, six years, and she fucking throws these kinds
of tantrums over some fucking powdered detergent? Telling you,
she’s fucking nuts, sees nothing in the world but her housecleaning.
Fucking nuts. And she, like, yells at me: ‘I’m fucking tired of this
fucking shit, don’t want to see you again, get the fuck out of here,
you only think about yourself, go fucking die!’ I tell her: ‘Can you
even hear yourself, what kind of words you’re using? You’re raising
a daughter and this is how you carry on?’ So she just threw this same
sweater at me! And I—what can I say?—well, that’s it, I decided
that was it. Get lost, you say—fine, that’s it, I got lost! And so I’m
like this all day, you know, walking around and thinking: Okay, so,
I’ll spend the night at my mother’s, all the most essential things I’ll come
and get tomorrow, while she’s at work, she still has money for now, so I’ll
leave an extra couple hundred on the table, for my conscience, you know—
and that’s it, and she can go to … I’ll talk to Natashka myself…. And
so at this point, you know, we’re already going out for lunch, but
I’ve forgotten my cell, so I say to the guys: ‘Guys, I’ll catch up with
you shortly,’ and so I run back in—and the phone rings. And I pick
up, thinking, Whoever you are, you can go fuck yourself, and suddenly
I hear, well, wailing. Real concrete wailing, like a siren, sobbing and
sniffling her nose. My heart drops to my gut; immediately I think—
Something with Natashka. I say: ‘Lena, what’s with her, what’s with
her? Lena, tell me, what’s with her?’ And she goes: ‘Wooooo … with
whooo?’ Right away I feel relief. In general I can’t take it when she
cries, my heart just starts falling out, I forget everything, no anger,
no nothing, just this, you know…. I say: ‘Sweetie, honey, tell me,
what’s wrong?’ She just wails. Then says: ‘I read in the paaaaper….’
‘What,’ I say, ‘what’s in the paper, baby?’ Thinking—maybe relatives
or something, maybe who knows what. And she’s like: ‘Woohooo …
in the paper … that all men…. Yyyyhh…. That in twenty thousand
years…. Well, not twenty, but…. That you’ll all diiie ouuuuut….
Your chromosome…. Woohooo….’ ‘Lenochka,’ I say, ‘what in the
world are you talking about?’ And she’s like: ‘Your chromosome’s
being destroyed … oooohhh…. One hundred thousand years—and
you’ll all be gone…. It’ll only be uuuuuus….’ I say: ‘Lenka, so what
of it?’ And she goes: ‘Lyesha, Lyeshechka, don’t die out, please!
Come home, right now, please, pleease!’ So again I didn’t buy the
powdered detergent. Nuts, I’m telling you, crazy!”
***
“... anyway, fifteen years old. That is, she was still in high school. And
this was exactly when they started teaching the upper classes safe
sex and sexual health, and she was already in her seventh month.
And everyone—both girls and boys—had to carry a doll around the
clock, to understand what responsibility for a child means. And so
she carried it—in one hand her belly, in the other the doll.”
***
“… to talk with someone, I’m human, after all, I also can’t go on like
this! But with whom can I talk? With dad—he starts crying, well,
actually, no, you know, but—I mean, with dad? With dad there’s
no point. But with who? Alik comes home from work at ten o’clock
and plops down on the sofa still in his boots. I once tried to tell him
something and he goes, like: ‘Just let me die in peace,’ as if I was,
you know, his … his … God knows what. But I’m human, you know,
I do need to talk with someone! So I was getting off on Lyubanka,
Pushechnaya exit, and there’s the Children’s World right there, and
I just thought, you know, You can all go to hell! So I went in and there,
like, on the first floor, there is some kind of carousel, you know,
and I bought myself a plush rabbit. The kind, you know, like, with
the long legs, kind of faded-looking? Like, you know, you know
the kind I’m talking about, yeah? Six hundred rubles, to be sure,
but, after all, I can afford it, can’t I? The last time I bought myself
a pair of jeans was nine months ago, so I can spend six hundred
rubles, can’t I? Anyway, I stuffed him into a bag and carried him to
my room, and, you know, Alik goes to bed and I lock myself in the
bathroom, I sit the rabbit on a board and, like, tell him absolutely
everything, you know, pour out my whole soul, until there’s not like
even a single drop left…. The first night it was like this until six in
the morning. You wouldn’t believe, I wailed, took pills, whatever
else, what didn’t I do?... And so, you know, after that there wasn’t
a single evening that I wouldn’t at least find a minute. And I hid
him in the cupboard, you know, where the pipes are, we hang
a bag in there, with an enema in it, of course nobody ever looks in
there, so that’s where I kept him. And yesterday dad had his usual,
you know, happening again, so I pulled him through with pills, put
him to bed, and went right to the rabbit, and once I started telling
him—I just couldn’t stop, you know, talked and talked, talked and
talked, and I, you know, I kind of shook him like, hard, and I said to
him: ‘Well, why do you always keep quiet?’ And here he looked at
me and said: ‘Listen, did it ever occur to you to ask me, maybe just
once, how I am doing?’”
***
“… wife comes home, and the cat smells of another woman’s

perfume.”
***
“… during the war. He made it all the way to Berlin and sent her
a parcel from the frontline with some kind of children’s things for
Mother and Pasha, tablecloths, something else, and a luxurious
chiffon peignoir. Well, here, you get of course they hadn’t ever
seen the likes of such, right? She unfolds it—and there’s a single
vermicelli stuck to it. As if some woman had been eating and
accidentally dropped one. She retched for about twenty minutes,
you know, then she grabbed the children and that’s it. He spent half
a year looking for her afterward.”
***
“… I grabbed Lenka by the hand—and ran up to the neighbors.

It’s like this now once every week: he gets smashed and heads
right for her, his paws digging ahead of himself, you know, like an
excavator. So me and her are already trained: jump into our boots—
and run. But besides that it’d be a shame to complain. There’s
Natasha. Everyone told me: there is not a man on earth who will
ever love someone else’s daughter, but there you have it, wouldn’t
you know.”
***
“… and so I’m walking and suddenly feel someone’s eyes on me.

And I’m wearing this black-and-white checkered coat, you know,
total scream of fashion then. Inka got it for me, cost two months’
salary. And so I’m walking, down that side, right, you know, where
that—well, art salon or artists’ house or whatever is, right? Where the
Indian restaurant is now. And suddenly I totally, like, feel someone’s
looking at me, can you imagine? So I turn my head, carefully like,
and there, you know, on the other side, walks a young man, get this,
looking openly and not even, like, hiding. And there’s something,
you know, about him … something in him … maybe looking like
some actor or something…. But I—get this—I just at that exact
moment, I knew: That’s it, this is my future husband. Well, you know,
do you believe these things happen? It’s like, I only looked at him
for a second and already I knew everything. And so I, well, I keep
walking, proudly, ignoring him, over toward the Neglinnaya, but
my heart is like thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. I glance
sideways-like—and he, you know, is walking across, diagonally, as
if to the sidewalk’s edge. And I realize we’re going to meet precisely
at the corner. And I’m not even thinking what to say, because
I already, you know, understand everything, you understand? Like,
everything’s already clear and understood without words. And
I’m walking and just thinking: I could’ve gone to pick up those shoes
first, and that’s it. And there’s nothing else in my head, just this:
I could’ve been picking up those idiotic shoes now and never would’ve
met my husband! And I, like, keep glancing over—and he’s already
stepping off the sidewalk, and even starting to walk faster, so as to
intercept me, see. And here—get this—just like that, a car shoots
out—and like woooooosh! And literally—I mean literally—within
two centimeters from him. Really, seriously, within two centimeters.
I’m standing there, even my heart stopped cold. Just can’t move.
And he’s also standing, like a statue. And then—get this—he turns
around—and starts walking right back, like, over to that one, you
know, the metro, almost like half running…. And I’m standing there
and thinking: Those shoes, I bet they aren’t even ready yet.”
***
“… and until the dog kicks the bucket, you’re not moving it from
that apartment.”
***
“… trained myself so that at moments like these my head just

switches off. I’m a robot. I already knew within one block, by the
smell, that it was a fucking nightmare up there. And indeed—
nothing was left of the cafe, just a wall. And so I just flip this little
switch in my head: ticktock. I am robot, I am robot. Well, and then
for three hours we do you know what. In fact, we just break into
groups of three people: two collect, one zips up the bags. So here,
I’m the one zippering—zzzziip, and it’s like these weren’t even
people but just, like, different kinds of objects we’re putting into
those sacks. Four groups of us there were, done within three hours.
Tsvi tells me: ‘Okay, let’s do one last walk-around, just in case.’ Fine,
what’s it to me, I’m a robot. We go around looking into every little
corner, debris everywhere, wherever possible we turn things over
a little. Seems like we’ve picked up everything. And then, out of the
corner of my eye, I catch some movement. I’m like—’What’s this?’
Take a look, and right there by the wall, the one that didn’t collapse,
there’s this sort of cupboard, completely intact, and in it are rotating

pastries. And that’s when I threw up.”
***
“… and screaming. And the dream is always the same: Mother

slaps his face and asks: ‘Was it you who ate the chocolate?’ He
wails and says: ‘No!’ Mother slaps his face: ‘Was it you who ate the
chocolate?’ He: ‘No!’ Mother slaps the face: ‘Was it you who ate the
chocolate?’ Here he breaks down and screams: ‘YES! YES!’ And his
mother slaps him across the face, hard, with the back of her hand
and shouts: ‘Haven’t I taught you—never own up to anything!’
Terrible, isn’t it? For half a year I couldn’t get it out of him, what
was this nightmare he was having, he’d just say: ‘What nightmare,
no nightmare, everything’s fine.’”
***
“… when he loved me, I wasn’t jealous, and when he didn’t love

me—I was. I’d start calling, aggravating both myself and him, until
one time an ambulance came for me.”
***
“… belong to this one rich person, and I have to sing when he

tells me to. Because if I keep on doing this for another year, my
band and I will get together enough cash to get ahead. But he’s
a totally wild person, doesn’t want to understand anything, it’s all
the same to him—if you’re sick, tired, have personal problems—
still, go, sing. Vera went to her sister’s wedding, so he fired her. But
I know this is necessary, or else we’ll never get ahead at all, very
difficult. So I bear it. Yeah, and so he and his friends were grilling
up some kabobs somewhere, and he called me—come, sing. And
this was outdoors, and it was September already. I get there, he
gives me this humongous coat, like a barrel, you know. And I felt
so disgusted, you know, to be singing in this coat and all, I almost
lost it. I explain to him: ‘Singing in cold air is bad for you, singing is
all about breathing, if I breathe this kind of air normally, tomorrow

I’ll have no vocal chords, and if I don’t breathe, and sing only with
my vocal chords alone, I’ll still lose them anyway.’ And all this is
at his dacha, huge dacha, pheasants, peacocks, dogs. And a silent
pregnant wife follows behind him everywhere. I’m thinking, you
know—it probably is a lucky marriage, she lives well, but her life
must be awful, it seems to me. ‘No,’ he tells me, ‘sing.’ I would have
quit a long time ago, but me and my band won’t get ahead without
his money, and I want to. Well, no, I still would have quit a long
time ago anyway, but he comes to me, after I’ve sung, sits down,
and cries. No, not groping, why do you keep asking these fucking
bullshit questions, huh?”
***
“… his daughter accidentally slammed the hamster in the door,

and he cried afterward. Kept saying: ‘Such an amazing dude
he was!’”
***
“… I ask, ‘Mama, what should I get you for New Year’s?’ And she
tells me, the bitch, you know what?—’Don’t buy anything, sonny,
maybe I won’t live that long….’”
***
“…. always loved my wife, loved her so much, you can’t even
imagine. And as for her loving me? Well, at least it seemed to
me—maybe not so much. Mother says to me: ‘Why don’t you get
yourself a mistress? Your wife will love you more.’ So I found myself
a woman. Didn’t love her, of course. I loved my wife; I didn’t love
this one. But I kept going to her. Then I think: I need my wife to find
out. But I can’t tell her. I did all of this for that, but I just can’t bring
myself to tell her. Mother tells me: ‘Why don’t you tell the children,
they’ll pass everything on to her.’ And my children, I’ve told you
about them, two sons, one had just entered college back then, and
the youngest was fifteen. So I called for them, I came home, got
them together, and said: ‘Children, listen to me. I’m going to tell you
a terrible thing, and you will have to forgive me. I have, children,
apart from your mother, I have another woman.’ And then I keep
silent. They kind of look at each other for a moment, then suddenly
burst into laughter! And the youngest slaps me on the shoulder
and says: ‘You go, Daddy-o!’ And the oldest says: ‘Awesome, man.
Don’t worry, we won’t rat you out.’ And so I still keep going to that
woman, even until this day. It’s just hell knows what.”
***
“… and the Day of Judgment, by the way, already happened, only

no one noticed it. It’s just that from that day things went well for
some, and for others they went badly.”
***
“… saw her yesterday. Well, I’ll tell you this—it’s not even
important how she looks, or that she’s beautiful—well, yes, she’s
beautiful, I won’t dispute that, what’s true is true—but that’s not
what’s important. What’s important is what I saw: nothing will come
of it for them. No-thing. Eight years of marriage, Marina—quite
a haul. I know him like this, understand, like this, like my own
palm, like these here five fingers. So, believe you me: with this
woman, nothing will work out for him, no-thing. She will suck his
blood and throw him out, and he’ll come crawling to me again.
You’ll see, mark my words. I’ve even calmed down. And actually,
you know, when I’d only just learned about all this, I couldn’t eat
for two weeks, completely, nothing. I lost seven kilos. That was such
a joy, such an amazing feeling!”
***
“… on that day everyone, of course, showed their true colors.

For example, my best friend, Lepyokha, he called me and started
shouting: ‘Dude, do you even know what’s going down here, over
by the White House?”Well,’ I say, ‘I know, sure, I’m watching the

television, what the …. “No!’ he shouts. ‘Dude, you have no idea!
There are such hot bitches here! One can fuck them right on top
of the tanks!’ Well, so I went to my wife—back then we were still
married—and I tell her: ‘My dear, I have to go to the White House,
to the barricades—to defend freedom and democracy!’ And she,
wouldn’t you know it, didn’t let me go! That bitch, I forgave her
everything, but this cruel heartlessness on her part I never forgave,
and never will.”
***
“… she’s a weak, timid, needy, completely untalented, a very hard-

to-take, very miserable woman. And we should feel sorry for her,
instead of saying such nasty things about her.”
***
“… by the way, the last time your mobile didn’t switch off, and I sat
for about five minutes, listening to how you were walking through
the snow. Thup-thup, thup-thup. I almost cried.”
***
“… little doggie runs, dirty-dirty, its ears rosy-rosy, and see-through.

And here I thought: Devil knows, maybe I should’ve given birth back
then.”
***
“… because God will fulfill your every wish if your thoughts are
pure. My grandmother taught me—you always have to wish people
well, even if something happens to you, you know, anything.
It works, seriously. For example, when that bitch said that I was
a junkie because I was pale, I decided: No, I’m not going there, you
know, I’m just not doing it, I’m not. I did what instead? I prayed in
the evening, real well, I said: ‘Dear God! Please deliver good health
unto all my friends and acquaintances!’ And the very next morning
that bitch fell down the stairs to her death.”
***
“… haven’t been in a supermarket in a long time. Would really like

to go there sometime.”
***
“… so I bought season tickets to the opera. I’m going to start building

the normal life of a single person.”
***
“… don’t go to class reunions, so as not to indulge my pride.

Otherwise you walk out of there with the kind of feeling a decent
person is not supposed to have. I mean, look, the majority of them
live in such a way that Google can’t even find them.”
***
“… don’t be distracted by fucking bullshit, Pasha. You’re always getting

distracted by fucking bullshit. I also remember one time, I take a look—
a woman, kind of unfamiliar-looking, but then I look more—no,
familiar, used to work at my research institute, it’s just this different
angle through the lens, plus she’s cut her hair, you know, like a fur
hat, sort of, wears it like a hat. I adjusted the lens more into focus,
looked again: sure, she’s changed, of course, time—no arguing with
time. And eating something. I adjusted some more: popcorn. She’s
eating popcorn. Walking down the street with popcorn. Where’d
she get it? For some reason, I suddenly got totally hung up on this:
where’d she get it? Then I pictured this thing: seriously, you’ve got
to really want the popcorn, go to the popcorn, I mean, the movie
theater, go inside the movie theater, you know, buy the popcorn,
and leave, in order to eat it on the go. I, like, pictured it with my
own eyes, and she was always like that, a stubborn goat. Walking
down the square and eating. I followed her to the corner, adjusted
the focus some more, got a ring on her finger. That’s how I got
distracted, and then they’re in my ear: ‘Blue, we don’t understand
the delay. Blue, are you working or what?’ My guy, you see, he’d
gotten away while I was distracted. Of course, I did get him still, but
that’s how sometimes you get distracted by some kind of fucking
bullshit, and then you walk around all mad for a couple of days.”
***
“… day. All morning I’ve tried to write a script, but all I kept
turning out was some kind of cheap melodrama. Because this
doesn’t happen in real life—I mean such sheer intensity of tragedy.
One minute everyone dies; next thing you know it’s something else.
Inexpressible soul-wrenching all the way. Long story short, I went
to pick up my suit, and kept thinking in the subway: No, really, is this
normal? Because art—it is precisely that, this ability to discern big
issues in small things. The drama, that is, in the simple things of life.
And the more I think about this, you know, the worse I feel. And
then, at Lubyanka, I suddenly decide: Ah, the hell with it, this suit. I’m
going to get off now, walk over to Captains, and just have a drink there.
That’s right. So I get out, and right at the exit, already upstairs, right
away three SMSs come in at once, in a row. From three different
people, obviously. As follows: I’m in psych ward, held here forcibly for
now; Anya died yesterday. Not flying in; Dad keeps crying asking I bring
him home. I read once, read twice, read three times, and suddenly
I realize I’ve been staring at my phone for fifteen minutes already,
walking in circles around the station pillar.”
Translated by Mikhail Iossel

Slava Mogutin
(b. 1974, Kemerovo)
A writer and photographer, Mogutin worked in Moscow as

a journalist. In 1994, after publishing a number of articles,
including several on gay rights, he left Russia for the United
States, where he received political asylum. The author of several
books of poetry, essays, and short prose. Mogutin received the
Andrei Bely literary prize in 2000. He lives in New York.
Slava Mogutin 99
I n v itation to a B ehea ding 1
Bastard Mogutin! For a long time I had a suspicion that you

were a nasty shit and a greasy, hidden Jew. Your writings are
disgusting! Who gave you, reptile, the right to write this stuff?
All kinds of faggots like you want to destroy our Orthodox
country and corrupt our children. It will never happen!
Our power is still strong! And tell this to your employers
(or fuck buddies?) in Washington and Tel-Aviv! You have
signed your own death warrant. Watch out now! If you are so
courageous and principled, why do you hide under an idiot’s
pseudonym and why don’t you disclose your real (Jewish)
name? I can answer: you are afraid of the revenge of the
Russian people who have been offended and mocked by you!
But remember: we are sick of your rotten provocations! Enough
is enough! Death! Death! Death!
I received this letter shortly before I was forced to leave Russia this
past March [1995] after a series of criminal charges brought against
me for my writing, but even more so, for my position as a gay rights
advocate and the only openly gay journalist in Russia. I got used to
this kind of homophobic and xenophobic message, as I had received
1
This essay was written in 1995, and all references to “today” and the “present,”
as well as the use of present tense, relate to that period.
them regularly through the mail and over the phone, but this one
arrived via fax machine, in a country where faxes are still rare.
These anonymous threats were not the most frightening compared
with the threats from the state authorities and the militia for what
I wrote or said.
I had been writing poetry since my teenage years, and in 1990,
shortly after I moved to Moscow, I began working as a freelance
journalist. Most of my articles were on cultural and literary criticism
and gay issues. I was widely published in new, independent papers
like Yeshcho and Novyi Vzgliad, as well as mainstream publications
like Nezavisimaia Gazeta, Stolitsa, and The Moscow News. I published
interviews with a number of famous cultural and pop personalities,
most of whom were gay and for the first time spoke openly about
their homosexuality.
I worked at Glagol, the first publishing house in Russia to
publish international and Russian gay literature, including James
Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and the two-
volume collected works by Evgeny Kharitonov, Under House Arrest.
When I first came out and began to publish my interviews
and articles, homosexuality was still taboo in the Russian media,
culture, and public life. Perestroika and Glasnost had scarcely
changed this situation. Although in 1993 Yeltsin repealed Stalin’s
law punishing homosexuality with up to five years in prison, gay
men in Russia still feared harassment and imprisonment from
the militia. Homophobic persecution is a tacit state policy, with
homosexuality considered criminal and morally abhorrent by most
Russians. As recent polls have shown, almost half of Russians feel
that homosexuals should be killed or isolated from society. Only
a couple of years ago, the few first gay bars and discos were opened
in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
There is no gay community per se in Russia. There is no gay civil
rights movement, nor are there any influential political, social, or
cultural gay groups. Needless to say, there are very few openly gay
Russians. Most gays and lesbians, especially in the provinces, are
deeply closeted and married with children. The foreign journalists
who interviewed me in Moscow told me that it was difficult for them
to find any Russian gays or lesbians who would agree to show their
Slava Mogutin. Invitation to a Beheading 101
faces or give their real names even for Western audiences. My open
gayness was shocking for the closeted journalists and editors in the
Russian press, who supported me in the beginning of my career, but
then decided that it was too dangerous for them to have any contact
with me. “Don’t push gay issues,” one editor advised me privately.
“I don’t want to lose my job for publishing your articles, and my
wife will think I’m a queer.”
From Recognition to Surveillance

In 1993 my writing began to be widely published and received critical
recognition. In 1994 I was called the best critic of contemporary
culture by Nezavisimaia Gazeta. Although increasingly popular, most
of my articles and interviews were partly censored by editors for
their gay references and content. For example, “Homosexuality in
the Soviet Camps and Prisons” (Novoe Vremia, No. 35-36, 1993) was
censored before publication by the editor, Leonid Mlechin. What
he excluded concerned homophobia among anti-Soviet dissidents.
“Even if it’s true that these dissidents were homophobic, it’s still not
a good reason to kick them!” said Mlechin.
“Who cares about homosexuals, their rights and their problems?
Only Mogutin does,” Sergei Chuprinin, editor-in-chief of the literary
magazine Znamia, wrote in his article in The Moscow News. These
kinds of homophobic declarations and remarks are still common for
the so-called democratic and liberal Russian press.
After I published an interview with Simon Karlinsky, professor
of Russian literature at the University of California at Berkeley and
the key authority on homosexuality in Russian history and culture,
the critic Nina Agisheva wrote in The Moscow News: “Mogutin and
Karlinsky try to present all Russian classics as homosexuals! Even
Gogol!” According to the old Soviet propaganda, which is still per-
vasive, there are no homosexuals in Russian/Soviet history; homo-
sexuality is a “foreign disease,” and, as the conservative writer Va-
lentin Rasputin put it, “it was imported into Russia from abroad.”
In July 1993, I published an interview with the famous
entertainer Boris Moiseyev, one of the few openly gay personalities
in Russian showbiz. In an interview entitled “Filthy Peckers of the
Komsomol Leaders,” Moiseyev revealed that at the outset of his

career he had been the victim of “sexual terror” by certain high-
ranking Komsomol and Communist Party officials, who were “fans
of the beautiful bodies of young guys.” He described in graphic
detail how during the Moscow Olympics festivities in 1980, he was
forced to strip-dance in front of a group of the Komsomol leaders
and later performed oral sex on “the filthy peckers of those old
bastards … all of whom are still in power.”
The Moiseyev interview created a huge scandal. It was first
published in the independent Latvian newspaper Yeshcho, and later
reprinted in several other newspapers, including the mainstream
daily Moskovskii Komsomolets and independent weekly Novyi
Vzgliad. I saw Xeroxed copies of my interview being distributed in
samizdat, like anti-Soviet literature in the USSR before Perestroika.
When the scandal reached the Parliamentary level, criminal
charges were brought against me under Article 206.2 of the Criminal
Code (“malicious hooliganism with exceptional cynicism and
extreme insolence”). The regional prosecutor accused me of using
“profane language and obscene expressions, graphic descriptions
of sexual perversions, illustrated with a photo of a homosexual
nature.” The notorious Article 206.2, with a penalty of up to five
years’ imprisonment, was typically used against dissidents by the
Soviet authorities. Following the Soviet prosecution system, the
same charge of ‘’hooliganism’’ has been used against homosexuals
in China and Cuba. I only found out about the prosecutor’s office
decision through accounts I read in the press.
In October 1993, right after the attempted coup, the Yeltsin
government shut down those newspapers it proclaimed
“oppositional.” Surprisingly enough, Yescho, which had initially
published my interview with Moiseyev, was on that black list.
On October 6, a group of militiamen headed by Detective
Matveyev showed up at the door of Aleksei Kostin, the paper’s
publisher. Without official warrant they searched the apartment
and arrested Kostin. For three days he was held in custody without
any formal charges. “We should have gotten rid off you perverts
a long time ago!,” Detective Matveyev exclaimed, referring to the
newspaper’s explicit content.
Yeshcho was singled out from the rest of the free press because
it was the only paper in Russia to regularly publish positive and
serious material on homosexual issues. In fact, Yescho was shut
down after the publication of my interview with Boris Moiseyev
and the opening of the criminal case against me. The prosecutors’
and militia’s repressive actions against Yeshcho, Novvi Vzgliad,
and me were part of a new wave of homophobia, and a broader
campaign against freedom of speech in the independent media.
This campaign was enthusiastically supported by the conservative
and governmental papers, such as Rossiiskaia Gazeta and Rossiiskie
Vesti, as well as the more liberal Solidarnost and Vechernyaia Moskva.
A series of homophobic articles against me and other journalists
from Yeshcho and Novyi Vzgliad appeared during the next few
weeks. One author proclaimed all of us “agents of the Israeli secret
service MOSSAD [sic], who have received instructions to corrupt
Russia.”
On October 28, 1993, three militiamen came to the office of Glagol
Publishing and shouted through the door to Aleksandr Shatalov, its
editor-in-chief, inquiring as to my whereabouts. He answered that
I was not in. They threatened to break the door down and check for
themselves. They obviously had been informed that I was in the
office at the moment. When the door was opened, they came in and
showed me their documents. I was arrested by Lieutenant Andrei
Kuptsov, handcuffed, and driven to the regional militia station. On
the way there all of them used far more “profane language and
obscene expressions” than the ones I had allegedly used.
At the station I was interrogated by Kuptsov three times
during five hours without break or the presence of a lawyer: first as
a witness to the crime (i.e., the writing and publishing of my own
article); then as the prime suspect in the crime; and, finally, as the
one charged with committing the crime. He asked if I understood
that the content of “Filthy Peckers” was illegal and that by writing
it I had broken the law. I answered that this whole case seemed
absolutely absurd. At the end of the interrogation I was forced to sign
a document prohibiting me from leaving Moscow. “You’re lucky we
don’t put you in custody like Kostin!” Kuptsov said to me. I did not
have the right of travel and was, for all intents and purposes, under
house arrest until the end of 1994. I was also banned from receiving
my foreign-travel passport.
Later, I found out that on the same day Kostin was also arrested.
He was charged under Article 228 of the Criminal Code: “promotion,
production, and distribution of pornography,” subject to up to three
years in prison. In the old Soviet times this article was also regularly
used against dissidents. Three months later Kostin was arrested
again and placed in a general holding cell in the most notorious
prison in Moscow, Butyrki. Despite the considerable press attention
given to the case of Yeshcho and Kostin, and the numerous letters of
protest from Russian and international human rights organizations,
Kostin was held in prison for thirteen months without trial.
The day after my arrest, Genrikh Padva, Russia’s most famous
human rights lawyer, took on my case pro bono. His authority is
based on the role he played in several high-profile political trials
during the Soviet era. Padva was the founding father of the first
professional lawyers’ union in the USSR, and the first lawyer to
petition the Ministry of Justice to end the anti-homosexual Article
121.1 of the Criminal Code.
Out Comes Zhirinovsky

At around this time, at an art opening in Moscow, I was introduced
to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the right-wing Liberal
Democratic Party. He ran for president in 1991 in Russia’s first free
elections and became one of the country’s most popular politicians
with his nationalistic slogans. His eccentric image and populist
speeches made him an idol for many teenagers, and he was often
invited to the openings of rock clubs and art galleries. Zhirinovsky
was with his bodyguard who, as he proudly announced, used to
be the bodyguard of Babrak Karmal, the head of the Soviet regime
in Afghanistan. Zhirinovsky was surprisingly interested in me. He
told me that he had heard about me and read some of my articles.
“So why didn’t you come to me before?,” he asked upfront. “You
could have come to me and said: I want to work for you and your
party! Why didn’t you do it, like so many other young Russian
guys have?” It was hard to determine whether he was joking or
not. Zhirinovsky invited me to join him at the restaurant of the

Central House of Architects. There he pursued two teenage boys,
fifteen or sixteen years old, and asked me to invite them to our
table: “They can be good party members! I bet they will look great
in military uniforms!” His manners, toasts, and speech seemed
totally bizarre. He felt comfortable in my company, as he knew
I was gay. He offered vodka to the boys, but they declined. He
openly flirted with them, but succeeded only in frightening them
off. Disappointed, Zhirinovsky shot down another glass of vodka
and went off to the dance floor into a clutch of young female
admirers.
Zhirinovsky’s interest in young guys is not a secret to his inner
circle, but it cannot be a subject for discussion among them. The
issue of his sexuality is seemingly taboo for the Russian press as well.
Although a number of major papers published a Reuters photo of
Zhirinovsky kissing a Serbian soldier on the mouth, both naked in
the sauna, during his visit to Yugoslavia, none made any comment
on it. He’s often escorted by handsome young men, the members of
the youth division of his party, or so-called “Sokoly Zhirinovskogo”
(“Zhirinovsky’s Falcons”). He lives separately from his wife and
spends almost every weekend at his private dacha outside Moscow.
One young reporter who was invited to interview Zhirinovsky told
me that he was instead propositioned by Zhirinovsky to pose naked
for his camera in the shower.
I received a different proposal from Zhirinovsky: he wanted me
to be his press secretary. My reputation as an openly gay journalist
obviously didn’t embarrass him. I suppose he had more sexual
than political interest in me. On the other hand, I was already
a known writer, and he may have wanted to use my name in order
to score more votes from my readers as well as from gay people.
I realized that collaboration with Zhirinovsky could put an end to
my persecution and protect me from other possible troubles with
the authorities. I was an easy target for them, as I had no political
backing or protection. One telephone call from Zhirinovsky to
the Prosecutor’s Office, and the criminal case against me would
be closed. But I declined his proposal, as I wanted to remain
independent from all political parties, groups, or organizations. In
retrospect I would say that it is almost impossible to be politically

independent in today’s Russia.
Two months later, in December 1993, after an incredibly
successful political campaign in the nation’s parliamentary
elections, Zhirinovsky became the leader of the largest faction in
the new Parliament. With his promises of cheap vodka for every
man, a boyfriend and flowers for every woman, and legalized drugs
for all, he was the only politician in Russian history to use slogans
in support of private life for all citizens, including homosexuals. As
a result, a significant part of his 12.3 million voters were gay.
“We are against any interference in the private lives of our
citizens,” Zhirinovsky said in an interview. “One person might be
fascinated by Eastern religions, another spends all day standing
on his head doing yoga, and someone else has particular sexual
preferences. Why do we have to interfere in their private lives?
We don’t want to! The American president had the same slogan.
And I was the first Russian politician who did the same, wasn’t I?
That’s good! And note my, let’s say, progressive ideology.” When
he was asked about me, what he thought of my reputation, he
answered diplomatically, “We have a lot of work now, and we need
people. It’s why I proposed to work with him…. You can find some
discriminative characteristic on everyone: one—dirty; another—
poor; the third one—stupid; the fourth one has a different religion;
the fifth one has a different Ideology…. And who’s left?”
The Marriage
On March 22, 1994, the Presidential Legal Commission on Infor-
mational Disputes held a hearing regarding my articles published
in Novyi Vzgliad. The Commission was founded by a special Yeltsin
decree, in order to monitor the media. Its chairman, Anatoly
Vengerov, is an ex-Communist bureaucrat in his late fifties. The
Commission consists of ten “experts,” all of whom are former
Soviet apparatchiks. The legal status of the Commission is not clear,
as its position is outside the Constitution, but its decisions have, in
effect, the same power as presidential decrees. The work and the
existence of the Commission have been criticized in the Russian
independent press and by the Parliament, although most of the

press tries to placate the Commission, which tacitly controls all
legal issues affecting the mass media.
I was not invited to my own hearing, and found out about the
Commission’s verdict in Rossiiskaia Gazeta, one of the government’s
papers. I was proclaimed “a corrupter of public morals, a propagan-
dist of pathological behavior, sexual perversions, and brutal vio-
lence,” etc. My writing “produces especial danger for children and
teenagers.” After that, only the few most liberal papers continued
to publish me.
During this period I had been living with the American artist
Robert Filippini. On my twentieth birthday we attempted to
officially register our relationship as the first same-sex marriage
in Russia. The marriage action was announced in the press, and
we expected that the authorities would try to stop it. In the press
release we wrote that the act was a “protest against the policy of
homophobia and sexism, puritan public opinion and hypocritical
morality,” and that “the primary objective for us was to draw public
attention to the problems of gays and lesbians in Russia.”
On the eve of the marriage action we went to the United
States embassy to register Robert’s intention to marry me, as per
the rules regarding marriage of foreigners and Russian nationals.
Surprisingly, even telling the consul to take note of the genders
involved, we received the certificate with the signature and stamp
of the Embassy consul Paul Davis-Jones.
On April 12, we arrived at Wedding Palace No. 4, the office for
registering international marriages in Moscow. Over a hundred
reporters and friends were waiting for us there. Karmen Bruyeva,
the head of the Palace for over twenty-five years, had been informed
about our visit through friends. To our surprise, she was polite
and sympathetic. Bruyeva said that personally she understood
our desire to get married, but that “marriage is a voluntary union
between a man and a woman,” according to a Soviet law that has
remained unchanged since 1969. “I’m really sorry, but I cannot
register your union. If I accepted an application from two men
I would be reprimanded and the marriage would be declared
invalid,” Bruyeva said. “Why don’t you apply to Parliament and
ask to amend the law? By the way, raise your hands, those of you,
journalists, who favor amending the law?” And all of them raised
their hands.
The action drew a huge public response. The event was widely
covered in the Russian and Western press. Most of the Russian press
was sympathetic, except for one article in the Communist Pravda in
which we were proclaimed “agents of Western drug trafficking and
the porn industry,” and a couple of other homophobic articles in
government papers.
The Trial
The trial concerning the criminal case against me under Article 206.2
was set for April 14th, 1994. Starting on April 13, Robert and I became
the targets of militia harassment. That evening, two uniformed
militiamen came to our apartment on Arbat and explained the
reason for their visit: they had received letters of complaint from
our neighbors claiming that we “had corrupted our neighborhood.”
After looking around the apartment they left.
A few hours later, two plainclothes detectives came to our
apartment. The lead man, stout and with a prominent scar on his
face, demanded to see our documents. When we asked to see their
identification, “Scarface” responded, “Fuck off!” He and his partner,
“Pretty Brute,” wearing long black leather jackets, walked us into
our kitchen and began an hour-and-a-half-long interrogation on
every aspect of our lives. Again, they told us that they had received
a letter from a neighbor, accusing us of holding “orgies with young
boys,” and then ranted on about their loathing of homosexuals
and what they perceived to be the farce of our marriage attempt.
“We can do anything with you two, put you in a psychiatric clinic,
send you to jail, deport you from Russia! And neither PEN Center
nor the American Embassy will be able to help you!” Scarface
boasted.
They stated that they were members of Zhirinovsky’s party.
Their belligerence was unrestrained until I told them that I knew
Zhirinovsky personally and that I could call him immediately to
have him order them to stop their actions against us. “Don’t give us
this shit!” Scarface yelled. “How can you, queer, know Zhirinovsky
personally?” I showed them his business card and his private
number in my telephone book. After they drank nearly a liter of our
vodka, they extorted $250 from us, promising that it would be the
end of our “troubles with the neighbors,” and left the apartment
laughing. The visit was utterly animalistic. We were absolutely
demoralized and in shock, to the point that we were afraid to tell
even our friends about the incident.
On April 14, the Presnenskii Interregional Court held a hearing
concerning the criminal charges brought against me under Article
206.2. Against code, I received no official notification for the date
of my trial. I was not even familiar with the documents of the case
against me, or with the indictment as it was written. When I protested
this to the presiding judge, Elena Filippova, she was completely
indifferent. My lawyer argued that I was targeted for prosecution
because of my homosexuality. He said that this was the only case
in the history of Soviet or Russian jurisprudence when a journalist
had been charged with “hooliganism” for his use of language. Use
of so-called profane language has a long tradition in Russian letters
and classical literature, and it has become increasingly common in
the media, including in large newspapers and on the government
TV channel. Padva mentioned a number of examples when profane
language was used by President Gorbachev, Vice President Rutskoi,
President Yeltsin, and other Russian officials. Padva said that the
case should be closed because of a series of violations of the Criminal
Code on the part of the Prosecutor’s Office. He stated that this was
not just “a minor point, but … a flagrant violation of human rights.”
After the lawyer’s speech, Judge Filippova took a break for
“consultation,” which was odd, as she was alone in her chambers.
Evidently, she “consulted” with the Prosecutor’s Office and other
initiators of the case against me. Even though the new Russian
constitution states that the judicial system is to be independent of
the Prosecutor’s Office, in Soviet and present-day Russia judges
still represent the Prosecutor’s Office. After about forty minutes the
judge returned and read her resolution. She found me guilty of all
charges, but sent the case back to the Prosecutor’s Office for a new
investigation, on technical grounds.
On the night of April 16, the two detectives returned. For the
next two hours a vodka-drinking Scarface—whose profanity-filled
speech was a curious mix of foul Russian, English, and German—told
graphic sexual stories and spoke of politics, religion, the philosophy
of Hegel, Zhirinovsky’s glory, the Motherland, his poor old mother,
the dangers of militia work, the Orthodox Power, family life, and the
general moral disorder of the world. Throughout, he emphasized
his hatred of homosexuals and the corrupting influence of the West.
Thus did I discover the sophisticated spiritual and intellectual
world of a militiaman. Midway through this monologue a large
cellophane bag of hashish was laid on our table. The detectives
laughed and proceeded to warn us of the prison terms dished out to
those found in possession of drugs. They then offered to find some
young girls to bring up to our apartment for group sex. Pretty Brute
asked if we preferred eleven- or twelve-year-old-girls. Repeatedly
during their visit, both of them demanded money from us. Again,
they left the apartment drunk to the point where they could
hardly walk.
A couple of nights later Scarface returned alone. He showed
us a handwritten letter full of homophobic scribblings, describing
graphically orgies with young boys that supposedly took place in our
apartment. He asked if we wanted him to kill our “motherfucking”
neighbor, the purported writer of this letter. He raised his full glass
of vodka, swilled it and said that he would now do us a favor, at
which point he burned the letter in front of us, filling the room with
smoke and yipping as he singed his fingers.
After the extensive press coverage our attempted marriage
received, we were frequently recognized and regularly stopped on
the street by the militia. This was especially true in our neighbor-
hood, where we couldn’t pass by the roving militia without being
harassed. Though the anti-homosexual law has now been abolished
in Russia2, the militia continue to keep and collect files on known
2
Although the 2013 legislation against “the propaganda of non-traditional sexuality
among minors” launched an anti-gay campaign in the Russian media, the
criminalization of homosexuality that had existed in the USSR and Russia from 1934
to 1993 has not been restored as of the date of this writing, November 2013.—Eds.
homosexuals. “I control all of them in my district,” the Moscow

local militia chief said in a TV interview. “I have to do it, because
homosexuals are physically and psychically abnormal people.
Every one of them at any time could pick up an ax and just kill
somebody. Easily! They have to be isolated. They are sick!”
Flight From Russia

On September 20, 1994, under pressure from the liberal press,
Russian and international human rights organizations, and legal
efforts, the Prosecutor’s Office dropped the criminal case against
me, because “due to the changed circumstances, Mogutin has
ceased to pose a danger to society.” I learned of the decision only
on October 10, when I was invited to the Prosecutor’s Office and
had a three-hour conversation with Igor Konyushkin, first deputy
prosecutor of the Office. Tall and thin, he chain-smoked nervously
throughout our conversation. He seemed too young, too intelligent,
and too gentle for his job. He spoke with me very frankly and
seemed outwardly friendly, but I soon realized that he was being
provocative. Konyushkin introduced himself as a “big fan of my
writing.” “Because of my job, I had to read all your articles,” he
said. “We have a huge file on you. You might be a good writer but
the content of most of your articles is criminal. We could open a new
case against you concerning anything from these articles as easily
as we did with the ‘Filthy Peckers’ case. I just want to let you know
that, although we dropped this case, we can always open another
one. We’re giving you a chance to rehabilitate your mind: you must
stop your writing or change your subject matter! You know what
I mean? That’s my advice as your big fan!”
My conversation with Konyushkin reminded me of Nabokov’s
Invitation to a Beheading. There was something sadomasochistic about
it. He seemed to be obsessed with me, my criminal prosecution
being an extension of this obsession. Konyushkin told me that he
was most outraged by an article in which I wrote that homophobes
in the Prosecutor’s Office were just repressed queers. After my
conversation with him, I was all the more convinced that what
I had written was true.
A few weeks later, the State Prosecutor’s Office issued a state-

ment proclaiming their disagreement with the Regional Office’s
decision to close my case, and they brought it into their jurisdiction
for future prosecution.
In February, the Presidential Legal Commission on Informational
Disputes held two hearings concerning an article called “Chechen
Knot” that I had written on the war in Chechnya. The article was
highly critical of Yeltsin’s government, the Parliament, and the
military complex, as well as of the Chechen separatists and the
Russian press and intelligentsia. “Chechen Knot” was not the only
article of this kind in the Russian press: I was again being singled
out because of my open homosexuality. Like my earlier case, this
one had a strong political motivation.
Both hearings of the Commission were closed to the press and
public: only reporters from the government press were allowed.
The trial was in typical Soviet style: when I tried to say something
in my defense, the microphone was turned off. The Commission’s
members and the reporters just laughed at my protests. The
chairman, Anatoly Vengerov, was screaming at me, “It’s scandalous!
Stop this ugliness immediately or we shall call the militia! Where is
security? Somebody, call security right now!”
The members of the Commission accused me of violating the
Constitution by “inflaming national, social, and religious division,”
and recommended to the Prosecutor’s Office that new criminal
charges be brought against me, and to the Committee on Press
and Information that it shut down Novyi Vzgliad and rescind its
publishing license. The official government TV channel Ostankino
broadcasted the Commission’s decision on its prime time news
program, Vremia (Time), and it was also published in Rossiiskaia
Gazeta and other government papers.
I was almost unanimously vilified in the press coverage of the
new trial, in over a dozen aggressively homophobic articles. One of
the authors called me a “hysterical mama’s boy” and appealed to the
authorities to put me in a psychiatric clinic. Another reporter, the
head of the Moscow Union of Journalists, suggested that it was too
bad that the earring-wearing Mogutin hadn’t been killed instead of
Dmitrii Kholodov (the journalist of Moskovskii Komsomolets killed by
a letter bomb in that paper’s editorial offices in October 1994 while

working on a report on corruption in the Russian military).
This three-year-long prosecution and intimidation campaign
took its toll on me: I felt like a trapped animal. I was afraid of staying
home just as much as being on the street, waiting to be arrested
or harassed by the militia again at any moment. On the advice of
my lawyer, I decided to flee the country, using an invitation from
Columbia University for a series of lectures as an excuse. Expecting
the situation to settle down in my absence, I left in the hope of
returning in a few months. But shortly thereafter I found out that
a new criminal case against me had in fact been opened under
Article 74 of the Criminal Code, with a possible prison sentence of
up to seven years. With that, going back home was no longer an
option. I had no choice but to seek political asylum in the United
States.
I left behind in Russia not just my political and criminal
troubles but also my language, audience, family, circle of friends,
and celebrity status. I had to start my whole life again from square
one. However, when people ask me how I find my present life, I tell
them that being an anonymous political exile in New York is much
better than being a famous gay writer in a Russian prison.3
3
First published in The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review 2, no. 4 (Fall 1995).
M y F ir st M a n : S entimenta l Vomit
I have never written or reminisced about it

as if this part of my memory got blocked: the recollections are
vague and dim
as if it had happened in my infancy long before i became who
i became—DEPRAVED UNBRIDLED MONSTER
i think i know what happened: i made myself forget about it
my first experience with another man
that guy at whose place i crashed in leningrad
i don’t remember clearly either his face or his cock—just a blurry
eroded image
i was 17 he near 40
things did not get to fucking
everything was quite innocent: i was lying like a log giving him
complete freedom of action but he was delicate and courteous
perhaps too much so
he touched me all over and gave me a great blow job—my first
blow job ever!
he came twice but i was too nervous and stiff so i couldn’t come no
matter how hard he and i tried
he liked my body even my skinny legs he called “sexy”
it must have been from him i first learned that i was attractive and
this knowledge turned my world upside down
in order to shock my teenage imagination he took me to a beriozka
hard currency store where we solemnly acquired a bottle of
some imported vodka
Slava Mogutin. My First Man: Sentimental Vomit 115
my imagination was indeed shocked

it was bitterly cold we were dying to get warm so we split the
bottle between the two of us
that night i didn’t eat anything except some solyanka that was a bit off
i got sick and puked all over him his bed and his bedroom
i made a mess
i vaguely remember how he started undressing me and when
i was already naked he tried to take off the golden cross
i was wearing (i got baptized shortly before that and was very
religious at the time)
i got ravenously angry called him a faggot a pervert and proudly
fell asleep in my own puke while he offended went to sleep
on the sofa
a couple of months later i was arrested by the militia for a drunken

row in the moscow subway the cops in the sobering station
having beaten me up and stripped me naked emptied my
pockets and expropriated my golden cross and my watch then
threw me onto the concrete floor to “relax” under an icy cold
shower where i realized that god had turned away from me
and that my religion was not even worth my vomit
upon my return to moscow i sent him some of my poems full of

adolescent fears depression and vague forebodings of a future
knockout life
he wrote to me mad love letters at my old address—the letters
which i read only after his death when he either slipped or
jumped off a balcony
one of them stated that he “cannot live without me”
these words meant absolutely nothing to me
later on things happened this way more than once
the only thing that i do remember clearly and forever is the scent
of his cologne drakkar—the scent that i can unmistakably
distinguish from any others even though i myself never use
perfume
now it seems to me he was even good-looking
then anyone could have taken his place

i was waiting to be seduced and used the first one who came in
handy (even though he was sure it was him who used me—
so young and innocent!)
he was only part of the faceless crowd of extras—one of those who
later in my life were countless
MY FIRST MAN
THE FIRST OF THOUSANDS
A semi-poet/semi-journalist/semi-playboy who didn’t leave behind
anything except a slim book of poems and some rapidly aging
boys who to this day preserve memories of his embraces
I entered his life and unceremoniously appropriated it

I adopted his identity and extended it to the point where he no
longer existed
My adolescent depression grew into something greater than
a simple yearning for a good life and someone’s strong arms
Even now I am writing not so much about him but about the vomit
with which essentially the whole thing had begun
Since then whenever I see vomit I get sentimental.

Slava Mogutin 117
Dr ea ms C ome T rue : P or n
as i witnessed myself getting double-fucked on screen

i realized that i will never again be happy and satisfied
ashamed or embarrassed
i won’t blush and cover my face with my hands
i will never again mourn a lost love and rejoice when i regain it
i will never again be sincere because i simply don’t know what that
means
this is how dreams come true
from now on i’m going to look at life through the dim prism of this
experience
wherever i go everyone will turn to look at me
whisper and point fingers and trying to tame me offer food drugs
or sex—the three things my uncomplicated life consists of
three whales on which my suddenly empty universe rests
lonesomely
yes it’s true that whenever i’m in america they wait for me
in europe
and the other way round
all the time someone breathes heavily into the receiver
masturbating at the other end of the line (if there in fact exists
an end or a line)
but what does it matter to me
what do i care about the geography of someone’s passions when
my soul is like a burnt-down vacant lot or a noxious waste
dump covered with snow
my phone book is filled with names of those who’d be happy to

use me from behind
from below or from above
i have nothing to retort with my mouth and ears are cluttered with
some sort of impenetrable crooked-mouthed cotton-wool i am
trying to say something but instead only a handful of senseless
interjections squeezes out of me
all that i know and remember are my poses
my poses
my poses
the automatic worked-out quality of those poses
the shaved head
the glassy stare
the broken lines of my body and the sinister german speech on the
set like the announcement of a verdict every word can carry
fatal consequences
it’s hard to see whether i am laughing or crying
squirming from pain or bliss
i have no escape from this curve of my neck the grimace of my
twisted arms
this is the nightmare that will be pursuing me for the rest of my life
blinding floodlights
cameras penetrating my throat and my guts
i had an epiphany at that moment
i truly lost my memory
i was in some kind of nirvana while they almost tore my ass
the producer calls trying to get me to do additional filming
i was again seen on german tv
as always i was naked
never again!—i tell myself trying to appeal to my willpower
but all the same with my heart stopping i lift the receiver to
dial his number
this must be fate
November 18, 1998, Berlin

Translated by Vitaly Chernetsky
Slava Mogutin 119
W e W er e A ll Dy ing of the S a me Disea ses
parade of pipettes
march of syringes
we were all dying of the same diseases
first exchanged experiences
then bullshitted about nazis
compared pills
accounted with antibiotics
- WHAT’S THIS WITH YOU BOYS GETTING SICK NOW?

- WHAT ARE THESE WEIRD SPOTS ON YOUR BODY?
doctors say jan’s got tuberculosis

john ditched hospital but with his hormones spent
pevzner got back to moscow—finger got ripped off by a mercedes
800 that rushed by
misha—remember misha?—ate some bad soup and died
the splinters in raoul’s leg—sea urchin needles
- OH SHIT YOU’VE GOT THE BITES ALL OVER YOU!

- IS IT DEADLY?
SCARS:
deep extended on left thigh—fell off the bike in berlin
could easily be taken for a knife wound
on right thigh chunk of flesh ripped off—jsmacked into a car

on skates in new york
scars from cigarettes extinguished on me: at least 2
from police beatings on spine—extended lines like lashes
from a whip
growing lump in right nipple under metal
and this red spot on my ass probably will never go away
yes we were all dying of the same diseases

bit off the hangnail on the plane—caught an infection
played with the ocean—broke a nail on a reef
rode on the horse around jungles—took a beating on my ass
and balls
mosquitoes gnawed me half to death
sleeping sickness: bytes from a tsetse fly
tarantula bit me on the cheek—went out with scabs
ate meat of a possessed ape—same one that howled in the
mornings under the windows—in an hour buried burned
to hell so it wouldn’t stink
there will be no grave
who fucking needs this shit in a foreign tropical country
September 2000, Costa Rica

Slava Mogutin 121
T he T r iumph of the Fa mily
this dreadful gray constancy

replaces for me today all colors
green blue red—what other ones are there?
i don’t find a place for me here don’t know where to sit
what to drink and to eat
was it long ago that daddy amused himself with his sonny?
the triumph of the family happened
mother was entertaining herself with the daughter
opening her mouth in the vicinity of hers
saliva poured slowly from here into there

never before two related bodies
were as close as then
green blue red
gray constancy
the identical you will never write like the different one
you were gone gone and the heart was beating
into the armpit like an exploded point
here is this one and here’s another one completely different
you are getting used to signs of differentiation silly
are you getting completely assimilated?
while father was amusing himself

mother was entertaining herself
the triumph of the family happened
green blue red
the russian word for “family” comes from the word for “pig”
1990, Moscow
Slava Mogutin 123
T he Death of M isha B eautiful
Some friends from Moscow who recently passed through New York
relayed this sad and disturbing news: Misha Beautiful was killed
in prison. The story of his short life could provide good material
for a book or movie. His death wasn’t reported in the obituaries.
His name did not appear in the news. Actually, nobody even knew
either his real name or his age (by my account, at the time of his
death he was somewhere between 20 and 23). Everybody knew
him by his English nickname. Not a single drug or rave party
could take place without Misha. He was one of those exotic night
creatures, androgynous club kids who keep it all going in any one
of the world’s capitals.
We met at Michael Jackson’s concert at the Luzhniki Stadium
in Moscow. I was invited by my good friend Vladik Mamyshev,
a.k.a. Monroe, who happened to have free tickets (otherwise I’d
never pay my own money to see that American freak!). There
was an incredible number of militia men there, one of whom
displayed a rather aggressive interest in me, catching me taking
a leak in an inappropriate place. Only my journalist ID saved
me from his insistent pestering. At the stadium entrance several
lines of cops thoroughly searched everyone. This got Monroe very
excited and he went back and forth about three times to prolong
the pleasure. Vladik was one of the most colorful and extravagant
characters of the Russian underground art scene, a conceptual
artist and performer who became famous for his brilliant campy
impersonations of different pop icons from Marilyn Monroe to

Adolf Hitler.
The concert was a flop, the weather was nasty, rain was pouring,
and people were standing up to their ankles in water. Misha
came up to us and asked for a smoke. It turned out that back in
St. Petersburg, not so long ago, he tried to pick up Monroe on
different occasions and claimed to be in love with him. Don’t know
what ever happened between those two, but Vladik told me he was
now trying to avoid Misha.
Monroe and his entourage left, and I remained standing in the
rain with Misha, who was high and seemed to have some difficulty
understanding what was going on around him. Later I never saw
him completely sober, looking normal; his pupils were always
dilated. Misha was a clear case of a teenager who grew too quickly—
tall, dystrophic-thin, boyishly awkward, with long arms and legs
and with shoulders and chest that had not shaped up yet. He truly
was beautiful with the innocent childish expression on his face,
wide open green eyes and long eyelashes, with a short haircut, in
a baseball cap turned backwards and with excessive piercings in his
ears, nose, and one eyebrow. Back then I was very much turned on
by that.
He slightly stuttered and slurred when he spoke, and his
vocabulary was full of slang and Russianized English words. Later
he became for me a walking dictionary of this simultaneously
entertaining and somewhat ridiculous new language that served as
a password of sorts for the “in” crowd. His head was an utter mess,
he jumped from one thought to another, and his speech frequently
resembled a Joycean stream of consciousness. I loved his stories and
fantasies; to me they sounded like perfect material for an absurdist
play yet to be written.
After the concert he had to go back to St. Petersburg. In a kiosk
by the metro station I bought a bottle of vodka which we opened
and finished right there, chasing it down with some nasty franks. He
got drunk instantly and was overflowing with affection toward me.
He wrapped himself around me, grabbing and kissing my hands,
feeling my cock through my pants, whispering excitedly, “Wow! So
big!” We embraced, kissed, and rubbed against each other like lusty
Slava Mogutin. The Death of Misha Beautiful 125
wild animals, cold and wet from the rain. Old drunkards drinking
vodka nearby watched us with both disgust and amusement.
Catching the last metro train, we found ourselves in an empty
car and lay down on a bench, still kissing and rubbing against
each other. He unbuttoned my fly, got his hand inside, and started
squeezing and caressing my cock. At the moment when he was
about to take it in his mouth, two thugs from the Caucasus, either
Chechen or Georgian, walked into the car. By the mad look in their
eyes I understood that they could have easily killed us right there
if we did not manage to jump out of the car a moment before the
doors closed. When I saw him off at the train station, we parted as if
we had been lovers for a long time. We had only known each other
for about three hours….
Back in St. Petersburg, he called me all the time, day and night,
often leaving some ten messages a day in his bird language on my
answering machine. The messages were about him missing me,
thinking about me all the time, feeling lonely and stuff, deciding
to kill himself, OD’ing on magic mushrooms and thinking he was
about to die, screwing some chick and imagining I was doing to him
whatever he was doing to her, and so on. At the time I was already
a well-known journalist and poet, the first openly queer writer in
Russia, regularly receiving both fan mail and hate mail, a generous
portion of love letters and death threats. But Misha’s messages
differed from them in that he didn’t have the slightest idea about
the things I did or the origin of my fame and wasn’t at all interested
in that. In any case, I am certain that he never read a single line of
what I had written (if he knew at all how to read). However, he
immediately became the inspiration for my writing. In the poem
“Seize It!” dedicated to him there are the following lines:
And that boy in a baseball cap

With a shelf that sticks out
Sucks and swallows like God
Nobody else could do it like him
As I found out later, the parents of Misha Beautiful are both well-
known and established people in St. Petersburg. Apparently, his
father is the director of some big department store. And, as often
happened in well-to-do Soviet families, he grew up “difficult,”

a “problem child.” He told me about doing fartsovka (illegal
exchanging of souvenirs for consumer goods such as jeans,
sneakers, watches, and gum with foreign tourists and the selling of
those goods on the black market—a crime punishable in the Soviet
Union by a severe prison sentence in the 70s and 80s.—S.M.) next
to the Intourist hotel. The fags who picked up foreigners also hung
out there. Misha and his buddies periodically conducted remont
(Russian slang for gay bashing.—S.M.)—beat the fags up and
robbed them. Misha did not consider himself a faggot.
From his other stories I found out that as a child he fell down
the stairs and suffered a severe concussion. Apparently this was the
reason for his speech difficulties and arrested development. I was
only older than him by some two years, but it seemed to me that
a veritable age gap divided us, turning our communication (when
his mouth wasn’t busy with something else) into some inarticulate
babble. He was street-smart, with only two real passions in life:
drugs and parties … and, of course, trendy, expensive clothes. He
didn’t like to work and didn’t know how, and when he ran out of his
parents’ money he stole or borrowed money from his friends, many
of whom used Misha as a prostitute in return. If one were to try
to count his regular partners or just one-night stands, it would be
a rather long list of names, with some celebrities among them. For
Misha sex was the only way to earn income, and he had all it takes
to become a successful hustler.
He did not have either willpower, nor a strong enough
personality, which is why, like some “Sons of the Regiment”
(A term used to describe orphans found and taken care of by
Soviet army regiments during World War II; an important element
of Soviet propaganda and cultural mythology.—S.M.), he had
a need for elder comrades in charge of his life and destiny. Having
found himself in the coterie of Timur Novikov, godfather of the
St. Petersburg underground art scene, Beautiful became a student
at his New Academy of Fine Arts. Timur himself had admitted that
“face control” was one of the main criteria he used for selecting
students, thanks to which Misha, like many other young local
talents, successfully passed the exams. As part of the educational
process, Timur’s boys posed naked for each other and had their
pictures taken in togas and robes, mimicking ancient homoerotic
statues and scenes. Various rooftops all over the city served as their
locations. The Academy itself was located in a large communal
apartment, one of the walls of which was covered from floor to
ceiling by satin of the symbolic sky-blue color. (“Goluboi,” “blue”
is Russian slang for gay.—S.M.) Not coincidentally, Timur’s main
inspirations were Oscar Wilde, Baron Von Gloeden, and Ludwig II,
the Mad King of Bavaria.
Timur, whom Misha and other students referred to respectfully
as Timur Petrovich, was for Misha for a while a true idol and figure
of authority. But even he, despite his definite organizer’s talent
and his skill in, let’s say, “working with the youth,” managed to
divert Misha from the lifestyle he had been leading only for a short
while. Fine arts interested him far less than drugs and parties.
Timur Petrovich sincerely tried to bring him to reason and take
him back into the realm of neo-classical beauty, but his efforts were
in vain....
Misha surprised me by showing up in Moscow on one of the
days of the October 1993 coup, during the State of Emergency. He
must have been the only person in the world who knew nothing
about it. He had no papers on him. He called me from the train
station. He had lots of acquaintances in Moscow, but he called
me and no one else since, according to him, he came down to see
me. And I felt somewhat responsible for him. The previous night
Monroe had been arrested while wandering around Moscow past
the curfew time, having his pictures taken for his self-published
magazine ME and exposing himself in front of the tanks. Vladik
and a friend of his had to spend a night in jail. This probably was
the best possible scenario of what could have happened to Misha.
Dropping everything, I grabbed a pack of my journalist IDs and
went to meet, or, rather, save him.
Having found out that something scary and incomprehensible
was happening in Moscow, Misha got totally excited and begged
me to take him to the barricaded building of the Russian Parliament,
called, ironically enough, the White House. Invisible evil snipers
followed us lustily with their eyepieces, stray bullets whizzed by,
the levels of adrenalin in our blood exceeded all Health Ministry

standards, people wandered in the streets, bewildered and
dumbfounded—all of this serving as an arousing backdrop.
Like homeless teenagers forced to engage in public sex, we
found ourselves in alleys and doorways, and Misha used every
opportunity to kneel in front of me, unbutton my pants, and blow
me. Several times we were caught in the middle of it, but in that
situation our pranks did not cause particular reactions in anyone:
queers on barricades! So this was my baptism by fire. Thanks to
Misha, I will always remember that sharp feeling of sex in the
midst of street fighting, shooting, general civil unrest and dis-
obedience….
I am writing about Misha in such detail, trying to recall all
that I know and remember about him precisely because he is no
longer in this world. I am getting excited from some cruel and dark
necrophiliac fantasies, thinking of whatever happened to his skinny
body. De Mortius Aut Bene, Aut Nihil. I know I could be accused of
blasphemy, but I am describing him the way he was, and he was by
no means an angel. Both sexually and mentally he was so passive,
so easy to take advantage of, and I did that, like everyone else.
He was a stalker of sorts, and I just couldn’t resist his advances.
He was doomed, and it was impossible not to notice that. It was
written all over him. I saw that, sensed that, and tried somehow
to influence his fate. But I had not fallen for him that badly. I had
a life of my own into which he would intrude from time to time; we
met periodically for a quick fuck, he was always somewhere nearby,
and it seemed things would stay like this forever. As I was moving
around Moscow, changing addresses and lovers, Misha somehow
managed to find my phone numbers and called me, always giving
me more inspiration material and running into troubles with my
jealous boyfriends every now and then.
On April 12, 1994, the day of my twentieth birthday, when
I tried to register officially the first same-sex marriage in Russia with
my American boyfriend Robert, Misha’s ghostly figure suddenly
appeared in front of the Moscow Central Palace of Weddings in the
crowd of reporters armed with erect cameras and microphones.
Sure enough, our marriage wasn’t registered, but we managed to
make enough noise for the whole world to hear, and we bravely
withstood the marathon of interviews that followed, talking about
the state of homophobia and gay rights in the state of Russia. As in
the case of the coup, Misha was probably the only person unaware of
that historic event. He fluttered his eyes and wrinkled his forehead
in total oblivion of who was marrying whom and why there was
such commotion.
I had neither the opportunity nor the desire to explain things
to him, but instead introduced Misha to my friend Fedor, the son
of a famous female playwright. Fedor was a cute, tall, blonde and
blue-eyed guy, and an aspiring journalist with good brains and
a kind heart. Prior to this the two of us fooled around somewhat
awkwardly a couple of times—on his initiative, in spite of Fedor
usually portraying himself as a big womanizer and lecturing me
about my “corrupt” lifestyle. I knew he wouldn’t mind “doing
it” with someone else. Misha was an ideal character for that and
obediently went with Fedor as he was told to.
After our crowded and loud wedding party at Robert’s studio,
Fedor grabbed Misha and brought him to his place. After another
clumsy and awkward fuck, Fedor departed either for work or
for college, letting Beautiful stay at his place and making the
noble gesture of leaving him his only key from the apartment.
He promised to get Misha a journalist ID so that he could attend
any club or concert without a hustle. More than a month passed
before the Good Samaritan Fedor managed to track down Misha
and retrieve his key from him. He had to pay for the apartment he
couldn’t even get into, while Misha turned it into a total drug nest,
did not answer Fedor’s calls, and tried to avoid him at any cost.
But an even greater surprise was still awaiting Fedor: his landlord
demanded that he pay for Misha’s long distance and international
calls to his tricks around the world. “I really tried to help him,”
a frustrated Fedor later complained to me. “I wanted to drag him
out of this swamp!”
Later on I ran into Misha in some clubs, and by then he was
already so drugged-out he could barely recognize me. He bumped
into me and mumbled something nonsensical. Later Misha
disappeared somewhere, and different stories about him reached
me from time to time: he had hung out with some Scandinavian

DJs who kept him on an ecstasy diet and gangbanged him for days;
he had to move for good to Moscow since in St. Petersburg he
“borrowed” too many valuables from too many friends; and now
a lot of people in Moscow were trying to hunt him down for the
same reason. Once I got a phone call from someone who was
looking for Beautiful in order to retrieve a video camera that had
disappeared after his visit. Misha had gone too far. For most people
he was no longer “beautiful,” he started losing his looks and his
appeal, and some serious dark clouds were beginning to gather over
his head.
Our last meeting took place when he called me again out of the
blue, in his usual manner, and found me in a horny and adventurous
mood. We made a date in front of a subway station. It was sunny
and warm and we walked around the Garden Ring, looking for
a spot to get off. I missed him and his silly stories. One was about his
parents cooking some mushrooms and him adding some of his own,
and then his parents started seeing things, and his grandma had the
most severe hallucinations. “I don’t understand what’s happening
to me!” Grandma kept on saying. “I feel like a completely different
person!” Another story, completely unreal, was about some rich girl
that Misha was apparently involved with at the moment. The girl
was into getting fucked up her ass and Misha proudly revealed that
he could satisfy her better than any other guy. Then, he confessed,
he himself grew to like anal sex as well. And then … he’d been
invited by some guy to work as a model either in Italy or Spain, and
that he would go for sure, “as soon as he’s ready.”
Having bought a couple of bottles of champagne, we dropped
in at the studio of my friend, painter and fashion designer Katya
Leonovich. She was being interviewed by a couple of lame tabloid
journalists who nearly fainted at seeing the two of us at the door.
Drunk on champagne, Misha and I started behaving in a rather
frivolous manner, grabbing and kissing each other. Just like the first
time, we were all over each other. In the bathroom I pushed him
down on his knees and pulled out my cock. His cock-sucking skills
had significantly improved since our first meeting. I kept on feeding
him, he sucked and licked readily and eagerly, stopping from time
to time, looking puppy-like into my eyes, slurping and saying

pitifully: “Don’t leave me, please! I want to be with you! Please!”
At that moment I just wanted one thing—to cum—and could easily
promise anything, so I did, as my load was going down his throat.
A few minutes later, when it was all over and we came out of the
bathroom, Misha took his shirt off to show his tattoos. Then Katya
had him try on one of the outfits from her new collection. Being at
the center of everyone’s attention, Misha was shy and at his best—so
obedient and passive, like a doll or a mannequin. After all, he would
make a great model somewhere in Italy or Spain!
Another few months had passed, and I had to flee from
criminal prosecution because of my queer writing and “corrupt”
lifestyle. On the eve of my departure—or, rather, escape—from
Russia, literally a few hours before our plane, when Robert and
I were hurriedly trying to pack at least something, Monroe burst
into our place with his artist friends Ivan and Sergei. Monroe and
Ivan were then renting an apartment on the Arbat, a two-minute
walk from us, and whenever they were totally broke, they would
come to our place for a free meal. We had to put off the packing until
the very last moment and feed the hungry artists. It was then, at our
Last Supper, that I learned from Vladik that Misha Beautiful had
been thrown in jail for robbery and drugs. Monroe joked cynically
that “now Misha’s doing the time of his life” and so on. But since
at that point I had a good chance of finding myself behind bars
as well, I understood perfectly well the seriousness of what had
happened.
For a homosexual prone to sadomasochist fantasies, prison
sometimes appears to be an enticing sexual paradise, a place where
the wildest dreams and fantasies come true. You can sit in the
safety of your home and masturbate endlessly imagining how dirty,
rough, and raw sex behind bars is: NO CONDOMS, NO LUBE, NO
MERCY! Well, after spending a few months investigating the lives
of gays in Soviet prisons and detention camps, all I can say is: under
no circumstances would I want to end up there! I know too well
what happens there to those like myself and especially like Misha
Beautiful. It doesn’t matter that he didn’t even consider himself
a fag....
The story of his life and death could easily be reworked into
a moralizing oration: look what drugs, gay debauchery, and
crazy nightlife do to a person! He started out with fartsovka and
mushrooms, and finished in prison, among the criminals! But one
can also present it in a completely different way: it’s a pity that
there did not appear a Michael Jackson who could have saved him
and turned his life into One Big Neverland. It’s a pity that neither
Monroe nor Timur Petrovich, nor me, nor Fedor became his Michael
Jackson!
1996, New York City

and the author
Oksana Robski
(b. 1968, Moscow)
Oksana Robski studied at the School of Journalism at Moscow

State University and in the Advanced Courses for Screenwriters
and Directors. She has founded several companies, including
one that provides clients with the services of female bodyguards.
Robski became famous after the publication of her first novel,
Casual, which depicts life in Rublevka and Zhukovka, the
settlements for the rich and powerful on the outskirts of Moscow.
Robski’s novel opened the floodgate for “glamour” fiction.
Her later novels On LiubOFF/On, Life Anew, Oysters under Rain,
and Casual 2 develop on the topics she introduced in her first
novel. She has hosted several television shows and become
a celebrity in her own right.

Oksana Robski, Casual, trans. by A.W. Bouis, New York: Regan Books, 2007.
E xcer pts from “G l a mour a’ l a O k sa na Robsk i ,”

by Tatiana Mikhailova1
It’s interesting—what does a person who can

buy a Vertu phone for six grand look like? Can
a woman be that person?
—Oksana Robski2
The First Generation of Happy Girls

[…] With all her books highly publicized in Russian glossy magazines
and on TV as an insider’s look at the lifestyles of the nouveau riche,
Robski became a symbol of the new consumerist culture of the
2000s.3 Gaily accepting the comparison of her writing style to that
of a talking purse from Chanel, Robski presents a gendered view of
the nouveau riche’s lifestyle, focusing on the lives and problems of
the women in the elitist settlement, mostly the wives and mistresses
of Russian businessmen and politicians. Mediocre in their literary
qualities, Robski’s novels nevertheless constitute an illuminating
case of the functioning of the glamour culture, in which happiness,
as manifested by “status” and “success,” is not the result of certain
achievements, but their very foundation. Although the characters
are in most cases already “made” in money and status, the origins
of their privilege are never quite clear. […]
Perhaps the nameless autobiographical heroine of Robski’s
first novel Casual is the closest reflection of the author. It is she
1
From Celebrity and Glamour in Contemporary Russia: Shocking Chic, ed. Helena
Goscilo and Vlad Strukov (London: Routledge, 2011), 90-104.
2
Oksana Robski. Casual (Moscow: Rosman, 2005), 11
3
A collection of reviews of Robski’s novels is posted on her personal site,
www.robski.ru/pressa. Last accessed on September 15, 2008.
Tatiana Mikhailova. Excerpts from “Glamour a’la Oksana Robski” 135
who says to her girlfriends, “We’ll be the first generation of happy

old ladies, just as we were the first generation of rich girls” (“Мы
будем первым поколением счастливых старушек, как были
первым поколением богатых девчонок”)4. The unquestionable
equivalence of happiness to wealth in this motto is principal to
Robski and is in many ways responsible for what may be called the
“Robski effect.” […]
The attraction of Robski’s novels and her persona is based
on the fact that she goes beyond the banal “the rich cry too,” and
presents the quests for happiness of those who already have a lot of
money. So, what is happiness for a woman already in possession of
a million-dollar cottage in Rublevka, her own business, a luxury car,
and a diamond collection? To risk sounding tautological, I argue
that this transcendental happiness is manifested by the concept of
glamour. […]
Glamour as a cultural concept appears as a result of the societal
democratization of the mid-nineteenth century, when aristocratic
symbolic capital was replaced by the mass consumption of “high
culture” signs.5 There is an obvious similarity between this process
and the rearrangement of social hierarchies in the post-Soviet
years, when the Soviet aristocracy of the Party and cultural elite
was ousted by the invasion of the nouveau riche, whose raspberry-
colored jackets and criminal slang were within a decade replaced
by Armani suits and Eton English. In this respect, Robski represents
a perfect example of a cultural mediator between two epochs:
a former member of the intelligentsia (her mother still teaches at
one of the Moscow colleges), she grew up in a small khrushchevka,6
and now represents the highest strata of the social elite.
Without a doubt, the very fact of having a house in the prestigious
Rublevka neighborhood helped Robski attain the necessary level of
4
Robski, Casual, 197.
5
See Stephen Gundle and Clino T. Castelli. The Glamour System (London: Palgrave,
2006), 43-45.
6
Small one-family apartments; named after Nikita Khrushchev, who launched
a wide-scale construction of apartment buildings of this kind in the 1960s.
immediate credibility in the eyes of her readers. Simultaneously

with the publication of Casual, it was broadly reported that the
author herself belonged to the same—“successful”—social stratum
as her characters. Almost immediately after the release of her first
book, Robski became a celebrity, a frequent guest and later an
anchor of TV shows promoting the glamorous lifestyle. Robski’s
novels gained a broad readership, mainly due to the illusion they
create of familiarizing us with the world of the rich and powerful,
and thus catering to those readers who, by default, do not belong to
this world. Her books intend to “humanize” the highly demonized
world of the nouveau riche, while at the same time exploiting the
public mythology of the transgressive and criminal mores typical
for this social stratum—evoking the genre of a mystery novel. The
fact that a female writer describing the female aspects of this realm
performs a “humanizing” function betrays the patriarchal, or rather
Victorian, dichotomy (men = dirty job, women = cozy home) in
which this discourse is rooted. Robski’s characters never question
their economic dependence on their husbands and lovers; they
perceive it quite simply as the route to their self-empowerment in
relation to those less “successful” and less happy than they are.
The Botox Effect

Unlike such western canonical texts of glam literature as Danielle
Steel’s and Jackie Collins’s bestsellers, Robski’s Casual, surprisingly,
lacks emotion. The botox that eliminates all facial manifestations of
emotion becomes an illuminating metaphor in this book: “Wrinkles
vanished. Muscles atrophied. The doll-like face of a little girl with
blue hair. And when I smile—Phantomas appears from a scary story:
forcefully stretched lips and motionless glass eyes.”7 Accordingly,
Robski’s narrator and heroines are emotionally numb, incapable
of being shocked: for them, everything is acceptable, including
murder. Indeed, botox appears to be an excellent synecdoche for
the entire culture of glamour, since the latter also emphasizes the
7
Robski. Casual, 31.
surface and downplays the substance, also stays on the “skin-deep”

level securing the invincibility of the lucky hero from the outside
world, and most importantly from time, age, and death. Thus, both
botox and glamour assign a supernatural, superhuman, or even
transcendental status to the glamorous character, while at the same
time paralyzing his/her subjectivity.
Happy glam girls, as depicted by Robski, seem to be incapable
of feeling anything, except for the excitement of power and envy for
those who are more powerful than they are. Power and its visible
signifiers—wealth, expensive goods, a rich husband—constitute
the horizon of happiness in Robski’s novel. To achieve this horizon,
a woman must mirror a man’s attitude to the opposite sex as prey, as
another commodity signifying life success. However, the paradox
of the Rublevka lifestyle as inadvertently reflected by Robski is
based on circular logic: the woman, “masculinized” by the cynical
ability to use any means possible to achieve her desires, equates her
success with submission to the man whom she “conquers.” […]
The “feminization” of the cold and power-oriented world
of the nouveaux riches women is performed in these novels by
a method borrowed from glamour magazines. Each character’s
realm is presented through a list of commodities: “things to own,”
such as houses, cars, furniture, clothing—frequently with an exact,
specified price and brand name—and “places to go”: massage and
hairdresser salons, “in” restaurants, fashionable entertainment
venues, etc. All these details are marked as feminine, and thus set
the system of standards for a “successful” woman’s lifestyle. The
heroine possesses things that are quite inaccessible to the majority
of Robski’s readers, thus placing herself “beyond the powers of
articulate authority and accountability.”8
The representation of a character through a list of things s/he
owns becomes a trademark of Robski’s literary method and a par-
ticularly obvious sign of the “botox effect” of glamour. Robski is
definitely not original in this respect (see, for instance, Martin Amis’
8
Nick Lee, “Becoming Mass: Glamour, Authority, and Human Presence,” in
The Consumption of Mass, ed N. Lee and R. Munro (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 174.
Money or Victor Pelevin’s Generation ‘P’), but she is probably the

first Russian writer to assign a neutral or positive meaning to the
equation of a human being with his/her possessions. This approach
resembles more than anything else a catalog or a fashion magazine.
In a sense, a character is equated with a certain kind of fashion
magazine. Those characters whose lists are the most luxurious
are separated from consumers of more affordable things not only
by their economic status but also by their language and symbolic
habitat. For instance, in the novel Liuboff/on, the heroine named
Dasha does not belong to the circle of rich and powerful, although
her lover tries to introduce her to his friends. These encounters
lead to miscommunications, similar to those comically depicted in
Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. On the one hand, Dasha corrects lapses
in the speech of her beloved—for him (unlike for Professor Higgins),
a good command of Russian has nothing to do with his social status.
On the other hand, Dasha finds herself failing to understand even
the simplest conversation:
“I can’t fit anything into my fridge,” complained an unbelievably

pudgy girl […]
I decided to take advantage of the situation and keep up
the conversation; Rita and I had meditated on the subject of
refrigerators for half a year already.
“Bosch is really good,” I said.
Several pairs of made-up eyes looked at me with interest. It
felt nice.
“Freezes well, beautiful design […] very conveniently
made”—I enjoyed universal attention—“even a compartment for
eggs. Not like other kinds. […]
My words were drowned out by loud laughter.
And the clink of glasses.
“To refrigerators!” everyone toasted in unison.
I raised my glass uncertainly.
“But only to refrigerators for fur coats. And not for eggs,”
specified the girl in the low-cut dress.
And everyone joyfully laughed again.9
9
Oksana Robski. Pro lubOFF/ON (Moscow: Rosmen, 2005), 35—6.
Continuing the parallel with Pygmalion, one might notice

that in the world of Robski’s characters it is not their language
that defines their social/cultural status. Instead, their status and
its manifestations through commodities change language itself.
Indeed, words (such as “refrigerator”) mean something other than
their normal definitions. Furthermore, for the inhabitants of Robski’s
Rublevka, refrigerators for food do not belong to the sphere of
discourse (these are objects for the commoners and the “help”); the
only refrigerators that concern them are those specially designed
for the preservation of their furs. Dasha’s failure to understand the
conversation she invades is especially telling (and painful) because
she is a professional linguist. Language is something she masters,
and even her power over her lover is augmented by her role as his
speech trainer. In another episode in the novel, Dasha revealingly
compares a lack of money with the absence of a voice, or, in other
words, with discursive deficiency: “‘Nine thousand, six hundred
and forty dollars.’ I had only two thousand, four hundred and eighty.
That’s probably how the mute feel. You want to say something, but
you can’t” (“Наверно, так чувствуют себя немые. Хочешь что-то
сказать, но не можешь”)10. The opacity of the glamour language is
indicative of the magic aura created by glamour objects.
The Magic of Sharing

Even within this circle of magic objects, there is an unstated
hierarchy between things more and less accessible. The former—
such as products of Mercedes, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Volkswagen,
Makita, Bacardi, and Panache—are typically written by Robski in
Cyrillic, while the latter—such as Cayenne, Bentley, Jack Daniels
Blue Label, Dupont lighters, a fitness center in Rublevka entitled
“World Class,” and a Provazi sofa—appear in Latin script. The
foreignness of the name corresponds to the transcendental status of
the thing, determined by its price. Thus, glamour is never entirely
familiarized by Robski’s character: it always preserves some sense
10
Robski, Casual, 117.
of distance, which is precisely why the possession of a glam object

can generate the “magic effect” of happiness.
From this perspective, it is symptomatic that of Robski’s four
novels, the first has an English title (Casual) and the third is based
on an international pun (Про любоff/on). In Zamuzh za millionera (co-
authored with Kseniia Sobchak) the first letter of the title, and in
Glamurnyi dom the syllable “glam” are written in Latin script. The
titles of Robski’s first and most recent book (Casual 2 came out in
October 2007) are especially eloquent: what is “casual” for Robski’s
heroine is foreign and therefore full of glamorous magic for the
reader.
This effect is self-perpetuating. Characteristically, the “real”
wives of Rublevka and Zhukovka sent an angry letter to the
NTV channel accusing Robski’s novels of inauthenticity. They
were especially enraged by the fact that Robski’s heroine receives
a monthly allowance of $2000 from her husband:
“It’s a joke—write the ladies—for a whole month? That wouldn’t

be enough for a day…. After that stupid book our husbands
make fun of us: “Why don’t I ask this … kefir businesswoman
for the numbers of those friends of hers who can get by on two
thousand a month….” True “Rublevka wives” think that Robski’s
project is PR for the poor, she just didn’t want to scare them with
the real price of living in this Moscow suburb. To conclude, the
ladies sneered at the writer for underestimating the cost of their
lifestyle, and devaluing their feminine “services.” […]11
There is, indeed, something peculiar in Robski’s glamour

discourse. Through her heroines she is not shy about enjoying
and praising cheap products of questionable quality seemingly
intended for the poor. She takes pleasure in a Doshirak noodle soup
and a Prichuda vafel’nyi tort (a wafer torte); she is amazed to learn
that a delicious tea that tastes no worse than the one she regularly
drinks ($10 per sip) is actually ordinary Lipton. She is excited by
11
[No author],“’Proletarskaia pisatel’nitsa glamurnykh bul’onnykh kubikov,” http://
www.stringer.ru/publication.mhtml?Part=38&PubID=4556 (last consulted
September 21, 2008).
her visit to a simple khoziaistvennyi magazin (a small version of

a Home Depot) and is not afraid of a “dirty job,” although lacking
medical training, she nevertheless knows how to give her daughter
injections and even immunization shots. Or consider the following
statement: “Katya’s maid fed us potato casserole. With that Filipino
I learned to value simple human food” (”Катина домработница
накормила нас картофельной запеканкой. С филиппинкой
я научилась ценить простую человеческую еду”).12
These examples are quite frequent in Robski’s prose. Hardly
any of them can be written off as product placement, and their
recurrence in her prose reflects Robski’s positioning of herself as
a mediator between the post-Soviet rich and the poor. However, the
reason for these intentional lapses in glam taste, I contend, springs
from the inextricable link between glamour and happiness.
As Jean Baudrillard points out in The System of Objects, everyone
in consumer culture “must constantly be ready to actualize all of
his potential, all of his capacity for consumption. If he forgets, he
will be gently reminded that he has no right not to be happy.”13 This
universal obligation to be happy is maintained through everyday
easy access to solidified happiness as embodied in consumer
products: “Everything is appropriated and simplified into the
translucence of abstract ‘happiness’”(ibid., 37). In other words,
every brand, every fashionable symbol of status serves as a signifier
of happiness. […]
Yet I maintain that Robski goes beyond the pragmatics of
embedding advice to naïve consumers in her prose. The presence
of cheap products like Doshirak or Lipton in the list of happiness-
signifiers allows virtually all of her readers to imbibe, in the process
of reading, their own dose of glamour happiness, regardless of
their income. In fact, the incorporation of cheap products into her
“catalogues” of things is a rhetorical device intended to bond her
with those readers who can afford nothing more expensive. By this
means, Robski truly creates the illusion of sharing, which in turn
12
Robski. Casual, 266.
13
Jean Baudrillard. The System of Objects (London: Verso, 2005), 51.
produces the effect of common values, understanding, and, most

importantly, of the reader’s belonging to the glamorous world. Even
the simple purchase of Robski’s book offers the reader an injection of
glamour and, thus, is equivalent to symbolic citizenship in Rublevka
or Zhukovka. The creation of this circle of shared happiness is the
main reason for the popularity of Robski’s books, as well as for the
transformation of her name into a commercial brand. This rhetorical
mechanism is quite typical for the culture of glamour: “… Glamour
is not the elusive pimpernel attainable through the god of riches….
It is easy to attain at least some of it, if not all of it, and half a loaf is
better than none.”14 […]
To Own (f)or To Be Owned

Robski’s characters are reminiscent of Giuseppe Archimboldo’s
baroque portraits, in which people’s faces are composed of fruits,
vegetables, fish, and flowers, only Robski’s characters consist
of fashionable objects, expensive houses and cars, powerful
positions, etc. If this is so, the character itself, and a protagonist
female character in particular, appears as an object too, though an
expensive, glamorous object that not every buyer can afford. This
situation, however, leaves unanswered the ubiquitous question
of agency: does Robski’s protagonist—or the post-Soviet glam
woman—preserve a certain, albeit limited, freedom, or does she
only enjoy the passive position of a glamorous object?
Robski seems to address the issue of a glam woman’s agency
quite consistently. Four of her novels begin with a fairy-tale-like
deficiency: a happy family is destroyed and a heroine has to build
her happiness anew. In Casual, after her husband’s murder, the
heroine tries to avenge his death and to find her own place in life.
She starts a business that turns sour because of her staff’s disloyalty
and hires a hitman to kill her husband’s murderer; yet, before justice
is served, the heroine administers the murder of an person (albeit
a gangster). As a result of these calamities, however, she finds
14
Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4.
a new, rich suitor who does business outside of Russia and thus is
hierarchically superior to her ex. In Den’ schast’ia: zavtra, the heroine
undergoes a similar crisis. She is not widowed but abandoned by
her husband, who tires of her cocaine addiction and her indifference
to the family, especially their son. Left alone, the heroine overcomes
her addiction and creates a successful security firm, even saving
her father-in-law’s life. As a result, the husband returns to her, and
family happiness amidst luxury is restored.
In each novel, Robski’s heroine tries to rebuild her life (and
happiness) through self-realization in business. This path implies
a new (or renewed) model of subjectivity that seemingly invokes
the ghosts of the Soviet female overachievers from the 1920s-30s,
and ostensibly resonates with the feminist ideal of a strong woman
breaking through gender stereotypes and proving her worth in
a “man’s world.” However, when asked directly if she promotes
models of women’s independence, Robski is aghast at the very idea:
“You wrote a book about a woman who solves difficult ‘masculine’

problems all alone. Are you a feminist?”
“No! Absolutely not! It’s just that they killed her husband, and
she has to deal with everything herself. That certainly doesn’t
mean that I share the theories of feminism.”15
Her fear of being labeled “feminist” is quite symptomatic of

the paradoxical complexes of her heroines. Robski’s characters do
not find psychological satisfaction in their free self-realization in
business or other similar activities. They are more reminiscent of
the Soviet “strong women,” such as the protagonist of Vladimir
Men’shov and Vladimir Chernykh’s Oscar-winning Moscow Does
Not Believe in Tears [1980], who achieved professional self-fulfillment
but preferred to sacrifice their independence for “obedient”
subordination in the private sphere. Unlike Soviet heroines, Robski’s
protagonists are not interested in “real” men if they do not have
15
Maria Baker, “Oksana Robski o schast’e, den’gakh i slave,” BBCrussian.com,
September 12, 2005.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/russian/entertainment/newsid_4236000/4236360.stm,
(last consulted September 21, 2008).
sufficient income or power. Furthermore, rich men are essential not

only to the women’s attempts at self-realization through professional
endeavors, but also (and preferably) to their “eternal happiness”
through a lucrative marriage that provides a passport to glamour
and all it entails. Thus, for any of Robski’s heroines, what seems like
self-fulfillment paradoxically reinforces objectification—or, rather,
self-objectification.
The only purpose for the business activities of Robski’s heroines
is to increase the businesswoman’s own price as a commodity.
In the Rublevka world, a single woman with an income of her
own possesses a higher “market value” than a woman without
a business—in other words, the former can have a better, i.e. richer
and more powerful, husband or lover who will “own” her along
with her business. When a man willing and able to “purchase” the
heroine appears, she eagerly sacrifices her freedom for marriage
and dependence on an affluent, powerful husband. If Aleksandr
Ostrovsky’s nineteenth-century bespridannitsa (bride without
dowry), in the play by the same title, was shocked to learn that she
was an “expensive and beautiful thing”16 auctioned off to the highest
bidder, Robski’s heroines possess this “market-consciousness” from
the outset. In fact, their concept of happiness is derived from it, and
they strive to raise their value as “things” for conjugal sale. […]
Thus, the agency of a glamorous woman in Robski’s novels
is inseparable from the concept of commodity. This connection is
twofold. First, Robski’s heroine is a valuable commodity herself,
by virtue of the glamour qualifications that make her unattainable
to men of modest means. Her youth, looks, and desirability, but
more importantly her lifestyle, clothing, cars, jewelry, etc., are the
means which establish her in this role. It does not matter that these
items can add up to only a simulacrum of actual success: as was
mentioned earlier, glamour is focused in principle on the surface
rather than the substance, and thus willingly accepts a “member”
based on appearance alone—dress is indeed the calling card (po
16
This play was popularized among the “last Soviet generation” by El’dar Riazanov’s
film The Cruel Romance (1984).
odezhke). (This, by the way, explains why clothing and their brand
names are so important for post-Soviet culture—in the realm of
glamour, clothes are not just for wearing, instead possessing an
emphatically symbolic function: they signify their owners’ social
status, which is in turn is inseparable from their wealth and power.)
Second, upon becoming the valued property of a happy husband
(or lover), Robski’s woman acquires access to a magic wand (no
double entendre intended) that allows her to purchase even more
glamorous items and services, thus increasing her own value and
enhancing the glamorous enchantment of her being. In other words,
Robski’s narratives trace female upward mobility. In this upward
movement authentic youth, looks, and an aura of desirability are
translated into glamour values (expensive clothes, social contacts,
and, most importantly, a sense, however false, of exclusivity). Only
through these glamorous effects can a woman attain “substance,”
i.e. actual wealth and power, although almost inevitably she does
this through association with a rich and powerful man. Indeed,
“in the 1990s glamour became a social and cultural lubricant on
a unprecedented scale.”17[…]
Gundle argues that “glamour contained the promise of
a mobile and commercial society, in which anyone could be
transformed into a better, more attractive, and wealthier version
of themselves […] The dreams of consumers included, of course,
fantasies of social promotion and of self-aggrandizement.”18 These
cultural functions of glamour are indeed similar to the social and
economic expectations of the anti-communist revolution of the
early nineties, a.k.a. Perestroika. It is quite ironic that a full-fledged
culture of glamour developed in Russia when the democratic vector
of Perestroika had been replaced by the neo-traditionalist and
restoration tendencies characteristic of Putin’s period (certainly,
the general growth of living standards has had its influence on
the development of glamour too). One may even maintain that the
exponential proliferation of glamour in Russian culture of the 2000s
17
Gundle. Glamour: A History, 352.
18
Ibid., 7.
appears as a substitute for the decreasing social mobility within

Russian society.
In this context, Robski’s success does more than exemplify the
role of glamour in the culture of the 2000s. A close reading of her
novels reveals the simulative character of glamour as the means
of social mobility. In other words, if Perestroika and the following
tumultuous decade offered real, although risky, possibilities for
upward movement in the social structure for women and men alike,
in the 2000s the glamour in Robski’s novels and elsewhere operates as
a simulacrum of this facet—returning to the etymological meaning
of the word “glamour” as magically delusive or alluring charm. As
we can see, glamour in Robski’s works imitates democratic values
by intertwining cheap products with catalogues of exclusive things
and services that, in turn, serve as substitutes for personalities and
identities. At the same time, it seemingly encourages women’s
ambition for upward movement in the social hierarchy—another
liberal value—but only as to secure their (self)objectification and
dependence on rich and powerful men. Whether Robski is cynical or
sincere in her powerful simulation is a moot point. It is obvious that
her writings resonate with mass consumers’ political appetites of
a peculiar kind. She herself formulates the demand for glamour (and
her own books as a part of this culture), as the following: “If you do
not have any other ideology [than the ideology of consumption],
then glamour will become your beacon.”19
19
[No author], “Shalost’—zhizn’ mne, imia—shalost’,” www.robski.ru/ http://www.
robski.ru/pressa/, last consulted September 21, 2008.
Part 2
“L i t t l e Te r ror”
a n d Tr au m at ic Wr i t i ng
148 Part 2. “Little Terror” and Traumatic Writing
The state of the “post” in “post-Soviet” has lasted for twenty years,
and may go on to last even longer. This reflects the peculiar state that
has characterized Russian culture since the end of Perestroika. The
sense of nostalgia for the Soviet period and the new reconstructions
and re-mythologizations of the Soviet past have become defining
features of the post-Soviet era. This chapter considers possible
responses to this phenomenon.
The anthropological approach is represented by an excerpt
from Serguei Oushakine’s article on “post-Soviet symbolic aphasia.”
Oushakine argues that aphasia, the loss of the ability to express or
understand speech, is an apt metaphor for the absence of a new
symbolic language adequate to the post-Soviet condition. His
analysis centers on a “feeling of being lost ‘between’ the ‘old Soviet’
and the ‘new Russian,’ this feeling of being stripped of anything that
could possibly reveal one’s symbolic belongingness, this feeling of
a profound symbolic lack” that is responsible for the “permanence
of transition” that has become characteristic of post-Soviet culture.
The post-traumatic approach to post-Soviet culture is also
explored in Alexander Etkind’s article “Stories of the Undead in
the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary
Russian Fiction” (also included as a chapter in his book Warped
Mourning).1 Employing Freud’s concepts of melancholia and
1
See Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the
Unburied (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 220-42.
mourning, which illustrate the inability of the subject to dissociate

itself from the lost object, Etkind views post-Soviet literature as
a response to historical traumas. The traumas of the Soviet past,
as well as the traumatic collapse of the Soviet world, still remain
unarticulated and repressed. In Etkind’s interpretation, repressed
traumas return in the form of the uncanny, generating a new mode
of writing that he terms “magic historicism”:
[In this literature], the past is perceived not just as “another

country” but as an exotic and unexplored one, still pregnant
with unborn alternatives and imminent miracles. […] Possessed
by the ghostly past and unable to withdraw from its repetitive
contemplation, post-Soviet writers find themselves trapped in a
state of melancholia. […] The inability to differentiate oneself from
the lost object prevents the individual from living in the present,
from love and work. On the political level, the reverse is probably
equally important: when there is no choice in the present, the
historical past unfolds into an overwhelming narrative that
obscures the present rather than explaining it.
Violence as universal language. The association of symbolic

aphasia with the post-traumatic condition. Everyday acts of
violence, or the “little terror” (to use Tatyana Tolstaya’s catchphrase)2
as a non-ideological “war of everyone against everybody.” These
structures characterize relationships of authority and submission on
a “horizontal level,” distinct from hierarchies in which those who
occupy formal positions of power abuse those beneath them. In a state
of symbolic aphasia, the only “language” that acquires the function
of a universally comprehensible discourse is the “language” of
violence, being as it is a product of shared traumatic experience. It is
most acutely observed in the social practices of criminal subcultures,
hazing rituals in the military, discourses of popular xenophobia and
racism, and the communal reprisal of the collective against its own
members, that is, the creation of social scapegoats. The arbitrariness
in post-Soviet definitions of the Other—the target of violence who
2
See Tatyana Tolstaya, “The Great Terror and the Little Terror,” in her Pushkin’s Children:
Writing on Russia and Russians, trans. Jamie Gambrell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2003), 14-26.
is now, unlike in the Soviet period, defined variously and in relation

to shifting social situations—transforms this type of violence into
a form of social communication, a discourse which is destructive
and self-destructive at the same time.
Literary texts included in this section address various aspects
of communication through violence. The popular playwright
Evgeny Grishkovets writes of systematic violence in the military.
For Grishkovets, who served in the navy, violence in the military
is the epitome of the post-Soviet political system’s devaluation of
individual human life. The playwright examines from the inside the
devastating effect that violence had on his psyche: it deformed the
very concepts of the self, of the home, and of the meaning of life.
(We also recommend that one of Anna Politkovskaya’s essays be
read along with Grishkovets’s piece.3) The Conceptualist poet Lev
Rubinshtein, in his essay “The Smoke of the Fatherland,” reveals
the violence concealed inside everyday discourses of nostalgia,
while Elena Fanailova, in her poem “Again, they are off for their
Afghanistan” and her commentary to it, demonstrates how the
violent and traumatic experience of the past transforms into a self-
righteous sense of identity. The identity that emerges is deformed
and scarred, but nevertheless nostalgically preserved by the poem’s
characters.
Fanailova’s poem “Lena and People,” scenes from the
Presnyakov Brothers’ play Terrorism, and poems by Andrei Rodionov
lay bare the very mechanism of communication through violence.
What unites these diverse texts is the concept of “negative identity.”
As defined by the sociologist Lev Gudkov, “negative identity” is:
[T]he self-constitution by contradiction, from another significant

subject or concept but expressed in the form of denying
some qualities or values of its carrier as another’s, disgusting,
frightening, menacing, personifying everything that is
unacceptable for members of the group or community; in short,
as an antipode [...]. Thanks to such an idea there arises the border
3
See, for instance, Anna Politkovskaya, “My Country’s Army and Its Mothers,” in her
Putin’s Russia: Life In A Failing Democracy, trans. Arch Tait (New York: Owl Books,
2007) 1-24.
between one’s own and another’s, allowing to support only the

rules of behavior inside the group (tribal ethics), while other
norms of behavior outside the group serve to establish a social
distance between ours and others as an elementary basis of social
morphology.4
In all these texts, the subject asserts itself by defining the other
as the enemy, the necessary target of violence, whether rhetorical,
psychological, or physical. Because this process is highly contingent,
a perpetuator of violence in one situation can become a scapegoat
in another. Nobody is safe, and everybody eventually becomes
a perpetrator or victim. As a result, society engages in everyday
mutual violence, the status quo of the post-Soviet social world.
4
Lev Gudkov, Negativnaia identichnost’ [Negative Identity] (Moscow: NLO, 2004),
271-72.
E xcer pts from
“I n the S tateP ost-S ov iet A pha si a : S y mbolic
of
Dev elopment in C ontempor a ry Russi a”
Serguei Oushakine
[…] In the text that follows I want to suggest a different approach

to what seems to be a problematic relation between the post-Soviet
language, or rather, post-Soviet discourse, and the post-Soviet
(transitional) speaker. I argue that the inability of the young post-
Soviet subjects to assume a certain subject-position and to perform
a certain subject-function within the dysfunctional discursive field
results not so much in speechlessness and/or silence but rather in
activation of different, substitutive modes of signification that have
been formed and shaped to a large degree by the previous cultural
period. By developing the concept of the post-Soviet aphasia, I want to
examine a particular case of discursive production of (post-Soviet)
subjectivity in a situation wherein the very discursive field is going
through a period of serious structural (e.g., semantic, syntactic,
stylistic, etc.) changes. By tracing various discursive and cultural
regressions and substitutions in the texts of my respondents, I want
to answer the following questions: Does the post-Soviet discursive
change have any internal logic, that is, an internal structure? How
is the socio-cultural transformation of the discursive field reflected
in individual discursive practices? And finally, what could be
said about the subject who is to embody this transformational (or
transforming?) discourse?
Before I go into a discussion of the state of post-Soviet aphasia,
a short terminological explanation is in order. For a long time,
“aphasia” was understood as a speech disorder (literally, “inability
Serguei Oushakine. “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia” 153
to speak,” in Greek) caused by physiological reasons, more precisely

by a certain type of brain damage.1 There are, however, other,
non-physiological traditions in studies of aphasia. One of them,
for example, is represented by Ernst Cassirer’s phenomenological
philosophy of symbolic forms, in which “the theory of aphasia took
a definite direction, leading toward the universal problem of the
symbol”2 and representation, toward the problem of the individual
perception and consciousness.3 Along with the phenomenological
approach, the structural study of aphasia initiated in the early
1940s by the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson has allowed yet
another totally non-physiological understanding of this type of
linguistic behavior. In this article I will also approach aphasia as
a phenomenon whose logic can help to understand the peculiarity
of intersection of the individual’s ability to speak and society’s
ability to provide a language with which to speak. Following a long-
established tradition of phenomenological and structural analysis,
I will use the concept of aphasia to interpret the “pathology” of the
“symbolic”4 and “verbal consciousness”5 rather than a pathology
of brains.
1
It was Paul Broca (1824–80), a French anthropologist and surgeon, the founder
of La Revue d’Anthropologie and of the Anthropological Society of Paris, who
in 1861 presented a paper to the Société d’Anthropologie in which, based on
post mortem medical analysis and clinical observation, he demonstrated that
a severe loss of speech correlates with lesions in the middle part of the frontal
lobe of the left cerebral hemisphere (see John Forrester, Language and the Origin
of Psychoanalysis [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980], 15.) Thanks to
Broca’s discovery, the problem of speech disorder—aphasia—was for a long time
firmly connected with the problem of brain lesion. Or, in different language, the
lack of expression /understanding was displaced onto the issue of localization of
physiological damage. For more discussion see, e.g., Alexander Luria, Traumatic
Aphasia: Its Syndromes, Psychology and Treatment (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 17–26.
2
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Three: The Phenomenology
of Knowledge, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 215.
3
Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 202.
4
Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 205.
5
Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. L. Matejka & I.R. Titunik
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998 [1929]), 15.
In the “structural” understanding of aphasia, according to

Jakobson, two interconnected processes are of pivotal importance:
they are the processes of “regression and disintegration” of
individual speech.6 I want to extend Jakobson’s rather individualistic
treatment of aphasia to a collective discursive behavior and use
the term “post-Soviet aphasia” to describe a manifestation of (1)
regression to symbolic forms of the previous historical period that
has been caused by (2) the society’s disintegrated ability to find proper
verbal signifiers for the signifieds of the new sociopolitical regime.
Aphasia, then, will be construed here as a double phenomenon that
makes apparent discursive “losses and compensations.”7 On the
one hand, the term will indicate what Jakobson called the “frozen”
beginning stage,8 a state of lacking, at which the already formed
desire to communicate is not yet complemented by the ability to
communicate something. From that point of view, aphasia denotes
the inability of the post-Soviet subject to use language creatively.
On the other hand, like Jakobson, I also understand aphasia as
a compensatory type of discursive behavior, in which lack of a new
creative symbolic production (“disorder of output”) is to be filled
by complex patterns of usage of the symbolic forms acquired during
the previous stages of individual and societal development.
The Loss of Transition

When replying to my questions about their own social identity, the
majority of the students chose to identify themselves as post-Soviet.
But what exactly does this position imply? The following responses
were typical:
The post-Soviet man and post-Soviet woman? These are us—the

ones who happened to catch the demise of the Soviet Union and
6
Roman Jakobson, Studies on Child Language and Aphasia (The Hague: Mouton,
1971), 13.
7
Jakobson, Studies on Child Language …, 31.
8
Jakobson, Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals (The Hague:
Mouton, 1968), 15.
who live now in a Russia not yet settled down (neustanovlenoi).

(f-17)9
Post-Soviet person—I guess that’s me, for I cannot describe myself

either as Soviet or as a new Russian. (f-17)
Post-Soviet people—the ones who have not become new Russians

but who are not Soviet anymore. They are the main part of the
Russian population—dreaming about old times while knowing
that there would be no return of the past. (m-17)
With some rare exceptions, what all these comments indicate is

a certain feeling of being caught in-between: between two classes
(poor/rich), between two times (past/future), between two systems
(Soviet/non-Soviet). Certainly, this feeling of being on the borderline
could be interpreted as the students’ reflection and projection of
their own marginal structural location—between the family of their
parents and their own family, between school and future job, between
a situation of financial and social dependence and (anticipated )
economic and social autonomy.
The interesting thing, though, is that neither of the poles that
defined the young people’s frames of reference—be it the “Soviet”
or the “new Russian”—functions in the essays as a site of possible
identification. Instead, they act precisely in a framing, constraining
manner, being perceived by the young people rather negatively.
The post-Soviet threshold, the post-Soviet transitionality and in-
betweenness, thus has a peculiar nature—it does not provide any cues
about the direction to follow, it does not channel one’s identificatory
process;10 instead it outlines the paths that should not be taken. For
9
To indicate the gender of my respondents I will use M and F for male and female
respectively; the number indicates the age of the respondent. Since all my
respondents were either senior high school students (starsheklassniki) or first and
second-year students at local universities, for the sake of brevity I will use the term
“students” when referring to them all.
10
In her study of self-identification of Rossiyane, the Russian scholar Natal’ ia
Tikhonova points to a similar tendency: the young post-Soviet generation typically
does not choose new models of civic self-identification instead of the old ones, but
example, a female student describes the two alternatives known to

her in the following way:
A Soviet man? He wears the same shirt all year around, [is]
unshakable in his opinion and decisions (and he has the ground
for that—“the party’s directives”…). Woman for him is seldom of
secondary importance: it is good if she occupies tenth place on his
list of priorities.
A Soviet woman? Despite her own wishes and desires, her
family is always overshadowed by her job problems. Work
always comes first. Plus all the financial problems of family life.
In her early 30s she is already talking about men in this manner:
“… those guys…, what could you expect from them….” In other
words—these are largely unhappy people with an abnormal
(unnatural) life style.
A New Russian man? Those who have a business bent are
happy today, but what about all the others?... New Russian man
is a man of will, who needs nobody. He is also unhappy…. The
New Russian man is a parody of an “average American” from
a cheap Western movie. (f-18)
A male student gives a similar, although less “personalized,”

account of the alternatives, neither of which is attractive:
The Soviet Union—the leadership cheated the simple-hearted

Russian man with his ideals of universal justice and his readiness
to die for them.
The new Russia? Everyone wants to get as much as possible;
everyone thinks: “I can keep stealing until I am caught”—and
thus our Russian society is falling apart. (m-17)
Yet another student, having described the Soviet past and the new
Russian present, demonstrates a typical situation of not being
willing to identify herself with any of the categories available:
Soviet man and woman? They had faith in communism, they were
fixed on it, and on their work. Women were lacking in femininity.
rather tends to refuse any type of civic self-identification altogether. See Natal’ ia
Tikhonova, “Samoidentifikatsiia rossiian i ee dinamika,” Obshchestvennye nauki i
sovremennost’ 4 (1999): 11.
Men were sort of bossy, with brief-cases. At first glance they

looked totally innocent but were corrupt and rotten inside.
The new Russian men? These are the hard-core bold guys
with golden neck-chains, crosses, and huge bellies. They are
not especially famous for their intellectual abilities but they are
certainly good at counting money. They are way too far from
being perfect. They spend money easily for it was not hard for
them to get it. The new Russian women are slightly better, but not
by much. The new Russians look down upon ordinary people,
but at the same time they are effective and business-minded
persons.
I cannot relate myself either to the new Russians, or to the
post-Soviet, or to the Soviet. I believe my friends and I belong to
a new generation that would be able to change life for the better.
At least this is what I hope for. (f-17)
There is an interesting tendency in the way the students symbolically

map their picture of Russian society. Despite their temporal and
even spatial proximity, the line that connects the “old Soviet” and
the “new Russian” with the post-Soviet seems to have a rather
complicated configuration. The extremes—the old Soviet/the new
Russian—cannot be easily and straightforwardly connected. The
extremes are not on the same continuum; nor do they indicate the
trajectory of development. The post-Soviet person is not the new
Russian’s embryo, nor is s/he an overdeveloped version of the Soviet
one. Instead, as one student puts it,
a post-Soviet person is one who is lost in this world, one who tries
to find his self and who, despite the constant failure to accomplish
this, has not lost his faith. Because this faith is the only thing he
has; he is totally naked—spiritually, materially, and nationally.
(m-17)
I think it is precisely this feeling of being lost “between” the “old

Soviet” and the “new Russian,” this feeling of being stripped of any
thing that could possibly reveal one’s symbolic belongingness, this
feeling of a profound symbolic lack, that forces young people to
metonymically bridge the “Soviet” to the “new Russian.” As I shall
show, these extremes—epitomized by the “faithful communist”
and the “self-indulgent new Russian”—function as the aphasic
substitutes called upon to designate and circumscribe the empty

space of the post-Soviet subject in/of transition. Before I try to
outline the structural and cultural reasons for this transitional
“loss” of the post-Soviet subject, I want to quote yet another, albeit
less personalized, example.
On March 11, 1999, a Moscow newspaper reported that the
lower house of the Russian parliament—the Duma—had approved
a draft of the law “On the State Anthem of the Russian Federation.”
The draft proposes to use as the anthem of today’s Russia the music
of the Soviet Union’s anthem written in the 1940s. As the newspaper
reminded us, this move by the Duma challenged the decision
made in 1990 by the Duma’s predecessor, the Supreme Soviet of
the Russian Soviet Federation. In 1990, the Supreme Soviet chose
to use as the anthem of the “independent” Russia the music of the
“Patriotic Song” written by Mikhail Glinka in the early 1830s.
The 1990 decision, however, did not solve one essential
problem with the anthem’s text: the lyrics of the “Patriotic Song,”
glorifying the Russian Emperor and the Russian people, were
utterly inappropriate in the contemporary situation. As a result of
this political—or, rather, textual—inapplicability, coupled with the
inability to create a new text, until now11 the ‘Patriotic song’—to
quote the title of the famous Russian New Year TV-show, the “Old
Song About the Most Important”—has been performed during
official ceremonies without words.
The newspaper indicated that a specially created committee of
the Duma had come to the conclusion that it would be impossible
to produce a text that would match Glinka’s music. This forced the
deputies to take a drastic step and—as Elena Mizulina, a member of
the Duma from the Yabloko party, put it—to replace a melody which
is “difficult even for simple reproduction” with the less convoluted
and more familiar melody of the Soviet anthem, whose lyrics are
also yet to be re-written.
11
“Patriotic Song” was used in lieu of the national anthem until 2000, when it was
replaced by the former Soviet anthem (music by Aleksandr Aleksandrov) with
revised lyrics by Sergei Mikhalkov (also the author of previous versions of the
Soviet anthem).—Eds.
The paper also quoted Vasily Shandybin, a deputy representing

the Communist Party, as saying “all the working people and the
working class are impatiently looking forward to the situation
when Russia will finally acquire its new [i.e. the Soviet] anthem,”
for “we were born with the words of this anthem and we shall die
with them.” “There is no reason to hurry to die,” the newspaper
comments sarcastically, “for there are no words so far” to die with.12
I find these two examples—the wordless post-Soviet/Soviet
anthem and the students’ inability to find a proper symbol, a proper
signifier to represent their “post-Soviet” location—very similar in
origin. It seems to me that, besides a clear lack of creativity, these
examples reflect a more fundamental tendency of an individual
and collective inability either to put into words normative ideals
and desired goals of the post-communist period or to express the
changes that have already happened in Russia.
Despite (or maybe because of) the politics of glasnost’, the gaps
that during the communist time separated one’s words from one’s
thoughts and one’s actions so well have not become any narrower.
Instead, as Andrei Sinyavsky, a prominent Soviet dissident,
pointed out shortly before his death, there has been “an incredible
devaluation … of words” in Russia.13 There is, as Vladimir Kolesov,
a historian of Russian language, indicated recently, an obvious
tendency in individual and public discourses towards a “deformed
speech” manifested by a predominance of “vague and unclear …
discourse.” “Have our language skills become worse,” asks the
linguist, “or is it our language itself that rejects us as its ‘carriers’?”14
As if they had exhausted their former political appeal during
the period of glasnost’, words in post-Soviet Russia somehow
became meaningless, that is, both unable to manifest content and
12
Dar’ia Korsunskaia, “S gimnom vas, dorogie tovarishchi!,” Vremia MN, 11 March
1999.
13
Andrei Sinyavsky, The Russian Intelligentsia, trans. Lynn Visson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997), 75.
14
Vladimir Kolesov, Russkaia rech’: vchera, segodnia, zavtra (St. Petersburg: IUNA,
1998), 210.
unnecessary for this purpose. Thus the anthem remains without

words, and the discussion—also symptomatically—is reduced to
choosing among already-existing melodies; the lack of “new words”
is covered up by the old (musical) symbols.
I believe this dominant logic of the post-Soviet “deformed
speech” in contemporary Russia is not unlike the logic of expressive
aphasia elaborated by Jakobson. It seems to me that the “state of
post-Soviet aphasia” can usefully describe a current situation in
Russia that is characterised by a profound difficulty in bringing
together a “world of words” with a “world of things,” a difficulty in
mastering, managing the social world—even if only on the level of
language. The main questions, certainly, are: What are the reasons?
and What are the consequences of this post-Soviet aphasia? In the
rest of the article I outline the linguistic characteristics of this post-
Soviet asymbolia and then offer my interpretations of political and
personal implications of it.
Chained Signifiers
As the example of the “new” old Russian anthem suggests, there is
an obvious difficulty in society with finding an adequate signifier
to symbolically envelop the new historical period.15 And yet, as the
example indicates, the difficulty might result in speechlessness,
in the absence of a new, i.e. post-Soviet text, but not in silence. In
that respect, a conclusion drawn more than a hundred years ago
by Hughlings Jackson, one of the pioneers of studies of aphasia,
15
Zinaida Sikevich, a sociologist from St. Petersburg, in her study of popular symbolic
representation of past and present, has pointed out that the current situation does
not provide people with any “basic” sign that could have epitomized the changes:
“… if in the respondents ’ view about the past it was the [Communist] party that
cemented with its activity all events of public and private life, then the current
situation in Russia is more chaotic and internally contradicting : is it at all accidental
that among the first four most frequent symbols are two ‘positive’ (freedom and
democracy) and two ‘negative ’ (unemployment and the Chechen conflict)?” See
Zinaida Sikevich, “‘Obraz’ proshlogo i nastoiashchego v simvolicheskom soznanii
rossiian,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 1 (1999): 88.
is still valid: “Speechlessness does not mean entire wordlessness.”16

Rather, it means a change in the pattern of communication.17
And this is a point I want to stress: the post-Soviet “disorder” of
“symbolic formulation and expression,”18 while ostensibly lacking
in new signifiers, manifests itself through an elaborate and intensive
usage of “languages” of the previous, that is, the Soviet, period. The
usual attempt to find a new expressive style, able to distinctively
reflect changes of the period, was supplanted by what appears to
be a “nostalgic” aesthetical and rhetorical regression. Contrary to
some recent studies that construe “the post-communist political
and intellectual world” as a “battlefield between different, often
incompatible myths” that are “able to inspire collective loyalties,
affinities, passions, and actions,”19 I argue that the situation is the
reverse, at least when it comes to Russia. Instead of being involved
in production of new mythical narratives able to encompass the
ongoing changes and to embrace individuals in a collective entity,
both public discourse and individual speech in post-Soviet Russia
demonstrate a different dynamic. Mythologization of the narratives
of the recent past has a somewhat parasitic (“nostalgic”) nature
here. It is not the morphology of the narrative that gets “corrected” or
“improved,” as usually happens during the process of “inventing”
histories and traditions. On the surface, the structure of the “sacred”
texts remains largely the same. What is being changed, though, is
the context of the texts’ existence and origin, the texts’ etymology.20 It
is in this de-contextualisation, in this dissociation of a cultural text
16
As quoted in Jakobson, Studies on Child Language …, 63.
17
See Jakobson, Studies on Child Language …, 63.
18
Henry Head, Aphasia and Kindred Disorders of Speech, vols. 1–2 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1926), vol. 1, 211–212.
19
Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in
Post-Communist Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 15 (emphasis
mine).
20
See, for example, Michael Urban’s discussion of Igor Chubais’s attempt to devise
his own model of the Russian national idea: Michael Urban, “Remythologising the
Russian State,” Europe-Asia Studies 50, no. 6 (1998): 976.
from the place of its origin, in this dissolution of a binding effect

of the Soviet meta-language, that the “post-Soviet aphasia” makes
itself apparent.
[…] Without distinctively articulated social and personal
landmarks to signal the direction(s) of the transition and with quickly
vanishing, even if only ideological, perspectives, how can the post-
Soviet changes be visualized and personally appropriated? What
could function in this case as an object of positive identification?
In other words, what does fill the post-Soviet symbolic void, then?
Culture of Symbolic Shortages

Given the regressive logic of the state of aphasia, it is hardly
surprising that the post-Soviet cultural development in Russia
has become closely associated with “longing for the past,” as
a student put it, with a profound cultural nostalgia. It is an outbreak
of “no(w)stalgia,”21 an “epidemic of nostalgia,” as it was defined
recently,22 that frames the post-Soviet symbolic landscape in the late
1990s.23 Inability to articulate a new language adequate to a new
period, coupled with a loss of the “enframing” meta-language, has
been compensated for by stylistic regression to the language of the
preceding period.24
21
Natal’ia Ivanova, “Nostal’iashchee: retro na (post)sovetskom teleekrane,” Znamya 9
(1997): 204–211. For an English version of this article see Natalya Ivanova, “No(w)
stalgia: Retro on the (post) Soviet Screen,” The Harriman Review 12, no.s 2–3 (Winter
1999/2000): 25–32.
22
Ivanova, “Nostal’iashchee …”, 205.
23
See also Mason and Sidorenko-Stephenson , “Public Opinion …”; Michael Urban,
“Stages of Political Identity Formation in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” in
Identities in Transition: Eastern Europe and Russia After the Collapse of Communism,
ed. Victoria E. Bonnell (Berkeley: Slavic and East European Center, University
of California, 1996), 140–154; Elena Bashkirova and Iurii Fedorov, “Labirinty
posttotalitarnogo soznaniia,” Pro et Contra 4, no. 2 (1999): 142.
24
Marilyn Ivy observes a structurally similar tendency in contemporary Japan, where
“nostalgia as style” aims at the third post-war generation. As she puts it, “the use of
1920s typography and design or the actual reproduction of period pieces evokes,
however, not a historical period but a free-floating past. Stripped of any tangible
Certainly, to reduce the problem of cultural “no(w)stalgia’

exclusively to the individual incapacity to creatively use available
symbolic means would be an exaggeration. Besides the transitional
location of the post-Soviet subject there must be structural reasons
within the symbolic field itself that not only provoke the aphasic
regression to the previous cultural styles but also prevent the new
symbolic styles from emerging. As I have argued elsewhere,25 the
most significant of these reasons is the absence of what, following
Pierre Bourdieu, can be defined as the field of post-Soviet cultural
production. That is to say, the absence of the field in which post-
communist economic and political dispositions of the social
actors could find adequate symbolic, cultural equivalents.26 Such
a structural underdevelopment (or even absence) of “post-Soviet
cultural industry”—connected with but not limited by the unstable
structural location of the post-Soviet political and cultural elite
and thus the hierarchy of cultural tastes—is compensated for by
a relatively developed field of post-Soviet cultural consumption,
with quantity as its main indicator.
The thesis about the absent (or underdeveloped) field of
post-Soviet symbolic production has certain consequences. One
is a methodological shift to questioning the structure of symbolic
consumption rather than its content. Or, to put it differently,
instead of determining and delineating the (inherent) meaning
of this or that symbol, the purpose of such an analysis is to try to
understand how/why one’s attachment to (or investment in) certain
cultural symbols has become possible and how this attachment
is sustained. Instead of the structure of the institutions that define
historical context, these cited moments of style operate as novel elements in the
image repertoire of hip Japan” (Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity,
Phantasm, Japan [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 56).
25
See my article ‘Kolichestvo stilia: voobrazhaemoe potreblenie v usloviiakh
simvolicheskogo Defitsita’, Sotsiologicheskii zhurnal, 1999, 3/4. See also Serguei
Oushakine, ‘The Quantity of Style: Imaginary Consumption in the New Russia’,
Theory, Culture, and Society (17, 5, 2000).
26
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York, Columbia University
Press, 1993).
and determine forms of cultural consumption, it is the structure

of the individual that occupies the primary analytical place. Let me
pause here.
As some scholars point out, the culturally un-operationalized
condition of the post-Soviet realm is reflected most vividly in the
absence of “mediating structures of political life,”27 in the lack
of “a political matrix within which competing identities can find
mooring.”28 Naturally enough, this fundamental lack of mediating
structures that makes it hard for the individual to assume a certain
subject position vis-á-vis social changes brings with it the problem
of subjectivity, the problem of one’s self-localization and self-
description in regard to the processes that have yet to be loaded
with graspable meaning. To put it differently, the lack of mediating
structures coincides with the lack of “tools” with which to
understand the transformation. Without such tools, neither changes
themselves nor one’s relation to them can become meaningful.
Notice how absence of the code with which to “dissect” the knots
of reality produces a state of hermeneutic paralysis: “To describe
the new Russia? It is a country whose future is unclear,” writes
a 17-year-old student, “whose present is foggy and contradictory
(but I hope for the best)” (m–17).
The main aspect of this paralysis, however, is not merely symbolic
but has a lot to do with the role of symbolic mechanisms in the
production of subjectivity and agency, in mapping out one’s field
of possibilities and trajectories. Hence the post-Soviet asymbolia
correlates with the post-Soviet anomie: the loss of words with the
loss of self. For example, when asked to describe his own position,
a male student wrote: “Where am I? I cannot associate myself with
any of the categories—be it “Soviet” or the “New Russian…” (m–21).
Another one puts it somewhat more resolutely: “I am not a new
Russian. But I have no idea of who I am” (m–20). Yet another one,
describing his attitude to the changes, phrased it this way: “My
27
Richard Sakwa, “Subjectivity, Politics and Order in Russian Evolution,” Slavic Review
54, no. 4 (1995): 964.
28
Urban, “The Politics of Identity,” 737.
attitude to the changes is negative, and I do not see any place for
myself there” (m–15).
Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery in their recent
discussion of studies of (post-communist) transition indicate that,
while focusing on the process of evolution of the macro institutions
in the post-communist world, transitologists remain largely blind in
regard to the micro processes and micro transformations.29 Earlier,
Richard Sakwa, demonstrating the same logic, went as far as to
claim that “the transition from communism … entails the rediscovery
of ‘subjectivity’ in the social polity.”30 In the remaining part of this
article, in my analysis of the post-Soviet aphasia, I attempt to bring
together the micro and macro levels of the transition by looking at
reflections of social changes in individual language. In order to do
this, I want to re-visit two major theoretical concepts of transitional
development: Victor Turner’s “liminal stage” and Donald
Winnicott’s “transitional object.” In spite of their different origins,
I think the two concepts describe essentially the same phenomenon
of profound transformation of the individual and/or society passing
from one structurally defined location to another. While Turner
emphasizes the societal, collective aspects of a transformation,
Winnicott focuses on the individual side of this process. Both
authors, however, are instrumental for understanding the logic of
symbolic activity typical for the transitional/transformational stage
in contemporary Russia.
29
Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, “Introduction,” in their Uncertain
Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (New York: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1999).
30
Sakwa, “Subjectivity, Politics and Order,” 965 (emphasis mine).
Permanence of Transition
Following Arnold van Gennep,31 Turner32 develops a concept

of “liminality” and “liminal personae” or “threshold people.”33
Studying rites of passage, that is, “rites which accompany every
change of place, state, social position and age,”34 van Gennep
indicates that this “transition” from one state/status to another,
reflected in the rites, consists of three phases: “separation, margin
(or limen, signifying ‘threshold’ in Latin), and aggregation.”35 The
first stage of separation consists of symbolic behavior signifying
the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier
fixed point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions
(a “state”), or from both.
During the intervening “liminal” period, the characteristics
of the ritual subject (the “Passenger”) are ambiguous; he passes
through a cultural realm that has few or no attributes of the past or
coming state. In the third phase (reaggregation or reincorporation),
the passage is consummated. The ritual subject, individual or
corporate, is in a relatively stable state once more. […]
This anthropologically grounded three-stage explanation of
the rites of passage might be useful for grasping the logic of the
transition through which Russian society as a whole and people
in Russia as individuals are going. It needs, however, a crucial
amendment.
Turner’s “liminal entities” which are located “neither here nor
there;… [being] betwixt and between the positions assigned and
arrayed by law, customs, convention, and ceremonial,”36 are precisely
31
Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L.
Caffee (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1909).
32
Turner, The Ritual Process.
33
Ibid., 95.
34
Van Gennep as quoted in Ibid., 94.
35
Ibid., 94.
36
Ibid., 95.
transitional. In other words, liminality here has a metonymic,

sequential nature; it is framed by a clear understanding of the point
of departure and a clear picture of the point of arrival. The purpose
of the liminal stage, then, is to provide the individual/group with
a spatial and temporal location in which to become ready to learn the
objectives of the new status. Hence, the positive, i.e. meaningful,
effect of the liminal stage is a result of a double negation, as it were:
negation of the structural constraints that have been previously
exercised upon the person in transition and negation of (or freedom
from) the limits that the anticipated state will bring with it.
At first glance, Turner’s liminal stage conceptually coincides
with the main thesis of studies of transition. That is, liminality here
is a structurally necessary temporal period, a period of “growing
a new skin,” as Katherine Verdery37 puts it. The question is, what
happens during the liminal stage in a situation when structural
configurations of the arrival point are not clear, as is the case in
Russia? Moreover, if the major goal of the liminal stage, as Turner
puts it, is to provide individuals with “myths, symbols, rituals,
philosophical systems, and works of art,”38 i.e., with symbolic tools
capable of rendering happening changes meaningful, then how
could the very absence of the post-Soviet field of cultural production
modify both the notion of transition and the notion of liminality?
As I have already indicated, in the absence of one of the opposites
(the point of arrival), the post-Soviet stage of cultural liminality
manifests itself as a twofold phenomenon. On the level of the signifier
it is expressed as an extensive subversion and re-production of
the previous symbolic structure (“the epidemic of nostalgia”), while
on the level of the signified the liminal stage works through various
mechanisms of personal investments and attachments, latent rather
37
Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996), 229.
38
I.e., ”with a set of templates or models which are, at one level, periodical
reclassification of reality and man’s relationship to society, nature and culture,
[while at the other,] they incite men to action as well as to thought” (Turner, The
Ritual Process, 128-129).
than manifested, associated with rather than expressed through the

signifier.
To put the same idea differently: in the absence of new cultural
forms ready to epitomize ongoing social changes, an individual—
the Passenger—faces basically two (not necessarily alternative)
choices. One of them deals with changing patterns of usage of the
old symbols; this approach can be called the “paradigm of remake.”
The other is based on changing one’s attitude to the old symbols;
this pattern of symbolic production can be labeled the “paradigm
of revival.” Both strategies, however, are aimed at keeping the
old signifier/symbol intact, while changing its signified/content/
context. Both activate the individual’s creative ability within the
rigid symbolic frames of the previous era.
[…]
Conclusion
As I have tried to show, the state of post-Soviet aphasia—with its
nostalgic regression and over-used Soviet symbols—can be seen as
a reaction to socio-cultural transformations that started happening
in Russia in the second half of the 1990s. I have suggested that one of
the most striking aspects of this discursive behavior, demonstrated in
the essays written by young Russians, was the loss of a metalanguage
and thus the loss of ability to “dissect” the metaphor of the “post-
Soviet.” This lack of knowledge about one’s own location and being,
I proposed, is closely connected with absence of the post-Soviet
field of cultural production that could have provided the post-
Soviet subject with adequate post-Soviet discursive possibilities/
signifiers. This absence of an adequate post-Soviet interpellation
capable of “naming” the subject39 undermines the very foundation
of the existing discursive field and its institutions. The “post-
Soviet” remains an empty space, a non-existence, devoid of its
subjectifying force, its own signifier, and its own meaning effect.
39
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1971), 174.
For, as Voloshinov puts it, “if experience does have meaning, if it is

susceptible to being understood and interpreted, then it must have
its existence in the material of actual, real signs … experience exists
even for the person undergoing it only in the material of signs. Outside
that material there is no experience as such.”40
The inability of young Russians to name, to identify the others
vis-á-vis themselves and thus to structure their own location, i.e.
the students’ virtual absence as subjects, manifests yet another
aspect of the lack of post-Soviet signifiers. Sign is a product of
the social, or, in Voloshinov’s terms, “signs can arise only on
interindividual territory.”41 “It is essential,” Voloshinov continues,
“that the two individuals be organized socially, that they compose
a group (a social unit); only then can the medium of signs take shape
between them.”42 When looked at from this perspective, the state
of post-Soviet aphasia with its lack of signs socially mediated and
recognized as such, I believe, can be seen as a condition in which
the “interindividual territory” has been increasingly shrinking and
where the intersubjective is more and more reduced to the inner-
subjective, or to the inner speech.43
The culture of symbolic shortages thus makes the process of
production of the post-Soviet subject very problematic. The symbolic
structure of post-Soviet society apparently fails to produce clearly
defined positions and functions with which the post-Soviet subject
could identify. Moreover, being in its embryonic state, this symbolic
structure cannot provide post-Soviet society with the necessary
mediating link, thus provoking a situation of social dispersion
and/or narcissistic withdrawal. In the absence of this mediating,
intersubjective space, I argue, the very situation of transition might
become institutionalized. Unable and unwilling to struggle with the
symbolic impenetrability of the very conditions of their being, the
potential post-Soviet subjects might find (and already have found)
40
Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 28.
41
Ibid., 12.
42
Ibid., 12.
43
Ibid., 29.
an escape in the realm of the imaginary, being constantly propped

up by the flow of nostalgic transitional objects.
One of the students wrote in her response to my questions:
The post-Soviet person is the answer to the old puzzle: “If it is

neither fish nor fowl, what is it? It is a lobster.” [It is the] same
with post-Soviet man—he does not know where he should
move—forward or backward. (f-19)
Nor, as I suggest, does the post-Soviet person have a language

to describe his/her situation. Except, maybe, for the old songs about
the most important [things]. With lyrics. Or without.
E xcer pts from
“S tor ies of the U ndea d in the L a nd of the U nbur ied :
M agic a l H istor icism
in C ontempor a ry Russi a n F iction ”
Alexander Etkind
Current Russian politics shows little regret for the millions who
perished in the Soviet terror, but post-Soviet culture has produced
unusual, maybe even perverted, forms of memory. Understanding
them depends on the idea of memory as a performative interplay of
cultural energies—memory that follows history but has a history of
its own. As Walter Benjamin put it, “Memory is not an instrument
for exploring the past but its theater…. He who seeks to approach
his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.”1
This theater of buried and exhumed memories selectively includes
knowledge of the past; but more often than not, its performances
defy rational explanation or historical precision.
Two processes converge on the stage of postcatastrophic
memory, the defamiliarization of the past and the return of the
repressed. Excavating the past buried in the present, the scholar
of a postcatastrophic culture watches memory turning into
imagination. In Russia, many authors and readers seem to share
a desire for a poetic reenactment of the catastrophic past. My
point is that this is melancholy rather than nostalgia. Melancholy,
famously counterposed against “healthy mourning” by Sigmund
1
Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans.
Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), 314. 2.
Freud, embraces the confusion between the present and the past,
the obsessive reenactment of the loss, and the cessation of the
relationship to the present. “The inhibition of the melancholic seems
puzzling to us because we cannot see what it is that is absorbing
him so entirely.”2 The dialectic of reenactment and defamiliarization
produces a rich but puzzling imagery. If we want to “understand”
postcatastrophic culture, we need to “see” what is absorbing it so
entirely.
In this article, I look at the Russian memory of the Soviet terror as
an enormous cultural formation that encompasses different media
and genres, incompatible versions of history, and various rituals
of mourning. Uncomfortably for the historian, postcatastrophic
memory often entails allegories rather than facts. “The only
pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it is a powerful
one, is allegory,” said Benjamin.3 However unrecognizable, these
allegorical images retain their dependency upon the past; but
this relationship cannot be described in those terms that Russian
cultural criticism is accustomed to. In the emerging field of Russian
memory studies, concepts are either imported from the neighboring
fields of Holocaust studies or postcolonial studies, or invented
anew. Combining these approaches, I coin the concept “magical
historicism” to define the bizarre but instructive imagery that has
evolved out of postcatastrophic, post-Soviet culture. […]
From the start, the cultural representation of the gulag has been
imbued with strange creatures. Everyone remembers the amazing
start of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, the story of a delicious
frozen monster, a prehistoric triton (a salamander in the English
translation by Thomas P. Whitney), that is devoured by the prisoners.
With the help of this triton, Solzhenitsyn presents the mission of
his great book in strikingly ambivalent words. He wishes to render
the camp not “as a nightmare to be cursed” but “as a monstrous
2
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in On Metapsychology: The Theory of
Psychoanalysis, The Pelican Freud Library, trans. James Strachey (New York: Pelican
Books, 1984), 11: 254.
3
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London:
Verso, 1998), 185.
Alexander Etkind. “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied” 173
world” to be “almost” loved; he hopes to bring this world to the

startled reader “like the bones and flesh of that salamander which is
still, incidentally, alive.” The mythological Triton has a man’s head,
a fish’s tail, and a conch shell to raise storms, as Solzhenitsyn did.
As an oceanic beast, Triton is, I would add, a distant relative of the
Leviathan.4
In 1945, Anna Akhmatova wrote a prophetic poem, “There are
three ages to memories.” With the passing of time, human memory
defamiliarizes the dead who become alien and frightening; this
third, shameful stage of memory is the bitterest.
И нет уже свидетелей событий

И не с кем плакать, не с кем вспоминать.
И медленно от нас уходят тени,
Которых мы уже не призываем,
Возврат которых был бы страшен нам…
И вот когда горчайшее приходит:
Мы сознаем, что не могли б вместить
То прошлое в границы нашей жизни,…
Что тех, кто умер, мы бы не узнали.
And there are no remaining witnesses to the events,

And no one to weep with, no one to remember with.
And slowly the shades withdraw from us,
Shades we no longer call back,
Whose return would be too terrible for us…
And then it is that bitterness wells up:
We realize that we couldn’t have fit
That past into boundaries of our life…
That those who died we would not recognize.5
4
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, trans. Thomas
P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), vol.1, ix-x. The aquatic aspect of
Solzhenitsyn’s monster, which is lost in English translation, alludes to his image of
the gulag archipelago, which in turn comes from the Solovetskii archipelago.
5
Anna Akhmatova, Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 1999), 2.1:100;
Anna Akhmatova, “Northern Elegies,” The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova,
trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (Somerville, MA: Zephyr Press, 1990), 2:351.
Akhmatova predicted important lines in the development of

Russian memory: “I’d like to name them all by name, But the list
has been confiscated.… And if ever in this country They decide
to erect a monument to me.”6 Akhmatova speaks about this
monument not metaphorically (text as a monument) but literally,
as a man-made monument that would, hopefully, be erected in her
memory. She does not specify any feature of this monument but its
location: “Here,” in a Leningrad prison, Kresty. This is an essential
feature of the postcatastrophic monument: it does not have a vi-
sual concreteness, since any such concreteness would reduce the
catastrophic experience to a human routine; it memorializes the
fact and location of the catastrophe. But, as Akhmatova foresaw in
the contemporaneous Poema bez geroia, another and very different
image will accompany her memory:
И на зов этот издалека

Вдруг откликнется страшный звук—
Клокотание, стон и клекот….
…And from afar, responding to this appeal,

Come the terrible sounds—
Of gurgling, groans and screams….7
The theme of uncanny, otherworldly beasts is certainly not

unknown to Russian literature. One easily remembers zadumchivyi
vampir (a thoughtful vampire) in Evgenii Onegin, Mikhail Lermontov’s
and Mikhail Vrubel’s Demon, Nikolai Gogol’s horrifying visions,
and Aleksandr Blok’s vampirstvennyi vek (vampiric century).8
6
Akhmatova, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:29. Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem,” The Complete
Poems, 2:115; for the analysis, see Susan Amert, In a Shattered Mirror: The Later
Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 58.
7
Akhmatova, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:10, and Anna Akhmatova, “Poem without
a Hero,” The Complete Poems, 2:443. […]
8
For the classical study of gothic motives in nineteenth-century Russian literature,
see Vadim Vatsuro, Goticheskii roman v Rossii (The Gothic novel in Russia, ed.
Tamara Selezneva; Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002); see also
N. D. Tamarchenko, ed., Goticheskaia traditsiia v russkoi literature (The Gothic
Vampire stories were popular in the gulag. In Shalamov’s story

“Zaklinatel’ zmei” (Snake charmer, 1954), prisoners force a fellow
prisoner, Platonov, to entertain them with “stories.” Platonov’s
favorite was “Count Dracula,” but prisoners preferred Russian
pulp fiction.9 This is how Shalamov saw the Soviet writer: as
a snake charmer, a magician who mesmerizes the public because, if
he fails to do so, the public will beat him to death. In the twenty-first
century, the new generation of post-Soviet writers has produced
a variety of strange animals, monsters, and modified humans. Though
the fantasy of fashionable post-Soviet authors such as Pelevin,
Vladimir Sorokin, Vladimir Sharov, and Bykov seems unlimited,
their actual themes overlap. They seem to be mostly interested in
two areas of human experience—religion and history—which they
combine in rich and shocking ways. At the same time, they are not
concerned about other areas of literary interest, such as psychology
or realistic analysis of social issues. The religion that they explore
is sometimes Christian and sometimes not, but it is never Orthodox
and usually does not belong to any known organized religion or
confession. Invariably, it is saturated with noncanonical magic. The
tradition in Russian literature; Moscow: RGGU, 2008). Jimmie E. Cain, Bram Stoker
and Russophobia: Evidence of the British Fear of Russia in Dracula and the Lady of
the Shroud (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2006) demonstrates numerous Russian
allusions in central texts of the British gothic. For gothic metaphors in early Soviet
literature, see Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), and Muireann Maguire, “Soviet
Gothic-Fantastic: A Study of Gothic and Supernatural Themes in Early Soviet
Literature” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 2008). For a gothic reading of current
Russian politics, see Dina Khapaeva, Goticheskoe obshchestvo: Morfologiia koshmara
(Morphology of the nightmare; Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007); for
a similar take on the newest Russian prose, see Olga Lebedushkina, “Nasha novaia
gotika” (Our new gothic, Druzhba narodov [2008]: 11). In the European context,
a number of scholars have suggested that the gothic novel developed in response
to the terror of the French revolution; see Ronald Paulson, “Gothic Fiction and the
French Revolution,” English Literary History 48, no. 3 (1981): 532-54; Markman Ellis,
The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
9
The name of this storyteller, Andrei Fedorovich Platonov, resembles the name of
a Soviet writer whom Shalamov probably read or knew, Andrei Platonovich
Platonov. “I loved Platonov,” writes Shalamov; his tale reads like an obituary of this
author (Shalamov, Kolymskie rasskazy [Kolyma Tales], 124.
historical periods that interest these writers are less variegated and
focus, almost always, on the Soviet experience and its aftermath.
These are stories about werewolves and vampires; about sectarians
who copulate with the soil and biophilologists who clone the great
Russian writers to extract the substance of immortality (Sorokin’s
Goluboe salo [Blue Lard, 1999]); about the war between the Vikings
(Russian Nordic bureaucrats and warriors) and the Khazars
(Russian-Jewish liberals and businessmen) that unavoidably
occurs after the collapse of oil prices (Bykov’s ZhD [Living Souls]
2006); about the restoration of the monarchy, public executions,
and oprichnina (the Tsar’s death squads from the time of Ivan the
Terrible) in twenty-first century Russia (Sorokin’s Den’ oprichnika
[Day of the Oprichnik, 2006]).10 These stories have little in common
with “science fiction” even in the broadest understanding of this
term; with the exception of history, which they scrutinize in their
unique ways, these narratives are not concerned with knowledge
and technology.11 They do not belong to “popular literature,” as
experts define it. Yet these writers are successful among Russian
readers. They publish their novels with mainstream commercial
publishers, produce literary scandals, and receive national prizes.
To be sure, their commercial success depends upon the content of
their novels, which responds to the unarticulated expectations of the
10
For thoughtful readings of some of these authors, see Edith W. Clowes, Russian
Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993); Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The
Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005);
Mark N. Lipovetskii, Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)-modernistskogo diskursa v rus-
skoi kul’ture 1920-2000-kh godov (Parologies: Transformations of [post]-modern
discourse in Russian culture; Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 2008).
For a review of the latest trend in Russian fiction, which is more fearful of Russia’s
future than of its past, see Aleksandr Chantsev, “Fabrika antiutopii: Distopicheskii
diskurs v rossiiskoi literature serediny 2000-kh” (Antiutopia factory: Dystopian
discourse in Russian literature of the mid-2000s, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no.
86 [2007]).
11
For such understanding, see Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The
Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005).
audience and shapes these expectations. In recent years, “vampiric”

and “demonic” themes have also proliferated in popular culture.12
A theoretical approach to these narratives can be found in
a seemingly distant paradigm Benjamin created in his writings
on mourning plays, baroque dramas of sorrow and mystery. Like
Freud’s study of the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit), Benjamin’s
study of the play of mourning (Trauerspiel) combines factual
observations and the personal project of mourning. “The laws which
govern Trauerspiel are to be found … at the heart of mourning”; this
genre is “the description of that world which is revealed under the
gaze of a melancholy man,” wrote Benjamin.13 Like Weimar culture,
mourning plays were “haunted by the idea of the catastrophe,” but
fought against the “historical ideal of the restoration.”14 Though
mourning plays caricatured classical tragedy, they produced the
same effects, fear and pity, that Aristotle attributed to tragedy;
but they were so “offensive or even barbaric to refined taste” that
they were said to be “written by brutes for brutes.”15 Ghostly
apparitions and dream visions frequently occur in these dramas,
which substitute the tragic deus ex machina with specters who come
from the grave.16 Only as corpses can their characters “enter the
homeland of allegory,” which is the domain of the undead. If in
12
Sergei Sobolev compiled an interesting catalogue of Russian fiction of a genre
he calls “alternative history”; many of these novels have been written in the
post-Soviet decades and are “magical.” See S. V. Sobolev, Al’ternativnaia istoriia
(Alternative history; Lipetsk: Krot, 2006); see also Dmitrii Bykov, “Drugoi alternativy
u nas est’!” Vmesto zhizni (Moscow: Vagrius, 2006). Many films of the last decade,
such as Nochnoi dozor (Night Watch) by Timur Bekmambetov (2004), 4 by Vladimir
Sorokin and Ilya Khrzhanovskii (2005), and Zhivoi (Alive) by Aleksandr Veledinskii
(2006) experiment with various combinations of the occult and the political. For
a view of post-Soviet popular culture that emphasizes themes of sex and violence
rather than history and magic, see Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in
Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
13
Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 139.
14
Ibid., 66.
15
Ibid., 53.
16
Ibid., 134.
tragedy death is the “ever immanent reality,” in mourning plays

death “frequently takes the form of communal fate, as if summoning
all the participants before the highest court”; this is why mourning
plays have no end.17 For Benjamin, allegory is not mere “illustrative
technique” but “a form of expression,” sometimes the only form
that is culturally or politically available. […]
Developing these ideas, Jacques Derrida associated the ghostly
visions of contemporary culture with the idea of justice: “This being
with specters would also be … a politics of memory…. If I am
getting ready to speak at length about ghosts,… it is in the name of
justice.”18 Evidently, this idea of justice becomes relevant when the
worldly courts deny hope; in a similar way, allegories bloom when
other ways of constructing truth and memory betray the storyteller.
The baroque and expressionism are separated by centuries, but
in Benjamin’s vision, these cultural epochs shared “unremitting
artistic will,” a “characteristic feeling of dizziness,” and “a desire
for new pathos.”19 The genre of the mourning play still has a future,
Benjamin predicted.20 Today, his work on the Trauerspiel helps us
read the new Russian cultural scene through a triple allegory that
integrates different melancholic epochs—the baroque, Weimar, and
the post-Soviet.
In Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny (Marina’s thirtieth love, 1999),
Sorokin draws an ironic picture of a young Muscovite who vacillates
in her commitment to political dissidents and Soviet true-believers.
Marina’s loves, male and female, defy novelistic convention by
their very multitude. Like other post-Soviet novels, this is a story
of a community rather than an individual. In her dissident stage,
Marina imagines underground Moscow in a typically post-Soviet
manner: “Under Stalin’s skyscrapers, under the puppet-like
Kremlin, under modern constructions lie the pressed bones of
17
Ibid., 135-36.
18
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994),
xviii.
19
Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 55-56.
20
Ibid., 113.
millions of the tortured, murdered by the scary machinery of the

gulag…. Nothing has changed here. It seemed that time ossified or
maybe was canceled by decree. The hands of the Kremlin chimes
turn in vain, like a windup doll without a spring.”21
Paradoxically, since there are so few monuments on the former
sites of the gulag, these sites are imagined to be everywhere. In
her search for truth and love, Marina spins around in vain, like
a windup doll, and reshapes herself into a Soviet specter when her
thirtieth love, a communist leader, manages to bring her to her first
orgasm but traps her mind in Soviet discourse. This erotic novel
effectively predicted the political events of the subsequent decade.
History folds here into a cursed, spectral loop, like in the mourning
play that features a particular conception of time which is repetitive
rather than “fulfilled” and “spectral, not mythic.”22 In Sorokin’s Lyod
(Ice, 2002), the characters are born-again rather than un-dead. People
of the Ice produce their fellowship by hammering humans with
sacred Ice. A few are fully transformed, but many more are killed
in the process. The People of the Ice make their way into the core
of the KGB and exploit the system for their benefit. In its own way,
Sorokin’s fantasy responds to the same desperate quest for meaning
that inspired Bykov’s Justification. The People of the Ice do not look
like animals, do not suck blood (in fact, they are vegetarians), and
are mortal. Like vampires, however, they are parasites on humans,
whom they use with the utmost cruelty. These mystics produce
their alternative history in intonations that are reminiscent of some
Russian religious narratives, starting from Avvakum. Performing
sacral manipulations on human bodies, the People of the Ice strive
to reach a magic number of their fellowship, which will bring
about the desired end of the world. This construction (managing
an apocalypse by mutilating a target number of men and women)
is probably taken from the central myth of the Skoptsy sect.23 Like
21
Vladimir Sorokin, Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1999), 122.
22
Walter Benjamin, “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 57.
23
Sects were at the center of Andrei Siniavsky’s version of Russian cultural history,
many of their historical predecessors, Sorokin’s characters struggle

to overcome history but inevitably return to it. Quite recently,
several Slavic scholars argued that the concept of magical realism
can be applied to east European literatures that have been recently
emancipated from Soviet domination and are arguably postcolonial;
examples were the late Soviet works of non-Russian writers, the
Kirgiz Chingiz Aitmatov and the Abkhazian Fasil Iskander, for
example, as well as post-Soviet Ukrainian literature.24 Coined in
Weimar Germany and then applied to Latin American and African
fiction, the concept of magical realism made a huge loop before
it arrived in the post-Soviet space.25 Salman Rushdie famously
described magical realism as “the commingling of the improbable
and the mundane.”26 Improbable as they are, Sorokin’s, Sharov’s,
or Bykov’s novels do not have much of what could be plausibly
characterized as mundane. Although they entail plenty of magic, to
deem them “realistic” would be plainly wrong.
published as Ivan-Durak (Ivan the Fool; Paris: Sintaksis 1991). A Skopets was
a character in Yury Mamleev’s Shatuny (Paris, New York: The Third Wave, 1988).
Russian sects have also been important for Aleksandr Dugin’s philosophical
speculations. Aleksei Ivanov’s Zoloto bunta (St. Petersburg, 2005) describes the
fight between Old Believer communities over the treasure that the eighteenth-
century Emil’ian Pugachev allegedly left before his arrest. In Pavel Krusanov’s Ukus
angela: Roman (The angel’s bite: a novel, St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2000), the
wandering Old Believer inspires the emerging dictator by citing Freud and Johann
Jakob Bachofen. For the role of sectarian themes in late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Russian literature and thought, see Aleksandr Etkind, Khlyst:
Sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998). The
reawakening of sectarian themes in post-Soviet literature deserves a special study.
24
Erika Haber, The Myth of the Non-Russian: Iskander and Aitmatov’s Magical Universe
(Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2003); Vitaly Chernetsky, Mapping Postcommunist
Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal: McGill/Queens
University Press, 2007).
25
Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification
of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004); see also Jean-Pierre
Durix, Mimesis, Genres, and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism
(London: Routledge, 2004).
26
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Avon, 1982), 9.
I believe that the application of the concept of magical realism

to post-Soviet Russian fiction requires a major theoretical revision.
Contemporary Russian narratives are similar to and different from
magical realist ones in several important respects. They are similar
because they make extensive use of magic in a full-scale novelistic
construction. They also present an implicit critique of contemporary
society by revising its historical foundations. They are different
because they are self-consciously distanced from the traditions of
the realist novel that are critical to magical realism. The post-Soviet
novel does not emulate social reality and does not compete with the
psychological novel; what it emulates and struggles with is history.
I believe that a reasonable description for this particular trend in
post-Soviet literature is magical historicism.
Michael Wood distinguishes between two kinds of magical
realism, one that is magic in its material and realist in its style
(when “fantasy was represented by the deadest of deadpans, as
if the author were reciting a telephone book”), and another that is
realist in material and magical in style (when “the facts are the facts,
but they are given to us as if they are fables”). Wood seems to be
mostly interested in the first kind of narratives, which he suggests
are written as if the reporter is sober and reality is drunk.27 The
anthropologist Michael Taussig explores the connection between
the internationally renowned prose of magical realists and native
practices of healing and sorcery; he concludes that the literary
elaborations of popular magic stand as a counterhegemonic force
that is capable of confronting the usage to which the church and,
sometimes, the backward-looking official culture put the remains
of native religion.28 Famous Latin American examples such as One
Hundred Years of Solitude, which clearly belong to Wood’s first kind
of magical realism, deconstruct nationalist historiographies by
impartially telling the fantastic stories of the past, as if the history
27
Michael Wood, “In Reality,” Janus Head, 5, no. 2, Special Issue on Magical Realism
(Fall 2002): 9-14.
28
See Michael T. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror
and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chap. 8.
were drunk but the historian sober. Recruiting popular magic and
multiplying its use in the most unbridled ways, these stories disavow
the official narrative of the people’s suffering in the past as necessary,
justifiable sacrifices for the sake of the people’s present. Projecting
magic into history, these novels subvert scholarly discourses of
historiography with their habitual emphasis on rational choices
and social forces. These novels tend to follow some of the stylistic
conventions of historical writing, such as impartiality and what
Wood aptly calls sobriety. Rarely, if ever, do the narrators of these
novels play Nabokovian games with their readers by actualizing
the presence of the narrator in the course of the action. They boost
their readers’ understanding of the relational, constructed nature
of the narrated reality with genealogical rather than narratological
experiments.
This is where post-Soviet Russian fiction converges with that
of post-colonial Latin America.29 In reality, there is no border
between the past and the present; even less so in the realm of
magic. Correspondingly, the border between magical realism
and magical historicism is a matter of focus or emphasis rather
than one of definitions or patrol. In the philosophical tradition,
historicism strives to understand the current state of the world as
the result of its development in the past. It also denies other ways
of understanding the present, for example, that free will can shape
the present without being predetermined by the past. Ironically,
magical historicism shares a belief in the explanatory power of the
past with rational versions of historicism. In Sharov’s esoteric novel
Do i vo vremia (Before and during, 1993) the eternal Madame de
29
For the recognition of the influence of Latin American “magical realist” writers on
Russian authors of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, see Sergei Chuprinin,
“Eshche raz k voprosu o kartografii vymysla” (Again on the cartography of fiction;
Znamia, no. 11 [2006]). The Russian mother of a founder of Latin American magical
realism, Alejo Carpentier, and her alleged kinship to the poet Konstantin Bal’mont
is a subject of musings by Russian critics. An interesting example of anxiety of
influence is Bykov’s speculation that in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia
Marquez in his own turn emulated “Istoriia odnogo goroda” (History of a city)
by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin; see Dmitrii Bykov, Vmesto zhizni (In place of life;
Moscow: Vagrius, 2006).
Staël lives in Russia, sleeps with its most important figures, from
Aleksandr Skriabin to Stalin, who is also her son, and resides in
a Soviet madhouse together with the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov
and a covey of old Bolsheviks. While the narrator is recording
the oral history of these survivors, an apocalyptic flood drowns
Moscow. A trained Soviet historian who refashioned himself into
a post-Soviet writer, Sharov describes his credo: “The history
I learned was not the history of humans. It was the history of
hectares, crops, financial flows…. It was entirely foreign to me….
I am trying to understand what the revolution was,… why the
people who had beautiful dreams committed monstrous crimes.”30
For some readers, Sharov’s, Sorokin’s, or Pelevin’s novels give
clearer answers to these questions than social history does. Michael
Wood’s twin concepts of drunk reality and sober observer help
us understand Sharov’s fantasy of the eternal, Russified Madame
de Staël.31 Indeed, who could have been an impartial observer of
the revolution and terror? If such an observer could be imagined,
he or she would be a fantastic personality. In Before and Then, the
author bothers himself with such questions and presents a complex
narrative construction that consists of the anchor character, de Staël,
and the first-person narrator who collects her oral history. In other
types of narratives, the author simply emulates the person-less
voice of a history textbook.
In melancholic visions of Sharov, Sorokin, and their colleagues,
the past is perceived not just as “another country” but as an exotic
and unexplored one, still pregnant with unborn alternatives and
imminent miracles. Arguably, the expanded use of the subjunctive
tense characterizes postrevolutionary periods. The feeling of
30
Vladimir Sharov, “la ne chuvstvuiu sebia ni uchitelem, ni prorokom” (I consider
myself neither a teacher nor a prophet), Druzhba narodov 8 (2004).
31
Post-Soviet literature often plays with the idea of reincarnation. This idea is usually
perceived as characteristically Buddhist; however, this idea was also central for
Russian mystical sects such as the Khlysty; see Humphrey, “Stalin and the Blue
Elephant,” for a fascinating analysis of reincarnation stories about Stalin, which are
told by the Buddhist peoples of Russia, and Etkind, Khlyst, for the reincarnation
mythology of traditional Russian sects.
loss opens up questions of what might have been.32 Possessed

by the ghostly past and unable to withdraw from its repetitive
contemplation, post-Soviet writers find themselves trapped in
a state of melancholia. At the same time, their readers celebrate
an unprecedented consumer boom but feel the loss of the political
opportunities they recently enjoyed. Writing in a glossy men’s
journal, the cultural critic Grigorii Revzin described the situation
in political rather than clinical terms: “The past does not know the
subjunctive mood only if the present does know it.... If the present
is what you cannot change at all, the past becomes what you can
change in every possible way.”33 When politics does not provide
alternatives, historiography offers them in abundance.
In the final account, the popularity of magical historicism among
post-Soviet writers and readers realizes the “compromise by which
the command of reality is carried out piecemeal” that Freud ascribed
to melancholia.34 The inability to differentiate oneself from the lost
object prevents the individual from living in the present, from love
and work. On the political level, the reverse is probably equally
important: when there is no choice in the present, the historical past
unfolds into an overwhelming narrative that obscures the present
rather than explaining it. On the poetical level, Freud’s observation
about the “piecemeal” character of the melancholic “compromise”
provides a new perspective on the nature of postcatastrophic writing,
which combines past and present, truth and fiction, allegories and
metonymies.
History and magic are strange bedfellows. Ghosts and
witches are ahistorical, but witch hunts and ghost tours embody
their historical moments. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and
other beasts help authors and readers discuss history that is not
comprehensible by other means. Such was the Soviet period with
32
See Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of
History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 203.
33
Grigorii Revzin, “O Tsaritsynskom dvortse i Iurii Luzhkove,” at http://www.gq.ru/
exclusive/columnists/152/44235/ (last accessed 15 May 2009).
34
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 253.
its “unjustified repressions.” The uncanny scenery of post-Soviet

literature signals the failure of other, more conventional ways of
understanding social reality. It is not the pointed clarity of social and
cultural criticism that attracts readers, but the inexhaustible fantasy
of creators of alternative pasts. Often, the technological fantasies
that authenticate these stories are manipulations of human bodies
that allow for supernatural warmth and an immediacy of contact
between the manipulated. After being hammered by Ice, Sorokin’s
sectarians can speak to each other with their hearts. After being
bitten by a vampire, Pelevin’s characters can understand other
creatures, human or vampiric, by biting them. Sharov’s patients
acquire similar abilities after having sex with Madame de Staël. In
the post-Soviet condition, the antimodern fantasy of immediate,
extralinguistic communication becomes a popular refuge. In most
of these stories, immediate knowledge leads to unlimited power.
They are stories of super-communes, not supermen.
Magical historicism does have critical potential. Though the
political boundaries in post-Soviet Russia tend to blur, magical
historicists such as Sorokin, Pelevin, Sharov, and Bykov are
recognizably different from those authors who use realistic techniques
to spread their pro-Soviet nostalgia, like Aleksandr Prokhanov or
Maksim Kantor. In 2002, the pro-Putin youth movement Walking
Together (a historicist replica of the Soviet Komsomol) publicly
destroyed copies of Sorokin’s Blue Lard by disposing of them in
a giant commode in the center of Moscow (the use of the commode
recalling, in its own turn, Marcel Duchamp). Set in the future, Blue
Lard tells the story of an elixir that the monstrous clones of great
Russian writers, from Lev Tolstoy to Vladimir Nabokov, produce
when writing. Through this transformation into “blue lard,” their
texts provide immortality. Exotic Russian sectarians of the future
steal this substance from the Russian-Chinese scientists who
produce the clones. Using a time machine, sectarians send this
elixir to Stalin, who is presented here as Khrushchev’s lover. At
the end of the story, we see the immortal Stalin as a servant to one
of the pathetic masters of the future. The final pages drop a hint
that Stalin is, in fact, the narrator of the story. Changing its focus
from invented communities to pseudo-historical personalities and
back to invented communities, this exemplary novel combines

many features of magical historicism: unmotivated distortions of
history, semi-human monsters, manipulations of the body, fantastic
cults, circular time, and the resulting interpenetration of epochs. In
a strange way that was, however, available to the semi-educated
Walking Together, this novel sent an aggressively critical political
message towards Putin’s Russia.
While dehumanization can take various forms and steps,
treating humans as animals is one of them; the conversion of humans
into monsters is probably the next one. Practicing senseless violence
that eludes any functional interpretation, the gulag effectively
reduced humans to working animals. Starting with Solzhenitsyn’s
triton, Vladimov’s dog, and Shalamov’s cat, the gulag’s memory in
literature has used humanized animals to tell the story of inhuman
suffering. In the early attempts at realistic representation, these
animals were put into the position of witnesses, more reliable ones
than humans on either side of the fence. In the later spirit of magical
historicism, these characters have developed into monsters that
embody the horror, not the truth, of the Soviet period better than
either humans or animals.35
This memorial culture is not so much postmodern as it is,
precisely, post-Soviet. Many classical figures and motifs resurge here:
monsters like the Sphinx, Moloch, Leviathan, and Triton; Antigone
who wanted to bury her brother; Dante’s infernal adventures and
Hamlet’s possession and revenge; Dracula, to be sure, and also
Sharikov. But the most pertinent master-plot may be that of Little
Red Riding Hood: the wolf ate the granny and now he looks like the
granny—or maybe it is the murdered granny who looks like a wolf?
35
Agamben discusses the relevance of animals and zoomorphic monsters for the
representation of the Nazi camps in his The Open.
Lev Rubinshtein
(b. 1947, Moscow)
Rubinshtein graduated from the Russian Language and Literature

School of the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. Perhaps
influenced by his work as a librarian, Rubinshtein invented
a unique literary genre: a prose poem in the form of a “card
catalogue” (kartoteka) that forms a collection of often enigmatic
fragments and citations that, when taken together, combine
numerous styles and discourses within a single work. His works
are filled with existential paradoxes emphasizing the birth of
new rhythms from a seeming cacophony of language. His first
collections of poems were published in Germany; in Russia, his
first collections appeared only in 1994-96 (Problems of Literature,
Further and Further, А Regular Writing). Since 1996, Rubinshtein
has been working as a columnist in a variety of paper and internet-
based magazines. He has created an idiosyncratic genre of essays
that fuse political judgment with witty or anecdotal parabola. His
essays are collected in such books as Language Cases, Chasing the
Hat, The Spirits of Time, The Word Stock, and others. Rubinshtein
is a recipient of the Andrei Bely Prize. His consistently liberal
political position placed him among the intellectual leaders of the
anti-Putin protest movement in 2011-12. In 2013, he received the
literary prize NOS (New Writing). He lives in Moscow.

Rubinstein, Lev. Here I Am. Trans. Joanne Turnbull. GLAS: New Russian Writing,
2001.
S mok e of the Father l a nd, or a F ilter G ul ag 1
These days in Moscow cigarettes are advertised in the most

resplendent fashion on enormous outdoor billboards at the bottom
of which—according to the law of the genre—we are reminded, in
fine and unconvincing print, that, actually, smoking isn’t all that
good for our health. In other words, the attractive, happy and even
excessively healthy people in the outsize posters can puff away with
impunity. But for people like you and me, smoking is apparently
dangerous. I don’t believe it! The Health Ministry’s pitiful prattle
about the hazards of smoking against the background of the ads’
triumphant bacchanalia carries no more weight than does the
formulaic civility in a verbal construction like: “Excuse me for saying
so, but you are a horse’s ass!” But that’s just by the way. Especially as
non-smokers don’t need any convincing, while confirmed smokers
don’t need any ads. They particularly didn’t need any ads not long
ago when crazed consumers of “the smoke of the Fatherland” took
to turning empty cigarette stands upside down.
Filter cigarettes made their debut in the early ‘60s. Domestic
ones included. Or rather, domestic ones specifically. The first, it
seems, were Krasnopresnenskiye; the second, Novost. Or maybe
it was the other way round, I don’t remember. Side by side with
1
From Lev Rubinstein, Here I Am, trans. by Joanne Turnbull (GLAS: New Russian
Writing, 2001), 139-44.
Lev Rubinshtein. Smoke of the Fatherland, or a Filter Gulag 189
hip cafes, jazz and abstract art, filter cigarettes—as opposed to

totalitarian, Stalinist papirosi—became signs of the thaw and of
liberalism in general. It is difficult to convey the sweet feeling of
initiation into world civilization with which one slowly undid the
little red cellophane strip, with which one put the glossy pack on
the plastic cafe tabletop for all the world to see, and with what
Hemingway-and-Aksyonovesque abstraction one exhaled the
smoke through one’s nose. “Old man, would you have a cigarette
on you?” That’s a far cry from: “Hey kid, gotta papiroska?” That’s
culture. The West, freedom, progress, glass and concrete, outer
space, Yunost magazine, polymers and pointy moccasins for fifteen
rubles a pair. The coming of the filter-cigarette age divided the
smoking community into the up-to-date and the old-regime, into
modernists and fundamentalists, into Westernizers and patriots.
The pre-filter and essentially papirosi civilization wasn’t
homogeneous either. One or another preference said more about
a person than the preferences themselves. Stalin, as portrayed in
hundreds of movies and novels, stuffed his pipe with tobacco from
Gertsegovina Flor papirosi. The gray-at-the-temples prison warden
usually uttered his sacramental “the Tambov wolf is your comrade
now”1 between two puffs of a Kazbek. The big boys behind the
shed smoked cheap Severs. In the folklore of young smokers, Sever
somehow rhymed with treepper (gonorrhea). As in: “Anyone who
smokes Sever is sure to get treepper.” What nonsense. Even children
knew that smoking something even as vile as Sever was fraught
with all sorts of things, but not that. Then again, poetry is beyond
truth, isn’t that true?
The most democratic and most statistically average thing
to smoke was Belomors. At first, everyone smoked them. Then,
in the filter era, the most stubborn. Later, and evidently to this
day, aging human rights activists as a symbol of their asceticism.
The most portentous aspect of a Belomor is its name, which has
1
Once imprisoned, the Soviet man forfeited the right to address a superior as
“comrade.” From now on the proper form of address was “citizen.” If the prisoner
forgot, and addressed the warden as “comrade,” the warden would set him straight:
“The Tambov wolf is your comrade now.” (Tr.)
survived everything. Imagine a German cigarette called Auschwitz

or Buchenwald. Consider as well the smoking chimneys and the
similarity becomes ridiculous. You could split your sides laughing.
Only why go butting into German history when we have our
own just as good. The name Belomorkanal is not, in essence, very
different from the name Gulag.
What has prompted the remarks above and below is the recent
appearance in cigarette kiosks of an amazing mutant: a Belomor
cigarette with a filter. The Similar Prima appeared a little earlier.
But in a socio-cultural context, a Prima as against a Belomor is like
a carpenter as against a cabinetmaker. So then, a filter Belomor.
With the same sickeningly familiar picture on the pack. A new wine
in an old wineskin. The appearance of this remake evokes a bright
bundle of meaningful metaphors. That this gimmick belongs to
the “old-songs-about-the-main-thing”2 class is clear. Perhaps even
too clear. What isn’t associated today with those ill-fated “songs”?
This hackneyed formula seems to have enveloped our entire time
and space symbolically. In other words, our space is going through
a time of “old songs”—our own inevitably specific and local
reception of postmodernism. It is as if to say we had a great era
once. And now that great era has been fitted with a filter. So that you
cough less. Cough less blood, too.
Meanwhile, the new and improved Belomor is this: typical
socialism with a human face. Or, to put it a bit more crudely:
a filter Gulag. It is, like other large and small features of the “velvet”
restoration, the same thing as today’s Stalinist anthem without the
Stalinist words: the anthem, too, has been fitted with a kind of filter.
That’s really all I have to say.
Oh, I almost forgot: “Smoking, dear reader, is hazardous to
your health.”
Translation and notes by Joanne Turnbull
2
“Old Songs about the Main Thing” was the name of a annual television program
aired on New Year’s Eve on which singers performed Soviet songs that were
especially popular twenty, thirty, and forty years ago. The program became
a symbol of nostalgia for the Soviet era. (Tr.)
Evgeny Grishkovets
(b. 1967, Kemerovo)
A popular playwright and prose-writer, actor and director

Evgeny Grishkovets graduated from the School of Philology of
the University of Kemerovo. After one year at university, he was
recruited into the Russian Navy, in which he served for three years.
From 1988-90 he acted in the Kemerovo University Pantomime
theatre, and in 1990 he founded the independent theatre “The
Lodge” in Kemerovo. In 1998, Grishkovets presented his one-
man show How I Ate a Dog, based on his experiences in the Navy,
in Moscow. The performance earned him The Golden Mask prize.
From 2000-2005 he produced several one-man shows based on his
plays, including Simultaneously, The Planet, Dreadnoughts, and The
Siege. He has published two novels and four books of short prose.
From 2008-2011, Grishkovets maintained a blog on LiveJournal,
and he has published four books based on his blog material. He
currently lives in Kaliningrad.
How I Ate a D og ( e xcer pts )
CHARACTERS:
Narrator: a young man in his mid- to late-thirties, dressed in
a sailor’s uniform, holding a sailor’s cap in his hands most of the
time, occasionally putting it on his head.
Personal stories and observations can be inserted into the text ad lib,
and any undesirable parts may be omitted. Ideally, the whole story should
take approximately 1-1.5 hours.
Ropes and other sailing accouterments are scattered around the stage,
and there is a bucket of water and a washrag. A chair stands at the center
of the stage.
Narrator:
Okay, so, imagine that you wake up one morning and you’re
a hussar. A real cavalryman. You’ve got one of those fancy hats
with this long thing coming out of the top, and a uniform jacket
with a zillion little buttons and ties. You’ve got the pants, the boots,
the spurs, the sword tucked right here, and … a horse! What a big
animal a horse is! Okay, so, on top of all that, you already know
everything: how to ride the horse, how to slash something with the
sword, how everything is arranged, what regiment you belong to,
your title, etc. And the really crazy thing is that you can remember
all of your previous battles and daring conquests…. But at the same
Evgeny Grishkovets. How I Ate a Dog 193
time, you’re completely surprised by all of this. Because after all,

you just woke up, and now there’s all this crazy stuff to deal with.
And that’s exactly how it was all three years I was in the Navy; I’d
wake up every morning thinking it, and the longer I served, the
stronger these thoughts: “I’m a sailor! For real! Like in the movies,
except even more real. A real sailor on a ship, that’s what…”
No, it can’t be! It’s impossible!
Riiiight…
And on Russian Island things were … intense. It was … intense.
I can’t stand watching kids on the first day of school. It’s just the
most awful sight. It’s usually … well, it happens in all kinds of
weather. Rain or shine, it doesn’t matter. The mother gets all dressed
up and takes her kid, who’s squeaky clean in a new uniform…. And
he doesn’t even seem old enough for school—he’s just this tiny little
kid. He walks really straight holding a bouquet of flowers that his
granny pulled from her garden. And Granny gets all teary-eyed,
going on and on about how time flies and how our little, oh, I don’t
know—Alex—is all grown up and going to school…. And there he
is, holding those flowers, with a blank look on his face, just sort
of spacing out. And they take him to school, and there are a lot of
people everywhere, and then there’s the first bell. Riiiing! And they
leave him there…. My first teacher was … Alevtina Petrovna or
Zinaida Nikolaevna….1
Okay, so later on, the kid comes home from school … and he’s acting
really strange….
The parents ask, “So? How was it?”
How the hell do you think it was? (That’s me speaking, not the kid.)
Seriously, I mean, how the hell do you think it was? The same as
always. Exactly the same. I mean, jeez, you were there. You went to
school…. So, you don’t need to ask…. You know!
1
Teachers in Russia are addressed formally using their first name and patronymic.
The first of these two names sounds especially funny to the Russian ear. An English
equivalent would be something like Mrs. Thistlebottom or Mrs. Dungworth.
And then sometime around seventh or eighth grade a history

teacher would appear, as if from another planet. He was easy-going,
completely different. You could actually have a conversation with
this guy, and when he got pissed off at your class you sort of felt bad
about it because you could, you know…. It’s like, you know, you’re
standing in the bathroom taking a piss and this guy suddenly walks
in and takes a piss. It’s hard to get your mind around…. Anyway, he
was a cool guy! But then something happened. The other teachers
wouldn’t accept him. He was so untarnished that they would just
eat him alive, or there would be some sort of nasty rumors going
around … or he was in a bad marriage….Whatever it was, he just
disappeared one day, along with all of the wondrous possibilities.
And his replacement was some Mrs. So-and-so … well, you get the
idea...
But on Russian Island things were intense…
So the Officers met us there, along with a bunch of other people.

The Officers thought of themselves as aristocrats or something, so
they never cursed…. Never! They would just talk like this:
Good morning Comrade Sailors! I know that things are [f***ing

(silently mouth the word, ad lib.)] difficult for you right now! This
is because you are [f***ing] thinking about [f***ing] home. (They
didn’t curse. They just moved their lips to convey the necessary
“clarification.”) So! You think that [f***ing] being at home with your
[f***ing] mommy was better? You’re [f***ing] wrong! Now—and for
the foreseeable future—we are all the [f***ing] family you’ve got.
And in order to [f***ing] help you avoid thinking about home, we
want you to focus on a man’s top three [f***ing] needs: eat, drink
and sleep! Therefore, we’ll be giving you very little [f***ing] food,
drink and sleep.
And they did exactly as they said they would! And, actually, it did
get a little better, but only much, much later.
They (that is, the Officers) would say:

“A Chinese missile can get here in 30 seconds. You need to be able to

defend the Motherland.” (They said this very loudly.)
We didn’t protest. In fact, we … .never protested. And we had to get
dressed really fast, so we could defend the Motherland. And wow,
did we get dressed fast. The thing is, no one was really afraid of the
Chinese missiles—everything we had to fear was all around us …
right there.
I can totally understand the Officers. Every morning they would

come out to find us standing in formation. And it was obvious that
they were really hoping to see something else. But there we were.
There were the Uzbeks and the Tadjiks and the Kirgiz and, well,
us white guys. But back when the Officers entered the military
academy, they probably imagined themselves as Commander on
the bridge, with the roar of the sea, and the navy flags raised high.
It was all so ceremonious, full of pomp and circumstance, the flags
and seagulls, and the “Hip-hip! Hurraaaaay!...” Yet there we were,
a shaggy bunch … and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it.
And I felt ashamed because I wasn’t what they wanted, and I’d never
be that, and I was to blame for, well, basically for everything….
There on Russian Island—what a name!—everything was done

according to custom. Everything was coordinated, and a mark of
tradition was evident in all that we did. From time immemorial, and
forever after! And perhaps the most venerable traditional of all was
“The Great Morning Release.”
To participate in this ritual, you had to be born in our country, be 18

years of age, and … get stuck on Russian Island…. Lucky you.
Okay, so at oh-six-hundred hours the national anthem would start

blaring on the radio and that meant: time to get up. We got up—
really fast!—and put on our boots—really fast!—(we already had
our boxers on) and we ran outside where we would encounter
not roads, but heavy fog. And we would run—in formation—and
there was noise and shouting all around us: “Faster, you [f***ers]!
You [f***ing.]…. Aaaand…. Run! Aaaand, double time, you sons-of-
bitches! [****]…” And we ran, and ran. With our buzz cuts and dirty
necks, all different colors, and in long, wrinkled blue boxers. We ran
to the shore.
There at the edge there was a cliff, the sea about 12 feet below. And
cliff hung in an almost perfectly straight line above the sea, so you
could fit something like three hundred guys standing at the edge
all at once. And there in the dark (it was 6 a.m., after all), you could
look across and see the city of Vladivostok, way off in the distance.
I never managed to see it during the day, but there in the dark it
shimmered—[sings] “Little lights, little liiights….”2 And I thought
about how great it would be to have a little house there—like the
tiny clapboard hut in that old Soviet Cipollino cartoon. I’d be like the
little Pumpkin Man, who would climb inside the hut and escape the
evil Señor Pomedór—I’d get away from all of this, and never want
for anything.
Okay, so there we were—two thousands of us men—running. Then,

on command, in perfect rank and file, three hundred of us at a time
would halt at the edge of the cliff. Then—on command—we’d drop
our shorts and … piss in the ocean! The commanders kept careful
watch, and when the last guy finished, they would bark another
command. And everyone would pull up their shorts and step back
in formation to let the next rank step forward. And the next three
hundred guys took their turn.
2
“Little lights, little lights…” refers to a popular Soviet-era chanson, a genre of song
that can include themes ranging from love and loss, to the struggles of the urban
underclasses, to tales of criminal activity. This particular song speaks of a longing
for home, old friends and youth:
If my friend
is feeling lonely,
If the guy is sad, forlorn—
Let him come by car, on foot
Let him wander unawares
Toward the familiar nighttime glow.
Little lights, little lights, at midnight they’re so bright,
Little lights of my wondrous youth.
And as we stood there pissing into the sea, a triple-decker cruise

ship, ablaze in lights, ferried across right in front of us. And we all
felt a kind of genuine strength and majestic beauty uniting us.
I know now why no enemy ever attacked us; we got up every

morning and took a mighty collective piss in the ocean. That’s
why no one ever attacked us. It wasn’t the nuclear submarines or
the rockets. Every single morning—rain or shine—we’d get up at
that ungodly hour and piss in the sea, and no one attacked. I guess
I don’t mean it literally—I’m not an idiot or a fool—but we really
were all in it together. Mhmmm….
There were butterflies on the Island—big, green swallowtails. They

were huge, actually, bigger than a sparrow. And they flew really,
really slowly. And the Officers would shout at us: “God [f***ing]
help me, if any one of you sons of bitches even touches a butterfly,
I’ll…. These butterflies … they’re on the [f***ing] endangered
species list. They’re only found here. We are proud of these [f***ing]
butterflies! God forbid one of you [f***ers]…. They’ve been here for
a million [f***ing] years, and then you show up, and an hour later
you just [sh*t] on every [f***ing] thing.
The butterflies were really beautiful. They moved their wings

slowly, and then flew off. Just like this. [Here it’s essential that you
take off your shoes and demonstrate how these big butterflies flew.] Their
wings were emerald green….
I killed three of them. They went crunch in my hand and this

yellowish slime oozed out…. I had to wash my hands for a long
time to get the green pollen-like wing dust off them…. Otherwise
they really would, God forbid…. I mean, they weren’t joking. The
Officers, that is.
Sometimes there are moments in life when, for example, you’re

standing in front of the mirror brushing your teeth, not in any
particular hurry. Or you’re taking a bath or a shower, again, not
hurrying—and everything is okay. And then suddenly you
remember something, something that makes you feel ashamed ...

terribly, terribly ashamed. Even if it’s something that happened
when you were a kid. You remember some stupid lie you told ...
or when, like an idiot, you pretended to be something you’re not
... it was obvious, but you still tried to fake your way through.
Or something else horrible—something that no one remembers
anymore, something that you yourself had completely forgotten.
And then it all comes flooding back. And you feel so awful, so
ashamed that you just want to curl up into a little ball, lie in the
fetal position [here it’s necessary to actually curl up into the fetal
position], to take up as little space as humanly possible.
Or there are times when something is eating away at you; someone

hurt your feelings, and you’re lying awake in bed at night, trying
to fall asleep, imagining everything you’ll say to that person when
you see him tomorrow. And you’re actually talking aloud, and he’s
answering, and everything comes so easily to you, as you fire back
with precisely the right words, and ... you finally fall asleep just
before dawn. Then, just forty minutes later—the alarm goes off.
Only forty minutes!... but it’s gone, all the words have disappeared.
Or you’re walking along and something’s driving you crazy. And

you’ve convinced yourself to let it go, that there’s nothing wrong,
and you try to just walk. But everyone around you sees this guy.
That is, they see YOU, walking along talking to yourself: “Yeah, well,
it’s not my problem!” Then a pause. See? It’s you. You’re walking
along and then you stop and shout: “What, do I really ask so much
of you?” Pause. “Well, so-oo-r—ry!” Pause. “Well, I don’t know,
I DON’T KNOW!”
Okay, so it’s obvious—you’re having a lousy day. It’s nothing

in particular, it’s just that ... things are always so ... crappy. Or
something hurts, or you can’t stop worrying about something, well,
you know ... you get the idea....
And it used to be—a long time ago—you’d run around all day
in the yard, and yell and scream, and think up all sorts of crazy
antics. Your little arms and legs were brand new and nothing hurt.
Wheeee! And then your dad would call from the upstairs window:
John-ny, hey! Cartoons! And you would race home, greedily gulp
some water right from the tap, plop down in front of the TV, and
you’d be just about to burst with anticipation…. Because earlier
you had taken the TV guide and, though there really weren’t many
programs for kids, you took your pencil and underlined everything
that you wanted to watch. And wow, there were twenty whole
minutes of cartoons!
And you’re just so excited you can’t stand it—while the station
announcer speaks, then there’s the studio production logo with that
little, you know, that little theme song … and then, when the film
credits begin for the cartoon you—as always—you can’t contain
yourself any longer, and you run to the bathroom … to pee. And
you can almost taste the joy, the sweet satisfaction … and with every
fiber of your being … you really and truly … hope.
And then a puppet show comes on…. Noooooo! It’s the worst cartoon
ever. The one about, you know, the bear and the rabbit and, I don’t
know, a hedgehog. And the hedgehog, or the bear or whatever, is
mean, or greedy or lazy. He’s got, like, an apple or something, but
he won’t share it, or he won’t help anyone else. And then everyone
stops hanging out with him, and they won’t talk to him anymore….
And he realizes what’s happening and starts helping people or
sharing with everyone, and he feels real good about himself. Then,
at the end, all the animals join hands and sing some stupid song….
You know, total crap. But….
But you manage not to get too upset about it, and you watch it to the
end and then go back outside to run around. I mean, so what? Those
people who made that cartoon probably hate you too. Whatever,
you can just go run around. Who cares? It’s okay.
Or you’re just this tiny little kid and you’re sleeping. It’s Sunday.
Winter. It’s already almost noon and you’re dozing, but you can hear
your granny saying, “No, it’s time to wake him up.” And she comes
in and pulls off the covers and rubs your back. And her hands are
coarse, like sandpaper, and it makes you squirm and twist around.
Because your back is so nice and her hands are so rough, and you
are, well, you know, you’re beautiful—all your relatives always
praise you for it…. So later on, when you’re older, you’re completely
shocked to look in the mirror and see: “Whoa. That’s me?” I look like
that? No way.
There was so much to be ashamed of! And for whatever reason there
was an especially large amount of shame on Russian Island. And it’s
weird, because there really shouldn’t be so much shame involved in
growing up. But there was … there is.
It just makes you want to lie down [lie down] and curl up into a little
ball [curl up], and try to take up as little space as possible [do this, lie
there for a bit, realize that it’s impossible, then say the following]. No, it
doesn’t work … no … it’s useless. I mean, you once weighed only
seven pounds. And before that, you were just a little tadpole thing,
with a tail. It’s like you existed, but not really. Yeah, that was the
life … or maybe not. I don’t actually remember it, but well, who are
we kidding? No one remembers it.
Yeah, it was much better back when you could just be afraid of the
dark, or the neighbor’s basement, or the older kids next door, or
some mythological creature or other … rather than those real fears
that … on Russian Island … were more than enough.
It was so great when you could dart into your apartment building
and watch the little pellets of snow on your sleeve melt from the
heat of the radiator, all the while being terrified of the older boys
next door. Or to run, and run, and run, and then fall backwards into
the snow and see—SUDDENLY—the night sky and the stars, and to
think about infinity. Out there—beyond the stars—there were more
stars, and more and more … and then suddenly … INFINITY. Like
an explosion. It took your breath away … oh, gasp!... terrifying …
and then … everything…released. It was awful … awfully good.
You know, it’s interesting to think about whether any of the stuff
we did on Russian Island really mattered to anyone anywhere else

in the world. I mean personally. Was there a person out there who
really understood why everything there was the way it was? And if
there was such a person, what was he like? I can’t even imagine….
Jeez. [sigh] Hard to believe….
It was there—in the service—that I got the sense, and soon came to
really understand, that the Motherland and the country I was born
in weren’t actually the same thing. I guess it’s probably obvious, but
it’s something that’s important to understand—it’s vital!
But many of the guys I served with didn’t really understand this,
though they suspected that something was up. But what seemed to
matter more to them was who betrayed us. Country or Motherland?
That was what we need to figure out here … except we won’t. Like
I said, the guys didn’t really understand … they just had their
suspicions.
But they thought up a variety of concrete things to be suspicious of.

Everyone had … well, everyone had a girlfriend who didn’t wait for
them, who cheated on them, who ran off with a student who had
managed to dodge the draft. And they poured their grief into this,
oh yes, they did: “As soon as I get back, I’ll find that student, and I’ll
teach him a lesson he’ll never forget.”
[sings] “Only mama won’t betray you,… only mama … only

mommmmmy….”3 So we all wrote letters, letters to those girls. And
3
This quote is from another chanson, this time from the criminal song sub-genre.
The song is sung from the point of view of a young man serving time in prison. He
sings of how a man’s mother is the only one who will stand by him, love him, and
never betray him. The chorus reads:
Only mama will call out: my dear son!
Only mama will be there with you to the very end
Only mama will hold out her frail hands to you
Won’t lie to you, or leave or betray you
Only mama will never betray you.
we signed the backs of photographs with “may this fixed image of

my face always remind you of me” and sent them off to random
cities, God knows where…. To those far-off places … the kind of
place that, if you drive up in the middle of the night you can see
the outlines of the windows, illuminated from inside. And all of
these windows are yellow…. That light … a light that makes you
want to turn and flee back into the darkness. And sometimes you
drive down the main street of a town, and all of a sudden you look
through a second-floor window and you can see … it’s the kitchen.
And the curtains are that familiar color…and the wallpaper…
and the lampshade—orange and made of plastic. And then, for
a brief second, a man’s back appears in the window. He’s wearing
a T-shirt—probably … light blue. And it’s all so familiar, just like
home. You know what their conversation is about, what’s in the
fridge, what they’re having for dinner, what kind of dishes are kept
in the sideboard in the living room, what kind of sofa they have, and
even what pattern and vintage of oriental rug hangs as decoration
on the wall….
And because you looked in that window, and because it’s all so
terribly familiar … everything seems so … dull. It’s as if you reached
down and gathered up all the dust bunnies that have collected there
in those hard-to-reach corners under the bed, and you stuff them all
into your mouth … and then just live like that. Just go on living. The
Motherland betrayed us…. But we never betrayed our Motherland
… we always defended her … constantly.
Pause.
On the ship we had this guy named Kolya E. Korean guy. That was
his last name: Eeee. He was soft-spoken, short, beaten down, and
always kinda dirty-looking. His Russian was terrible. He didn’t
fit in well with the Uzbeks, and with the Russian guys he was
a complete outsider. Poor bastard. It seemed like he always had the
worst luck. Either he’d lost his hat, or his dish would run away with
his spoon…. The guy never got leave time, but then one day we
found out that he had gotten leave orders along with the rest of us.
And so now we had to stop messing with him, be respectful … you

know, give the guy a break.
And when E got back from his very first leave he showed up with
a dead dog in his bag. We all freaked out and started yelling at him
to throw it overboard. But he wouldn’t. And then he got upset. Said
there was no way in hell that he would get rid of it—and he was
dead serious.
And then we realized that he was actually seriously offended. He

dragged the dog away and hid it somewhere and … well, he was
really sore. He sat up all night just crying his eyes out. I said, hey,
buddy, take it easy, just let it go. I mean, you’ve gotta understand.
That dog—it’s just nasty! And then he started to bare his soul to me,
explaining bitterly that he had killed and cut up the dog according
to tradition and that it was important to have the right kind of dog,
so he had spent all day searching for the perfect offering. And he did
this all for us—so that he could treat us to an authentic traditional
Korean dish…. And then he started crying again. He was so hurt.
And I remember how we sat there that night—Kolya E, Abror the

Uzbek (the ship’s cook) and me—we sat there and ate that dog that
Kolya had cooked for such a long time, all the while worrying what
I would think of it. And I sat and thought: “Well, here I am, eating
a dog…. And somewhere out there there’s a little girl, weary from
crying, still releasing little whimpers and sobs as she falls asleep.
She and her dad spent hours wandering the neighborhood with
a flashlight, checking the barns and asking everyone they encountered
if they knew anything about the beloved dog’s whereabouts. And
they’d keep searching tomorrow, and there would be ‘lost dog’
signs written in the little girl’s handwriting, and a picture of the
poor puppy with his little leash around his neck would hang above
her bed for weeks…. Or maybe some old lady would step outside
and look down the street, into the darkness and, at every rustle,
she’d race to the door, open it and peer into the dark hallway—her
hope completely in vain. “Here Rover! Here boy! Roooverrrr!” And
then she goes back inside and sits down at the table covered with an
oilcloth, and stares at the dish and bowl of water … and tears well
up in her eyes.
I ate and ate and thought about how inside of me—in my stomach—
there was a piece of that trusting and helpless creature who had
probably rolled over and wagged his tail when Kolya had lifted him
up…. And as I chewed, I tried to sense some inner protest … but
I couldn’t … it was delicious. Kolya had prepared it so well. And
I had thought—up until the moment I tasted it—that there was no
way I could eat it. But I could. With gusto. I wouldn’t have been
able to before … in my previous life. I guess one version of me did
the thinking, and another did the eating. And the one who ate was
more … well, contemporary. That is, he matched the demands of
that particular time. That time—my time in the Navy. My Navy
Years. And now I can’t imagine eating a dog, not at night, down
in the galley with Kolya E and the Uzbek cook, there on that
enormous anti-submarine ship. I probably … probably couldn’t do
it anymore….
I discovered within myself such strange feelings: whenever I was

really sick, or when people had really hurt my feelings, or when
I did something that no one should ever have to do—ever—you
know, something really, really awful … or when they called me
terrible names… Anyway, at those times … I didn’t feel sorry for
myself.
I didn’t feel sorry, and I didn’t get upset…. But I felt really, really
sorry for my parents and everyone who had ever loved me. I mean,
they loved me so much, and they were waiting for me to come
home. For my mom, it would mean … and my dad…. And they
know me so well—they know that I’m this and that, and that I’m
one-of-a-kind. I’m me, and they love me….
But I’d been beaten … so badly … that I wasn’t me anymore…. That

person that they loved so much, the one they were waiting for to
come home…. That one-of-a-kind kid? He didn’t exist. I wasn’t him—
I didn’t exist. And they had no idea. There’s no me anymore.
I felt so sorry for them. Mom wrote me a letter every single day.
And sent packages. And it was really hard for me to eat the cookies
she sent in those little boxes. I felt bad messing up the orderly little
bundles she had put together. You see, they sent those packages
to that kid who had waved goodbye to them as the train pulled
away, headed for the Far East. But that boy was gone. They sent
the packages to the wrong address. They weren’t delivered to their
sweet, bright, only son. They were sent to one of any number of
dirty, miserable, ugly sailors, each of whom had a number on his
sleeve and was called by last name once a day, at evening roll.
It was so painful to try to pretend to be that kid I had been, and

answer my mother’s letters. “Dear Mama … Everything is fine.
The food is fine … the weather is lousy, but soon it will … there’s
no time to be homesick, there’s always work to do…. Love, Your
Son….” It’s not as if I could write: Your son is no longer here. He’s
gone, and another has taken his place. And then this other person
I had become would write all about … no. No, I wasn’t a fool. I was
a sailor, not a fool. At least I can say that.
And the whole time, all I could think was “Iwannagohome,

Iwannagohome….”
I remember how it was that first night home…. How I slept well, but
got up early. I spent three years imagining how I would get home,
go to bed and just sleep in all day…. But I woke up at 6 a.m. sharp.
I woke up in my room and though “Now what?... Look, I’m home …
but there’s that ‘Iwannagohome….’ Wait, so where is home?... Hold
on! Where’s home? But there is no home anymore!”
My room, of course, was the same as it always was. Mom kept it

exactly as it had been, everything laid out just so, like a museum.
But it wasn’t home. I mean, my desire for HOME had been so strong
that it grew and overwhelmed my actual home, so that it no longer
fit inside, sort of like how I didn’t fit in any of the pants I had worn
before I entered the Navy. But there was something else. Some-
thing … horrible. There was no home…! There was no me…!
And what had life been like before? It was so simple: you finish
school, which means you have to take exams, then you choose a
college, etc., etc. Then you’re expecting to be drafted, and there’s
nothing you can do about it. Then, in the service, there’s that constant
thought of home…. So, life had always been about anticipating the
next step … always just about to begin…. But … but now … there
wasn’t anything to look forward to…. No next step … just go on
living … but you don’t really feel like it … ’cause how can you go
on…?
But a little later on time seemed to appear, and there was a feeling
that time was moving and … that it was disappearing … passing
away, I mean. […]
Translation and notes by Molly Thomasy Blasing

Elena Fanailova
(b. 1962, Voronezh)
Elena Fanailova graduated from the Voronezh Medical Institute

and Voronezh University (with a degree in linguistics). She has
worked as a doctor, taught at the School of Journalism at Voronezh
University, and worked as a producer at the Voronezh regional TV
station. Since the late 1990s has lived in Moscow. From 1995-2012
was a correspondent for Radio Liberty and hosted several radio
shows. She is the author of six books of verse, and her poetry
and essays have been published in prominent Russian journals
and in online editions. Her book The Russian Version (translated
by Stephanie Sandler and Genia Turovskaya, Ugly Duckling
Presse, 2009) received the 2010 Best Tranlsated Book Award for
poetry. Fanailova received the Andrei Bely literary prize in 2009
for her book Especially Cynical (S osobym tsinizmom). Her poetry
represents a fusion of the lyrical and political and contributes to
contemporary political discussions.
F rom T he R ussi a n V ersion 1
“… Again they’re off for their Afghanistan…”
1
… Again they’re off for their Afghanistan,
And black roses in Grozny, big as fists,
On the plaza, as they form a square
On their way to being smashed to bits.
When they go to get sworn in,
She flies to give it up to him,
Like a new-fangled Tristan and Isolde
(Special dispatch to all posts)
And there’s a strange strain of Hep in Ashkhabad
He drinks magnesia from the common trough,

Making a racket with the metal chain
While she recites Our Father at the doctor’s
Counting the days of menstrual delays.
The cure proceeds at its own pace,
And meanwhile he carouses like a boy
Bored and jerking away his days
Corporal N., a bit older than the rest,

Who are still wet behind the ears,
Is an expert in the vulgar furlough arts,
He pours black wine for them,
1
Elena Fanailova, The Russian Version, trans. Stephanie Sandler and Genia Turovskaya,
with an introduction by Alexander Skidan (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009),
52-59, 149-59.
Elena Fanailova. From The Russian Version 209
Remembering, not from the authorized

Sections, but something along these lines:
The diseases of dirty hands are
Swallowed bullets made of shit
Common myth and communal hell.

She’s off to the abortion clinic,
Exactly as the doctor has prescribed,
Like a soldier marching the familiar march,
According to the commander’s drill.
And there she is, surrounded by her friends,
Slender and skittish fauns and dryads all—
Cattle at an abattoir.
There’s no free will,
Just chance, the luck to simply stay alive.
And there in ‘Ghanistan were beer-soaked moustaches,

Fucking beautiful Uzbek girls
Unbraiding bridles with their tongues.
They got to ride on armor metal,
Fast and crude.
Later, to keep the whole affair from leaking out,
The colonel himself shot them dead
In front of the regiment—or more precisely,
Had them shot, the ones who dragged
The girls into the bushes by their braids
And those who raped them in the bushes,
The Afghan girls who looked about sixteen,
But weren’t any older than twelve, and barely.
The rapists weren’t more than twenty.
Their families heard nothing of it.
And the ceiling bore down slowly like
A chopper to the sound of women wailing
Now they’re at the river getting soused

And reminiscing about the good old days.
And it’s as though a strange chill tugs
Against their corporeal flesh.

Now the lovers are both forty.
Or, more precisely, the husband and the wife.
The kid is ten, they had him late by Soviet standards.
Their scars speak for themselves.
I’ll never find another country such as this.
2
The story of how this text came to be is simple enough.
In August 2001 I was sitting on the bank of the Usmanka River,
near Voronezh. More precisely, I was sunbathing with a girlfriend;
a campsite, warm weather, the last days of summer when you could
still go swimming. Next to us was a group of people: husband and
wife, their son, the wife’s mother, and some man, to whom they
suddenly, and for no apparent reason, began to tell their story: how
the husband was taken by the army, that the training was in Grozny,
and the roses there were big and black, the time she went to see him
for the swearing in, the roses on the plaza were fist-sized, remember,
how beautiful the city was (addressing each other)? Then he came
down with jaundice, and was sent to Ashkhabad for some reason, to
the hospital, and they drank magnesium by the mug there, no other
available treatment, and in the evening, in the ward, they drank
local wine.
I was hooked by the combination of sounds in “roses and
Grozny” (the conversation was taking place on the second
anniversary of the Chechen war). Also by the fact that they made no
comments, no judgments along the lines of “they let the country go
to shit, the bastards,” so it was as though they were speaking about
their lives almost lightly, almost with humor. I gathered that they
were around my age, because then they talked about Afghanistan,
and immediately I began to fill in the medical history of that period
in their lives (something I know well from med school). I saw their
scars: the man had a laparotomy (most likely for a perforated ulcer).
The woman, surgery related to a cyst. Probably several abortions
too, taking into account their social status, and you can determine
that by the swimming trunks alone (the speech, the faces of former
defense industry workers who went into small business at the
right moment). Soviet gynecology was the legalization of extreme
humiliation and utter shame, all performed barracks-style, like the
rest of Soviet existence.
These people’s conversation (the systematic execution of the
perpetrators, the Uzbek military girls who the soldiers screwed, all
this recounted by the man, not at all self-conscious in front of his
wife and child; in my text nothing is invented), the whole course
and mechanism of this conversation call for a kind of opening of
a window in time, and through this window the draft of the eighties
begins to blow. The details, taste, and feel of the time all had to be
captured, whenever possible, without distortions. I started to write
the poem down right as their conversation was happening and
finished it the next day. The sense of violence is the main thing that
I remember about this era; this sense penetrated all entertainments,
pleasures, sensations and feelings, not to speak of work, and it was
fully present in the conversation of these people, my contemporaries.
They speak about monstrous things in a rather ordinary way, even
with some animation, because it is their youth they are referring to,
and in the moment of telling their story they re-enter it. My job was
to properly preserve this neutral intonation. The last line I wrote
was my own; it of course expresses the intolerable bitterness of life
and pain felt toward this country, and not at all an admiration for it,
as it has seemed to some readers.
Translated by Genya Turovskaya

Lena, or the Poet and the People
There’s a clerk in the all-night store

Where I stop after work
To buy food and drinks (I hate that word, drinks).
One time she said to me, “I saw you on TV
On the culture channel
I liked what you were saying.
Are you a poet? Let me read your book.
I’ll give it back, I promise.”
I say, “I don’t have a spare copy right now,
But when I get one,
I promise I’ll bring it to you.”
I wasn’t at all sure

She’d like the poems.
That actor’s urge to be liked
Is astonishing, whorish,
It disappeared after Sasha d-d,
But now it secretly returned.
Eventually an extra copy of my book

The Russian Version turned up
A poet has to get involved
Distributing books, after all
Publishers don’t do much on this front.
I handed it over. Right there, as I was paying for the food and drinks.
(Kefir for in the morning, one gin and tonic, a second gin and tonic,
Plus a little vodka,
And farewell, cruel world,
To quote Lvovsky’s1 version
Of two Nizhny Novgorod boys’ conversation.
No question, I remain a provincial teenager.)
1
Stanislav Lvovsky is a contemporary Russian poet and critic.
It turned out that Lena and I were namesakes.

I hate that word, namesakes
And even more I hate the word connect
It arouses physiological spasms in me
Possibly because
The word has echoes of coitus and sex,
But I prefer fucking, pure and simple.
After all, I am my own highest judge.
“Could you autograph it,” she says.

To Elena, I write, from Elena.
I hand it over nervously.
For a few days she doesn’t look me in the eye.
Then one day there aren’t many other people,
She says, “So, I read your book.
I didn’t understand a word of it:
Too many names of people no one knows.
I had the feeling that you write
For a narrow circle. For friends. For an in-group.
Who are these people, who are they, Elena?
The ones you name?
I gave it to my girlfriends to read,
One of them knows a little bit about literature.
She felt the same way:
It’s for a narrow circle.”
I say, “Well, the part about St. Tikhon of Zadonsk,

You didn’t get that?”
She says, “No, I got the part about Tikhon.”
I say, “What about Seryozha the drunk, did you get that?”
She says, “I got that.”
I say, “And the essays, you didn’t get them?”
“I got the prose,” she says.
“I even wanted to read more
About the people you were writing about.”
So I say, “Lena, believe me, I didn’t do it on purpose.
I don’t want it to be hard to figure out.
It just turns out that way.”

She looks at me sympathetically
And says, “Okay.”
I keep on justifying myself, “You know,
I write plenty of articles,
And if you understand the ones in the book,
Then you’d get the other ones too, right?”
She says, “Okay, I get it. So, do you want two beers and menthol
cigarettes?”
“Yes,” I say, “Lena,
I’m going to work on myself.
The balloon came back, a sign of wealth.
Look, that’s almost rhyme.”
Why in the world do I care if she gets it?

Why am I trying to justify myself?
Why do I have this furtive sense of unease?
This forgotten
Wish that she like me?
Do I want to be loved by the people,
Like Vodennikov2 (poet or pianist)?
Am I conducting a purely socio-cultural experiment
Like D.A. Prigov?3
I already conducted one experiment
In his memory
At the election of a king of poets
At the Polytechnic Institute
(I read an anti-Putin ditty
At a festival sponsored by his Administration.
The pure wave of icy hatred
that rushed at me from the audience—
Students from provincial theater institutes—
Was more than I had felt in a lifetime.
2
Contemporary Russian poet.
3
Poet and artist, the leader of Russian Conceptualism.
That’s a useful experiment.)
I always used to say:

Never show your poems
To your children or relatives
To workers or peasants
Instead, show factories and production plants,
To the poor—other people’s problems, to the rich as well
But I
Show the work of native speech
In a country of natural resources
I am not fucking anyone over,
Like that poetess, Johanna Pollyeva4
Obviously, this is an unthinkable claim

And an illegitimate assertion of power
My father was right to be angry
When he read in my adolescent diary:
I would not want to pretend
That I am the same as everyone else.
(“What, do you think you’re above the rest?”
He asked me with a passion
That bordered on sado-masochism.)
I was fifteen
And depressed for the first time
My parents didn’t notice a thing
I wasn’t a complainer
And wasn’t used to asking for attention
I don’t think I’m better

My claim is tougher than that
I think I’m different—male, female, other, the others
Like in the movie by that name
4
A poet, author of lyrics for several pop songs and at the same time the head of
the office of Russian State Duma (since 2012). From 2004-2011 she served as an
assistant to the President of the Russian Federation.
With Nicole Kidman in the lead
I don’t get why

On New Year’s Eve
People run around looking for a tree
And for gifts
I don’t get the dumb tradition
Of waiting around
For the President’s speech on TV
Before the drinking and eating
I spent this New Year’s Eve

On a train
From Moscow to Voronezh
With Chinese workers.
Their Year of the Rat begins in February
And they went to sleep at eleven
And I fell asleep with them
As opposed to my usual habit
Of staying up until four
I like to look into

Windows all lit up
Aquarium fish
Live there among the seaweed
This is all terribly interesting.
But I do not understand how it works
Who thought up the idea
Of drinking champagne
At the Metropolitan Opera?
On the other side of the world
It could have been entirely otherwise,
In short
I can’t pretend any longer
I walk home thinking:
Who is she, this Lena,
A clerk in an all-night store

Heavyset, fifty years old, with glasses
I love the word heavyset
She is plump, not all flabby, tall
A solid bleached blonde
She watches the Culture channel
When she’s not working around the clock
Coming out to smoke on the stoop
And joke with the security guard
Who was she in that previous life?
An engineer? A librarian?
I have to remember to ask next time
If there aren’t too many people around
And of course, she’s right:

It’s a complicated text,
Even when it pretends to be simple,
Like now
Translated by Stephanie Sandler

The Presnyakov Brothers
Oleg (b. 1969, Sverdlovsk)
and Vladimir (b. 1974, Sverdlovsk)
The Presnyakov brothers graduated from the school of philology

at Ural State University. Oleg defended his PhD dissertation on
Andrei Bely’s prose; Vladimir defended his on pedagogy. Both
taught at Ural State University. In 1998 they established an amateur
theatre at the university, for which they wrote their first plays.
The first play by Vladimir Presnyakov, Z.O.B, was published in
the “youth” issue of the journal Ural in 1999. In 2000 their joint
play Floor/Sexual Covering (Polovoe pokrytie) was read during
the Liubimovka festival, but the play was staged only in 2004.
In 2002 the New European Theatre festival in Moscow opened
with Kirill Serebrennikov’s production of their play Terrorism
on the Small Stage of the Moscow Art Theatre. This play soon
conquered world theatre stages, with numerous productions in
Europe and beyond. Terrorism was a success at London’s Royal
Court Theatre, where the play was staged in March 2003 during
International Playwrights Season. Half a year later the same
theatre premiered, with no less success, the Presnyakovs’ Playing
the Victim (Izobrazhaia zhertvu); its Moscow premiere took place
at the Moscow Art Theatre in June 2004, where it was once again
directed by Serebrennikov. In 2006 Serebrennikov adapted the
play to film. The film received awards at the Russian Film Festival
Kinotavr in Sochi and the Grand Prix of the First International
Film Festival in Rome. Since 2003 a number of Moscow theatres
have included the Presnyakovs’ plays in their repertoire. In 2009
Ivan Dykhovichnyi made a film based on their play Europe-Asia.
In 2005, the first part of the Presnyakovs’ novel To Kill the Judge
(Ubit’ sud’iu) was published. In 2013, they released the television
mini-series After School (Posle shkoly), which they wrote and
directed.
The Presnyakov Brothers 219
T er ror ism ( e xcer pts ) 1
SCENE ONE
The tarmacked area in front of an airport: instead of the cars usually parked
in this area, there are numerous passengers sitting on their bags and cases.
Judging by their miserable, huddled poses and their faces, which have stiffened
in an expression of resigned desperation and silent hysterics, they’ve been here
quite a while. It seems likely that these wretched people set off for the airport in
order to fly somewhere they needed to go: some of them on business trips; some of
them on holiday; and some of them, well, just because the time had come for them
to fly somewhere. However, something has put paid to their plans and forced all
these would-be flyers to stop right here on this inauspicious stretch of tarmac—
suddenly a focus of misfortune.
On the far side of the tarmac, directly in front of the glass-fronted airport
building, stretches a line of armed men. It appears that it is because of this long and
rather unsightly line of soldiers that no one can fly. The cordon is an indication of
the seriousness of what is happening. No one is talking—neither the soldiers, nor
the Passengers. It’s very quiet all around. There isn’t even the usual roar of planes
landing and taking off. There is a depressing feeling of paralysis, acting upon
all sounds and signs of life, and it is strengthened by the hardly discernible, yet
insistent rustling of the main entrance doors, opening and shutting. A guard in
the cordon is standing next to these automatic doors. He was positioned here and
he is not able to move from his post, so the doors, which react with great sensitivity
to the presence of a human body within their range, are twitching back and forth.
The doors will only stop twitching if the soldier moves from his post….
A new P a s s e n g e r appears on the tarmac. Without paying attention to
anyone, he walks with a carefully measured pace directly towards the guard, who is
standing motionless by the door. Actually it only seems that the P a s s e n g e r ,
1
From The Presnyakov Brothers, Terrorism, trans. Sasha Dugdale (London: Nick
Hern Books, 2003). Excerpts from Terrorism are copyright © 2003 The Presnyakov
Brothers, and the translations are copyright © 2003 Sasha Dugdale. Reprinted by
arrangement with the publishers, Nick Hern Books Ltd: www.nickhernbooks.co.uk
who is oblivious of everything, is walking towards the M a n i n a m i l i t a r y

u n i f o r m . In fact he is walking towards the doors, which the soldier’s bio force
has jammed. The P a s s e n g e r appears to know this route well. He walks almost
intuitively, without looking at anything around him, in his own little world, and
this is why he doesn’t notice anything strange about the scene….
M a n i n a m i l i t a r y u n i f o r m . The airport is closed.

P a s s e n g e r . Pardon?
P a s s e n g e r . But I have a flight to catch—it leaves in twenty
minutes.
M a n i n a m i l i t a r y u n i f o r m . Papers.
P a s s e n g e r . Here you are—this is my ticket and … erm … here’s
my passport…. (He fusses getting them out and hands them to the
soldier. The soldier studies them and hands them back.)
P a s s e n g e r . So how am I going to catch my plane?
The M a n i n a m i l i t a r y u n i f o r m remains silent, and sternly
and fixedly gazes straight through the P a s s e n g e r .
P a s s e n g e r . Listen, I’m sure you’re fed up of explaining why
no one is allowed into the airport, but I happen not to know.
I bought this ticket a week ago and no one warned me that
everything could be just canceled, because the airport had
closed without warning. So excuse me, but can you make
the effort to answer my questions—they’re completely
legitimate.
M a n i n a m i l i t a r y u n i f o r m . There is a bomb alert in the
airport and all flights are delayed for the foreseeable future.
When the airport has been cleared of explosive devices you will
be able to enter.
P a s s e n g e r . I will … but there won’t be much point by then….
Christ only knows what’s going on … bomb alerts at the airport.
And when will you…. What’s the point….
The P a s s e n g e r mumbles something else whilst moving away

from the soldier and sits down on his suitcase next to some other waiting
P a s s e n g e r s.
The Presnyakov Brothers. Terrorism 221
P a s s e n g e r (addressing the man sitting next to him, who is perched

regally on a checked case). Do you know what’s going on?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r (looking up at the sky and wrinkling up his eyes).
Of course … there’s a bomb alert in the airport….
P a s s e n g e r . Why … I mean, someone must have been arriving or
about to leave, someone very…. Someone they’d want to attack …
a politician or a scientist?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r (addressing S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r , who is
sitting on the tarmac as he has no baggage. Indeed the only way you’d
know he was a P a s s e n g e r is because he is waiting for the airport
to open, like the rest). Are you a politician?
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . No.
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . A scientist?
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . No.
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Strange. You’re the only person here who
looks anything like a politician or a scientist….
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Why?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Because you haven’t got any luggage.
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . So what?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . No luggage means nothing bothers you.
Either it’s being delivered, or you don’t need it at all, because
you’re so caught up in your politics or your science you don’t
think about anything else….
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Well actually I’m not thinking about
anything else. But I’m not a politician, or a scientist.
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Are you worth attacking?
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . No idea….
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . I mean, could they have planted bombs in the
airport because of you?
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r (nervily). What makes you think there are
bombs planted in the airport?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r (with irony). I’m guessing.
P a s s e n g e r . In fact it’s what that soldier said….
F i r s t and S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r s (together). The soldier said that?
P a s s e n g e r . Yes, he just told me.
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . I never heard anything like that from
them…. I just know someone left some bags on the runway, and
at the moment the bomb disposal people are trying to find out
what’s inside. And while they’re doing that, all the flights are
canceled and the airport is closed.
P a s s e n g e r . All because of some stupid bags?!
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . All because of some “stupid bags”?!
There could be anything in those bags! We could all go
up in smoke. And it’s naïve to suppose that bombs are
planted in airports because of politicians and scientists.
They’re planted there for everyone, everyone sitting here….
Because when totally normal, innocent people are killed it’s
even more shocking than when some famous person is. If
the most ordinary people are killed … I mean, often and
in large numbers, and not at war, but right in their homes
and in airplanes and on their way to work … well then,
everything in the country changes, and politicians with
their pointless politics and scientists with all their science
can go to hell….
P a s s e n g e r . To hell?
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Yes—because no one and nothing can
control a world in which ordinary people are killed that often
… and in such large numbers….
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Yeah—that’s right. Why go chasing after the
ones with the bodyguards? Because it’s so simple to kill an idea,
assassinate the sense in things … no one guards them, do they?
The meaning of life, the big idea … it’s in people, it’s in all of us,
and no one’s guarding us! Even now they’re guarding the airport
and not us.
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . The innocent always suffer….
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . That’s right. The innocent always suffer….
After saying this phrase F i r s t and S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r s shake
their heads theatrically.
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Although one way or another everyone’s
guilty of something.
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Still, that’s no reason to start bombing
everyone.
P a s s e n g e r . Hang on, so where did you get the idea that something
in those bags could blow up?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . They’re finding out right now. We’re not

claiming anything—we’re just discussing it. And they (He points
at the soldiers. standing in a line.) … they’re finding out….
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . But in any case, it’s already blown up.
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Yes, that’s right. It’s blown up.
P a s s e n g e r . What? (Looks around theatrically.) So where’s the
smoke? The splinters? Ruins? Where are they?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . It’s all inside.
P a s s e n g e r . Inside?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Yes. Inside all these people sitting here right
now—and the ones who are stopping us going in (He points
at the soldiers.) … Those people standing in the cordon …
they were tom away from something, from their own lives,
whoever they were … made to worry, panic, even if they are
pretending that they’re not scared. But they’re cold inside,
a nasty little cold draught is blowing through them. They
pretend it isn’t, but it is, I can see…. In all of us here something
has been broken, we’ve been made to think about something
completely different. And what can we do about it? Eh?
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . And think about the ones out there on
the runway at the moment—they’re risking their lives opening
those bags. There are three suitcases and in every single one of
them there could be an explosive.
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . In every one of them?
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . It’s not ruled out. There’d be such a blast
that even here we’d be covered in splinters.
P a s s e n g e r . You’ve clearly been here quite a while, you must be
absolutely furious. You’ve obviously got to the point when you
know what each other’s going to say, because you really seem
to have your stories straight.
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r (as if frightened). Straight?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r (mockingly). Straight!
After this everyone is silent for a while.
P a s s e n g e r . What’s the time?

F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . What difference does it make? No one’s going
anywhere anyway. Where were you trying to get to?
P a s s e n g e r . Does it matter? I just needed to get there. I wanted

to fly from this place to another … meetings…. I was given
a lift here. My wife packed my bag and saw me off and she’ll be
waiting for me tomorrow, and they’ll be waiting for me there in
three hours’ time. But it seems I’m not going to be there in three
hours….
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . You won’t!
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . No, you won’t!
P a s s e n g e r . So I’m going to be late everywhere, it appears. What
shall I do?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . What indeed?
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . If everything blows up we won’t be flying
anywhere for a while, till they mend everything….
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . We won’t be flying anywhere at all, if that
happens!
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . If they get rid of the bombs we won’t be
going anywhere for a while anyway.
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Really?
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . It’ll be two or three hours while they redo
the timetable, after all, everything’s been put back.
P a s s e n g e r . As long as nothing blows up. I’ve got to get there,
whatever it takes. I’ve got to get there….
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . You’ll get there. In about six hours at the
earliest, if they defuse the bombs right now.
P a s s e n g e r . Good God. It’s madness—what sort of an age do we
live in? You don’t feel safe anywhere now, only at home….
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . At home?
P a s s e n g e r . Only at home now.
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . You hold on to your convictions.
P a s s e n g e r . What do you mean?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Who knows what all this will come to? For
example, have you any idea what’s become of competition?
P a s s e n g e r . Competition? You mean, market forces?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Whatever! When someone wants to prove to
someone else that he’s better than he really is—it’s a harmless
enough idea, isn’t it, and what’s become of it?
P a s s e n g e r . What? What has become of it?
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Competition is all about choice now. If

there’s something else on offer, why not go for it? It means
choosing, it means, horror of horrors, refusing.
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . In theory, yeah, that’s right—there is an issue
of choice. But, like, they say Pepsi and Coca-Cola are owned
by the same company and all this competition stuff is just
a clever trick. If you don’t buy one, you definitely buy the other,
and the owner gets the profit from the lot, because it’s all his.
All of it!
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Yes … yes … yes…. Hmmm. So in fact this
issue of choice is probably just a decoy. It’s a sham. Everything
has already been decided. Even now.
P a s s e n g e r . Now?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Of course. See, I’m boiling with rage inside.
I can barely hold back from attacking someone because I’m
late, I’m not going to make it on time, and actually I could
have died—it’s a good thing they discovered those bags on the
runway in time. And, in fact, I’ve got no choice. I’ve got to sit
here and wait until all this madness is over. I’m forced to take
part in it all.
P a s s e n g e r . Well I have got a choice.
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Really?
P a s s e n g e r . Yes. I’m going home. And when everything’s returned
to normal I’ll come back and get my flight. But right now I’m
going home because I have no desire to wait here. This doesn’t
concern me and actually I don’t care what happens. I’ll wait it
out at home, they’ll change my ticket, the airline will pay me
compensation for the delay and I’ll make it to where I wanted
to go anyway. I’ll be late, but I’ll make it. And it doesn’t matter
whether I’m on time or not as I have a good excuse. They can
turn on their TVs and they’ll find out that I’ve got a decent
excuse. I’ll wait it out at home.
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . You’re just trying to convince yourself!
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Do you think it will help?
P a s s e n g e r (muttering). There’s a bomb alert in the airport, I’m
off home. I’ll be back in an hour maximum. Right, that’s it.
I’m off.
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . So are you really going home?

P a s s e n g e r . Yes. There’s no point in hanging around here, this
pantomime will go on for ages.
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . For ages.
P a s s e n g e r . Goodbye.
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . But you’re coming back?
P a s s e n g e r . Of course I am. I’ll get my flight today whatever.
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . Well then, see you soon.
P a s s e n g e r . See you soon?
F i r s t p a s s e n g e r . As soon as this madness is over, there’ll
be another, probably something along the lines of stuffing
everyone into one plane, which will race around at the speed of
sound dropping us all off where we need to be….
P a s s e n g e r . I don’t get your stupid jokes … what d’you mean by
that? What’s the point of joking right now?
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . So are they waiting for you?
P a s s e n g e r . Who?
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . Where you’re going. There. If there’s no
one waiting for you why don’t you stay?
P a s s e n g e r . It’ll be a surprise. (He collects up his belongings.)
S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r . See you then.
The P a s s e n g e r leaves and F i r s t and S e c o n d p a s s e n g e r s
remain seated, waiting.
S C EN E T WO
The bedroom in a standard flat. In the middle of the room is a large bed.
Slightly to the side is a cupboard with a mirror, and by the bed are bedside tables
with lamps and a telephone on one. There’s a M a n and W o m a n in the bed.
W o m a n . I feel bad…. (She’s on the verge of crying.)

M a n . Oh don’t start. Anything but that. What’s wrong with you, eh?
What’s this all about—all this emotional stuff suddenly? Some
memory upsetting you? Why are you crying for no reason?
W o m a n . I don’t know. I feel bad, confused … like a used ashtray.
M a n . A used ashtray….
W o m a n . I don’t know.... It’s like when you’ve held back for

a long time, you really think it’s going to be special with that
particular man, or with any man in fact … you hang on, you
fantasize, and then, when it all happens, the second after, this
emptiness suddenly descends on you, and now, this is like the
whole lot together….
M a n . There must be something wrong with you … you can’t go
round being like that!
W o m a n . I don’t know…. But the hardest thing is getting over
these first few seconds and minutes. After that, when you start
to want it again, it gets easier…. (Suddenly shouts.) And then it
all happens again! The whole lot again….
M a n . You’re a psychopath! How on earth does your husband put
up with you?
W o m a n . Habit.
M a n . Habit … he puts up with you out of habit…. And are these
hysterics of yours also habit, or did you arrange this show
especially for me?
W o m a n . For you … for you. It’ll pass in a minute. How was it for
you?
M a n . Yeah, alright. Could do it again.
W o m a n . Oh God, find another word, anything else … are you
trying to kill me?
M a n (theatrically, and with a slightly mournful intonation, reads
a poem aloud).
Late autumn,
The rooks have flown,
The trees are naked,
The fields are bare,
Only a strip left to be mown,
Casts us suddenly into despair,
As if ears of corn were whispering together:
We’re miserable here in the raging weather….
W o m a n . Stop it!
M a n . I dunno. It’s helped me ever since school. I say it in my
head or out aloud and the time flies past and I think about
those ears of com and not about whatever it is that’s troubling
me … just the ears of corn. It gets better as it goes on, because

those ears of corn are sort of waiting for a peasant who hasn’t
ploughed the land or harvested them, yeah, so they’re waiting
and calling him and then there’s an answer, right, this voice
from above or something, says to them, I mean, to these ears
of corn:
He doesn’t reap or sow the field,

Because he is so very sick.
The hands that tended strips of land
Have dried to old stick,
And hang like whips.
W o m a n (turns right over to face the M a n and suddenly climbs

on top of him. The violent and yet coquettish way she does this suggests
a sudden mood change). Fancy tying me up?
M a n . Tie you up? What with? I don’t wear a belt … with his
belt?
W o m a n . He doesn’t wear one…. Oh, tie me up with a pair of
tights.
M a n . Tights?
W o m a n . Yeah—take some out of the cupboard and I’ll lie here
like I’m unconscious. (She rolls away from the M a n and pushes him out
of the bed with her feet. The M a n falls on the floor.) So I’m lying here
unconscious and you tie me up, whilst I’m still unconscious, and
I’ll come round straight away, but it will be too late and you will
possess me completely and I will submit, helplessly.
M a n (crawls over to the cupboard). Won’t the tights tear?
W o m a n . No, they won’t. (She adopts the pose of a woman who is
unconscious for some unclear reason of her own.)
Come on then, they’re over there in the cupboard in the middle
drawer.
The naked M a n stands up in front of the cupboard and opens the
door. In front of him there are a large number of drawers of underwear. The
M a n opens one, then another, quickly scans the drawer and, discovering
nothing made of nylon, he sits down on the ground, deciding to make
a more detailed search from the bottom of the cupboard.
M a n (pulling a pair of socks out of the cupboard). Your husband wears

long socks. (He reads the word embroidered on the socks.) Carpenter….
They’re long ones … shall I tie you up with these, then?
W o m a n . They could be dirty. He always chucks them back in with
everything else without sorting them.
M a n . With everything else … (He lifts the socks to his nose and sniffs.)…
they’re dirty … (He lifts them again.) … what a strange smell….
W o m a n . Oh, I can’t bear it…. Get on with it, won’t you!
(She lies back as if unconscious.)
M a n . You live in a pigsty….
W o m a n (comes to, irritated). You keep an eye on your own wife.
This pigsty is fine by me.
M a n (takes a pair of women’s knickers out of the drawer and lifts them
to his nose). That’s strange—your underwear smells like your
husband’s socks.
W o m a n (explodes). Did he chuck them in with my underwear?
M a n . No, they’re in a different drawer, but they smell the same.
W o m a n . Give them here!
The M a n throws the long “Carpenter” socks and the knickers over to the
W o m a n in the bed. The W o m a n sniffs the knickers first and then her
husband’s socks.
That’s odd…. Are you sure they weren’t in the same drawer?
M a n . Sure. This is all your stuff—(He points at one of the middle
drawers.)—and this is his—(He points at another drawer higher
up.)—and these socks were down here actually. (He points at the
lowest drawer.)
W o m a n . I don’t know. It’s probably the cupboard making them
smell.
M a n . The cupboard?
W o m a n . Yeah, the smell of wood….
M a n . Wood….
W o m a n (throws the socks and the knickers at the M a n ). Put them
back and stop sniffing everything, will you? Get on with the
business, for God’s sake!
M a n (crosses to another compartment of the cupboard and opens it;
in front of him is a space filled to bursting with clothes; the clothes
are heaped up in a pile right to the very top of the cupboard). Your
cupboard is full!
W o m a n . And?
M a n (pulls a crumpled and creased pair of tights from the heap of clothes,
then another pair and carries on until he has about five or six pairs).
That’s not good!
W o m a n . Why?
M a n . If your husband comes home I’ll have nowhere to hide.
W o m a n . He’s not coming home.
M a n . Not at all?
W o m a n . He gets back tomorrow.
M a n . All the same, we should have arranged this for when he
was definitely on the plane. Or after he’d arrived in wherever
he was going to. He could have rung to let you know he’d
got there or something. I shouldn’t have come until then.
Because this way was ridiculous—me sitting on the bench,
waiting for him to come out of the building and walk off
into the distance. (He goes over to the bed and gets up on it,
continuing to speak, and starts tying the Woman’s hands.) I had
fantasies, too—about breaking in here and making love to
you…. See, I don’t care about the stuff people normally care
about. You know, usually, when it’s someone else’s wife, you
ask, “Did you give him a goodbye kiss? Did he hug you?”
I don’t care about all that stuff because every one of us does
exactly what they want. And I feel down and empty straight
after I come as well, and then I want to do it again and then
I want to eat…. It’s horribly ordinary, somehow, even the
fact that you’re someone else’s wife and I’m tying you up …
should I tie your legs?
W o m a n (momentarily coming round and immediately afterwards
“losing” consciousness again). Yes.
M a n (continuing to speak and to tie her up). I don’t want to think about
all this…. I want to imagine that … yes … something untasted
and deliciously interesting is lying in front of me, all tied up,
and I’m about to violate it and nothing will happen to me as
a result, because, in theory, everything has been mutually
agreed, although this stuff wasn’t in the small print (After tying
the W o m a n ’s legs he lays on top of her. He doesn’t move for a while

and then he begins the sexual act.) and I know that I’d be far happier
if I really had the urge to tie someone up and get pleasure from
it, or to secretly sniff someone’s underwear or socks and to get
off on it so totally that I could come with the single thought that
I was about to sniff something intimate, something not mine.
That would make me feel good … but I don’t like that stuff,
I can’t get into it, and anyway I’ve realized that every little bit
of my body is separate from the other bits and lives its own
life, not understood by the rest of my body. All of it is separate
and sometimes, right, one part of me terrorizes another part,
yeah … at the moment my mind is making fun of everything
that should turn me on. So I’m rubbing myself on you, but not
getting any excitement because it’s like I’m in a diving suit, and
the fact that I’m hard and I’ll probably come in a minute—all
that’s my memory keeping me going, but every time my mind
commits a terrorist act I get closer to forgetting everything and
the first thing that will happen then is that I’ll become impotent
and then it’ll go further and further and if I suddenly don’t like
the smell of someone’s underwear or something, then that’ll be
it … that’s it … that’s it. (He comes.)
W o m a n . I’ve gone numb all over.
M a n . Because of the tights? Shall I untie you?
W o m a n . Because of your words…. I don’t know … they’re like
chains….
M a n . Right.
W o m a n . Turns out you’re worse than me. I just felt bad and
I wanted to spoil your mood too, infect you with it—but you’re
a nightmare, you’re completely hopeless … untie me.
M a n . I wouldn’t mind a bite to eat.
W o m a n . Great. Untie me.
M a n . I wouldn’t mind a bite … so I must have something to eat,
that’s for certain. After the second go I don’t feel so bad myself
because I get up an appetite and suddenly I think “that was
worth doing, after all” … it was worth it if only to get up an
appetite…. I must feed it though, because while it’s still there,
there’s still hope.
W o m a n . Christ! The more time I spend with you, listening to all

your words, the more I like my husband … soon it’ll get to the
point where I fall in love with him again.
M a n . I’m saving your marriage.
W o m a n . Untie me.
M a n . Is there anything to eat?
W o m a n . In the kitchen … in the fridge. There’s a glass bowl
covered with a plate. Salad in it.
M a n . Bread?
W o m a n . White? Black?
M a n . Black?
W o m a n . There’s no black.
M a n . White?
W o m a n . Baguette.
M a n . Baguette?
W o m a n . It’s stale…. We don’t eat bread…. From the day before
yesterday…. We had guests the day before yesterday. Untie me.
M a n . No I won’t untie you. Can I eat in bed?
W o m a n . No. You should eat at the table, but if you don’t untie
me you can eat in bed, ’cause no one’s going to stop you eating
in bed.
M a n (stands up and goes out to the kitchen. He shouts from the kitchen).
I’ll eat straight out of the bowl, alright?
W o m a n . Aren’t you going to untie me?
M a n . No. This way is more interesting….
He appears in the bedroom with the bowl, chewing. He starts to say something
else but he is interrupted by the sound of the phone ringing. The phone rings
twice. The bound W o m a n twitches. The M a n stands and looks at the phone.
The answering machine clicks on.
A n s w e r i n g m a c h i n e . Hallo. There is no one at home. Please

leave a message after the tone. (The tone sounds and then the
machine suddenly fails—it repeats the recorded message and after
it the tone sounds and cuts off once again. A long hissing sound
remains….)
W o m a n . There you go—and the answering machine’s gone
wrong! Turn it off, will you? That sound drives me mad. (The
M a n stands there, the answerphone hisses—suddenly it quiets of its

own accord and seems to fade out.) Thanks.
M a n . You’re welcome. Only I didn’t even touch it.
W o m a n . Never mind. The main thing is it shut up. What were you
saying?
M a n . Who do you think it was?
W o m a n . Who cares who it was. What, were you saying, would be
more interesting?
M a n . Real violence. I was saying that real violence would be more
interesting. I’m not going to untie you. It couldn’t have been
him?
W o m a n . Him, her … whatever. I’m out!
M a n (settles on the bed and eats). I’m definitely out!
W o m a n . That’s for sure! What are you going to do when you’ve
finished eating?
M a n . Have a sleep.
W o m a n . What about me?
M a n . You can do what you like … but I’m not going to untie
you yet. I’ll have a sleep, rest a bit and then make love to you
again.
W o m a n . You’ve got it all worked out perfectly … almost too
perfectly!
M a n . You don’t like it?
W o m a n . No!
M a n . Excellent! Now it’s for real … none of this playing around. Is
it turning you on?
W o m a n . Not just yet!
M a n . Wait then. (He finishes eating and puts the empty bowl on the
ground, lies down on the pillow and wraps himself up in the blanket.)
W o m a n . What are you doing?
M a n (as if he was half-asleep). Perhaps in a minute … or maybe in an
hour … I’ll jump on top of you….
W o m a n . What? Are you really going to have a sleep?
M a n . I’ll try….
W o m a n (hysterically). Untie me! Untie me!
M a n . Do you want me to gag you?
W o m a n (scared). No.
M a n . Stop shouting then….

W o m a n . OK.
M a n . See, you’re liking it already.
W o m a n (hissing like a snake). Don’t sleep for long—I’ll get pins and
needles in my hands.
M a n . Gag … gag … horrible word, that—gag.
W o m a n . You understood me … pins and needles in my hands.
M a n (turns onto his side). Your bed squeaks like a swing—
W o m a n . A swing?
M a n . Yeah, a swing. You’ve got a swing in your yard and whilst
I was waiting for your husband to disappear a kid was swinging
for ages, and the swing made this eek-eek noise and your bed
sounds just like that…. It squeaked the whole time when I,
when we—
W o m a n . Hey—well I can only check whether it squeaks or not
with you—
M a n . Just don’t complain!
W o m a n . I’m not!
M a n . You’re the victim, I’m the rapist…. It would be absurd if you
started complaining to me.
W o m a n . You started complaining to me first! That’s even more
absurd—the rapist complaining to the victim that her bed squeaks.
The M a n jumps up from the bed and runs over to the cupboard. He grabs
some piece of underwear from a drawer and returns to the bed. He screws up
the underwear and stuffs it into the W o m a n ’s mouth. The W o m a n
twitches, tries to bellow something out, but the M a n stops up her mouth even
more firmly.
M a n . You’re really spoiling it for me … you’re stopping me getting

in the proper mood…. (The W o m a n soundlessly writhes.) I’ll
wake up just as you’re getting tired and we’ll have a good time.
You’ll have a doubly good time, I’ll screw you and untie you.
Heaven. (He covers himself in the blanket from his head down. The
W o m a n twitches some time more and then calms down. Suddenly
the M a n throws off the blanket and gets up.) Can you hear? (He
remembers that the W o m a n can’t answer.) Oh…. Something’s
hissing. Is it the answerphone or something…. I didn’t tum it
off, did I? They’re probably still working out a message to leave

us…. Oh well, let them think…. (He covers himself in the blanket
from his head down.)
[…]
SCENE FOUR
A yard with a bench. Two old W o m e n are sitting on the bench. From
far off comes the sound of a swing. It is as if somewhere in the depths of the yard
an invisible person is swinging on a rusty swing—a rusty robot. The robot likes
swinging—so it’s not very likely that he’s going to stop for a break at any point
and even less likely that he’s going to leave the swing in peace—he’s going to be
swinging forever. The W o m e n sitting on the bench have probably realized this
and they are trying to get used to the iron sounds piercing their hearts, and imitate
them with the sounds and the droning of their own voices.
F i r s t w o m a n . Are you dressed up warmly?

S e c o n d w o m a n . Yes. (She pulls up her skirt and displays to the
other W o m a n her pink woolen longjohns.) That Lisa’s had a chill
in her bladder and she always wears a pair like this, right over
her tights. As soon as there’s a breeze, even a light one, she gets
a chill in her bladder straight away. And then she wees blood.
Says it’s like someone was sticking a fork or a penknife into her
weehole. There she is squatting over the toilet and waiting for
it to cut its way through. Five minutes, ten, twenty … and then
it’s got blood in it. She was wretched with it until she started
wearing these.
F i r s t w o m a n . Better safe than sorry.
S e c o n d w o m a n . Better safe than sorry.
F i r s t w o m a n (turning towards the sounds of the swing, shouts). You
not tired yet?
C h i l d ’s v o i c e . No!
F i r s t w o m a n . Well go on, then, go on. Have a swing.
S e c o n d w o m a n . Let him swing.
F i r s t w o m a n . His parents come home, lock him up in their four
rooms and he goes over to the window and looks out, looks at
that swing … like a dog who hasn’t been taken for a walk he
looks out. I say to them, let the kid go outside, and they act like
they can’t hear me, I mean, like I’m there but I’m not. I’m like the
noise of the running water when you wash up … they notice me
when they want something…. You’re a witness.
S e c o n d w o m a n . Yes.
F i r s t w o m a n . Like, I wouldn’t wish evil on anyone….
S e c o n d w o m a n . No….
F i r s t w o m a n . But them…. You’ll see! It’s right to my face. Like
only yesterday I says to them, if I’m getting in your way … if
you don’t want anyone in the way, well then put me in a home
for old people. What do I care? I’ve seen everything I need to,
they’re the ones who’ve got to live and bring up the kid.
S e c o n d w o m a n . Oh come off it! Honestly, what sort of home
would that be, then?
F i r s t w o m a n . The usual sort. At least I’ll know there that
I’m definitely no use to anyone. I mean, look how they
treat me here. My own flesh and blood and they talk to me
like that!
S e c o n d w o m a n . What about your daughter?
F i r s t w o m a n . What about her? Sleeps with him at night and
then repeats his words all day. She does everything he puts
into her head at night…. Sometimes I wonder if it’s my own
daughter or not.
S e c o n d w o m a n . Only got yourself to blame.
F i r s t w o m a n . Only got myself….
S e c o n d w o m a n . I warned you, when he’d only just started
seeing your girl … I told you straight off—he’ll make trouble for
you! He’ll get his hands on the lot! You weren’t quick enough,
you didn’t see him coming! And now you’ll suffer for it!
F i r s t w o m a n (whimpering). Yes.
S e c o n d w o m a n . What in God’s name were you thinking of? You
know what nationality he is. It’s in their blood—commanding,
taking control … and you allowed the blood to mix… .
F i r s t w o m a n . Lovely child, though.
S e c o n d w o m a n . Lovely! But so what? Grow up just like his
Dad! Degenerate!
F i r s t w o m a n . Stop it!
S e c o n d w o m a n . Come on. If you don’t manage to drag

him out from his Father’s influence he’ll grow up just the
same.
F i r s t w o m a n . But he’s got a good job, money corning in!
S e c o n d w o m a n . How much of this money do you see? Any?
There you go. Where does he dance—in a casino?
F i r s t w o m a n . A club, in the restaurant….
S e c o n d w o m a n . So he’ll keep the job as long as this fashion for
ethnic holds. They get a load of these ones, like your son-in-law
and ask them to dance and sing, all in their … national style.
And no one understands a word of it, do they, what they’re
singing and dancing, ’cause everyone’s on drugs, the in-crowd
and they’re in seventh heaven—someone in front of them
wriggling and howling something they don’t understand. The
ones who’ve got money—they get high on it, on all this ethnic,
and invest in the ones like your son-in-law. These ethnics then
reckon that someone has really understood the stuff they’re
singing, when in fact no one gives a monkeys—it’s just they’ve
made it the fashion, ‘cause no one cares about normal songs and
dances, they’ve all got brains like Aero bars, full of holes—and
to them it’s boring. No one gets off on simple understandable
human language or straight culture anymore. Druggies,
druggies all around, they’ve got the money, these producers,
network marketing managers, supervisors … all working for
drugs…. My whole pension goes on paying for my mobile and
food, and they’re working to pay for the drugs as well. Just wait
and see, this fashion for ethnic will pass and your son-in-law
will be back sweeping the yard or nicking scrap metal—which
is, after all, what these shepherds in their ribboned shirts should
be doing.
F i r s t w o m a n . So, if they chuck him out of work, I’ll have to
support them, will I?
S e c o n d w o m a n . No one’ll ask you. You’ll be in slavery,
sweetheart. Or they’ll just drown you in the bath and take the
flat for themselves.
F i r s t w o m a n . Oh my God, are you serious … what am I going to
do….
S e c o n d w o m a n . Here you are! (Takes a little phial out of her coat

pocket and stretches it out towards the F i r s t w o m a n .)
F i r s t w o m a n . What’s this?
S e c o n d w o m a n . This is war, d’you understand? It’s time to
move from preventative measures to ground attack! In this
war it’s the first to make a move comes out the winner. One
of these tablets in his soup or his tea every day and in just six
months daughter, grandson and his favourite Gran will be one
happy family. All that’ll remain of the son-in-law are … happy
memories.
F i r s t w o m a n . Look at these round pills. Is this poison or
something?
S e c o n d w o m a n . Lozenges, love. Of course it’s poison—don’t
worry—you won’t be found out—it’s already tried and tested—
personally, by me! And your son-in-law is just a crook, my
husband was way worse!
F i r s t w o m a n . So you—
S e c o n d w o m a n . Helped him! Helped him, or he’d have been
around another twenty years, preparing to meet his maker.
F i r s t w o m a n . He was such a nice man—
S e c o n d w o m a n . Nice? That nice man ruined my whole life. It’s
only the last year I’ve started to live like a real person. Freedom,
my own flat, all the kids sorted out and no one bothering me.
F i r s t w o m a n . How many tablets? One?
S e c o n d w o m a n . One.
F i r s t w o m a n . What about two? Would it be twice as fast?
S e c o n d w o m a n . If you try two—I’m telling you now—I won’t
be bringing you food parcels in prison. He’ll have shit running
in his veins instead of blood and they’ll work out it was you
straightaway … so you be patient, let it take its time…. And
then no one will guess what happened … just one tablet a day!
Do you understand?
A M a n carrying some suitcases approaches the bench where the F i r s t
and S e c o n d w o m a n are sitting and sits down a little way from the
W o m e n , puts the suitcases down near him and looks down at the ground.
He tenses his forehead and mutters something. His eyes are already wet and the
wetness is just about to trickle down onto his cheeks. The W o m e n break off
their conversation and look discreetly out of the comers of their eyes at the M a n
sitting next to them. The F i r s t w o m a n calls out theatrically in the direction
of the squeaking swings, still squinting at their strange companion.
F i r s t w o m a n . Are you tired yet?

C h i l d ’s v o i c e . No!
F i r s t w o m a n . Well go on, then, go on. Have a swing.
S e c o n d w o m a n . Let him swing.
The M a n , unable to restrain himself, starts crying.
F i r s t w o m a n . What’s wrong, eh?
S e c o n d w o m a n . Hey, hey, hey … now then … come on … get
a grip!
F i r s t w o m a n . Here’s a hanky. Wipe your eyes. (She offers the
M a n a hanky.)
M a n . Thank you.
The M a n wipes away his tears. The WOMEN stare at him, expecting that
he will unburden himself to them any moment now.
M a n . Yes…. (He loses himself in thought and looks into the distance.
His tears stop flowing and his eyes dry up.) So what’s up with you?
F i r s t w o m a n . With us?
S e c o n d w o m a n . What do you mean?
M a n . Well, why are you sitting here, what are you waiting for?
F i r s t w o m a n . I’m giving my grandson some fresh air!
S e c o n d w o m a n . And I’m getting a bit of fresh air … what’s
wrong with that? I’ve got the whole day ahead!
M a n . Well then…. (He stands up, picks up the suitcases and walks
off.)
F i r s t w o m a n . Well look at him!
S e c o n d w o m a n . Honestly, do I have to account for what I’m
doing out here? It’s my husband I account to, and he’s hardly
going to ask me!
F i r s t w o m a n . I always sit here! My grandson is swinging over
there, and so what?
S e c o n d w o m a n . Those bossy types, I’ve always managed to
get away from them, and now, thank you very much, I’m free,
I do exactly what I want! So now does every so-and-so think
he’s got the right to ask me questions and give me instructions?

Do I have to write reports or something now?
F i r s t w o m a n . I took him into the yard one block along for a walk.
The swings are better over there. These two military types came
up and asked if some green car was ours.
S e c o n d w o m a n . Who does he think he is … taking his suitcases
out for a walk….
F i r s t w o m a n . I says to them, it’s not … why you asking?
S e c o n d w o m a n . He was probably late somewhere and annoyed
about that, and we got in his way…. I’m not leaving this place
ever.
F i r s t w o m a n . So then they asked for my name and address.
The car’s tires had been let down, they said, and no one knows
whose it is, so they start asking if I knew anything or saw
anyone get in it or let down the tires.
S e c o n d w o m a n . I’m not waiting for anything any more. I’ve
done my bit of waiting … and then this one turns up here and
starts asking…. I did my bit of waiting thirty years ago and now
I’ve stopped waiting.
F i r s t w o m a n . I says to them that I hadn’t seen who got into
the car or who let down the wotsits, I’ve got other things to
worry about—my grandson is on the swing over there and why
should I give my name to any old so-and-so?!
S e c o n d w o m a n . I don’t even report back to my grown-up
children where I’ve sat and where I’ve been, so why does
some other bloke think he’s got the right? They’ve got their
lives, I’ve got mine—it just so happened that their lives started
from me, but I don’t make any demands on them because
of that! And they know they won’t get anything from their
Mother.
F i r s t w o m a n . All the same they took down the lot, wrote it
down, even my postcode! See what I mean! So I don’t go to that
yard anymore—keep well clear! There’s a swing here as well.
Not a bad swing. Give us those pills, then.
The squeak of the swing suddenly stops.
S e c o n d w o m a n . Take them. (She passes the F i r s t w o m a n the

bottle of tablets.) Who is he, anyway? What’s his name? With his
suitcases! Nowadays they have to check out anyone carrying
suitcases.
F i r s t w o m a n . What’s that on your forehead?
She stares at the forehead of her elderly friend. She has a bright
red dot shining and trembling slightly, right in the middle of
her forehead, like the symbol of marriage on an Indian woman.
Only this isn’t a symbol of marriage, but a laser sight.
S e c o n d w o m a n . What?
F i r s t w o m a n . Red dot. Come here. (She spits on her finger and
tries to rub the dot off, but the red dot, like a ray of sun, escapes from
her finger and settles slightly higher.) I need a hanky.
S e c o n d w o m a n . He took it off with him! Well I never! Took us
for a right old ride, didn’t he. Stop it, will you?
(She pushes away the hand of her friend from her forehead.)
F i r s t w o m a n . Oh—it’s disappeared! Oh—it’s back again!

S e c o n d w o m a n . What’s that, then?
F i r s t w o m a n . Oh—I think it’s one of those laser sights…. Like
a sniper’s aiming at you…
S e c o n d w o m a n . What for?
F i r s t w o m a n . To shoot you.
S e c o n d w o m a n . Oh my goodness! (Jumps up and runs around the
bench, hides behind the F i r s t w o m a n and peeps out from behind
her back.) Look, what’s that your grandson is pointing at us?
F i r s t w o m a n . Oh! That’s what his dad gave him—it’s only a toy,
that laser sight.
S e c o n d w o m a n . So it’s started already! That’s how it all
starts, with toys! Tell him to put it away! (Hides behind F i r s t
w o m a n .) Tell him!
F i r s t w o m a n (shouts at the CHILD). What are you up to, eh?
(Turns to her friend.) Don’t be scared, it doesn’t shoot, it just
aims.
S e c o n d w o m a n . Oh right, it aims—it just aims and then it
shoots! (She shouts to the disobedient CHILD.) Put it away, do you
hear? Move it away from us!
F i r s t w o m a n (to the CHILD). Sit down and have a swing! Sit

down and have a swing, love!
S e c o n d w o m a n . He’s not listening!
F i r s t w o m a n . Right, I’ll teach him! (She rushes over to the swing
with a shout.) Didn’t I tell you to put that thing away? Put it
away! Sit down and have a swing! Or I’ll take you home!
S e c o n d w o m a n (getting up). Look at what blood makes people
do. Just in their blood, and that’s it, nothing you can do, doesn’t
matter how you bring them up, you need to poison the lot of
them, every single one…. (Shouts at the F i r s t w o m a n .) Go
on, break it! Break it into bits, so he won’t ever play with it
again! (She runs over to the swing.)
SCENE FIVE
In the shower changing rooms at the base of one of the military police divisions.
Steam from the showers penetrates into the changing rooms and envelops the
countless lockers and low benches. A M a n with an athletic build is sitting on
one of the benches in front of an open locker. He is squeezing white cream out of
a long, large tube onto his palm and then rubbing it carefully on his toes. There is
an impatient knocking and rattling from the next locker as if someone was locked
in there and trying to break open the door from inside. At this point the door opens
with a bang and two more young M e n run into the changing rooms with towels
around their waists. One is holding a box of washing powder, the other runs over
to his locker, digs around in it and gets out a sheet of white paper. Together they go
over to the locker, from which the noise is coming, laughing and egging each other
on. One shakes out some powder on the paper and the other one lifts it over to the
chinks in the door of the locker and blows as hard as he can. There is the sound of
coughing from inside the locker. The M e n guffaw, pleased with their little joke.
F i r s t m a n . Chemical weapon attack!

S e c o n d m a n (shouts into the locker). Don’t breathe!
T h i r d m a n (rubbing cream off his hands). Why do you keep getting
at him?
F i r s t m a n . ‘Cause he’s a fucking meatball!
S e c o n d m a n . Ravioli man! (They both roar with laughter and lift the
paper with the powder on it up to the locker and blow. Someone starts
coughing loudly in the locker.)
T h i r d m a n . Where’ve you been today?

F i r s t m a n . A fire. Someone blew up a block.
T h i r d m a n . What was it like? (The person locked in the locker begins
to knock frenziedly, the noise drowns out their voices.) Come on,
open it—you’ve worn him down between the two of you.
The S e c o n d m a n opens the locker. A puny naked M a n falls out. He
looks much older than the MEN who locked him up. He gets over his coughing fit
and then goes over to his locker, opens it and starts dressing, muttering the whole
time….
F o u r t h m a n . Bastards….
S e c o n d m a n . You should be thanking us… See, you’re ready for
anything now—even chemical warfare! (Roars with laughter.)
T h i r d m a n . So what had happened, then?
F i r s t m a n . Gas explosion.
T h i r d m a n . Accident?
F i r s t m a n . No, it’s not clear yet, but most likely it wasn’t an
accident. The whole floor was destroyed and the explosion was
in one of the flats—the experts have been digging away and the
first signs are that it was a set up. Someone switched on the gas,
all the taps….
The S e c o n d m a n is now digging away in his bag. He takes out a pho-

tograph and shows it to the T h i r d m a n .
S e c o n d m a n . Hey, look at what I snapped! Lovely, eh? Lovely.

T h i r d m a n . Whose hands are those?
F i r s t m a n . Look, hands and feet are tied to the bed, and in the
middle—nothing! Hey, wow!
T h i r d m a n . You’re maniacs! You collecting for an exhibition?
S e c o n d m a n . Look—the limbs stayed with the bed, ’cause they
were tied to it … but the body was blown away … they found it
outside, amazing, eh? (He roars with laughter and sticks the photo
right under the T h i r d m a n ’s nose. The T h i r d m a n pushes
him away and the S e c o n d m a n brings the photo up to the eyes of
the F i r s t m a n .)
F i r s t m a n . Put it away! I can’t sleep doing this work as it is.
F o u r t h m a n . You’re all sick.
S e c o n d m a n . What’s wrong with you, eh? (He gives the photo

to the F i r s t m a n and takes his towel from his waist. He folds it
double and twists it up. Then he twirls it above his head, approaches
the F o u r t h m a n and whips his thighs with energy.)
F o u r t h m a n (shouts out hysterically). Leave off me!
S e c o n d m a n . I’ll leave off you in a minute! I’ll leave off you so
bad, you’ll do for our photo exhibition. I’ll just rip your legs off
and stick them in your locker and we’ll take their picture and
call it “Legs in a Locker.” (Roars with laughter.)
F i r s t m a n . No—we’ll screw them to the bottom of the locker and
then it’ll stand on his legs. (They both roar.)
F o u r t h m a n . What do you want from me? Why do you get at me
the whole time? (He starts to cry.)
S e c o n d m a n . ‘Cause you’re a meatball!
F i r s t m a n . Ravioli man!
S e c o n d m a n . Seen your ears recently?
F i r s t m a n . Was your Dad an elephant, then? Your Mum get too
close to the cage at the zoo? Then she had you!
S e c o n d m a n . Elephant!
T h i r d m a n . Alright, that’s enough! Let him get dressed and
disappear, the moaning he makes, I can’t stand it anymore.
The S e c o n d m a n whips the F o u r t h m a n with the towel again.

The F o u r t h m a n presses himself against the locker and remains silent.
S e c o n d m a n . Come on then! Give us a moan!

The F o u r t h m a n suddenly turns around to the S e c o n d m a n
and with all his strength, jumping slightly, gives him a swinging punch right in
the face. The S e c o n d m a n falls over and lies there for some time working out
what has happened. Then he jumps up suddenly and runs over to the F o u r t h
m a n , lifts his hand and punches. The F o u r t h m a n dodges the blow
adroitly and gives his aggressor another good punch in the eye. The S e c o n d
m a n shouts out in rage and leaps onto the F o u r t h m a n , knocking him
to the floor. Their bodies weave into a ball which rolls wildly from one side of the
changing room to the other. At this point another fat, elderly M a n comes into
the changing room. He is only wearing a t-shirt and trousers. He has bare feet and
he is holding his tunic and boots in his hands. The M a n stops in amazement and
looks at the F i f t h m a n , and then at the F i r s t and T h i r d m a n . They
jump up and rush over to the F o u r t h and S e c o n d m a n and attempt to
part them. Then all four stand to attention along the bench in front of the F i f t h
m a n . The F i f t h m a n goes over to his locker, puts the boots in at the bottom,
hangs up the tunic and takes off his trousers. He wraps a towel around his waist.
Without looking at the four standing to attention, he issues his command.
F i ft h m a n . At ease! (Turns towards them all.) Not tired yet?

Lots of energy, eh? Eh? Can’t find a better use for your hands, eh?
Give them something to play with. That’ll relax them. (Addresses the
S e c o n d m a n .) You fight with him today, and tomorrow he might
not drag you out of the rubble or from the epicenter, eh….You go on
jobs together…. (Creaking, he sits down on the low bench.) Or maybe
he’ll just give you a little push from behind. (He winks at F o u r t h
m a n .) Eh? And that’ll be it—tragic accident on the job—and all
because of your own stupidity…. Sit down. (They all sit down.)
The F i f t h m a n remains silent for a long time, then he asks a question,
but it isn’t clear to whom it is addressed.
Did you take any photos?
They are all silent.
Come on then, show me, I saw you snapping away. Show me!
The S e c o n d m a n gets up and goes over to his locker. He searches for
the photo. The F i r s t m a n runs over to his locker and gets out the photo and
stretches it out to the F i f t h m a n , who has a good look at it before handing it
to the S e c o n d m a n .
A woman.
O t h e r s (together). A woman?
F i ft h m a n . Nails are painted.
S e c o n d m a n . Painted? (Stares at the photo and then passes it to the
F i r s t m a n .)
F i r s t m a n . You’ve got eagle eyes—how on earth can you tell red
nail varnish from blood?
F i ft h m a n . You can tell—when you’ve seen as much as me, you’ll

be able to. (He addresses the T h i r d m a n .) And where did they
send your lot today?
T h i r d m a n . The airport.
F i ft h m a n . What was going on there?
T h i r d m a n . The usual, suitcases on the runway….

F i ft h m a n . Did they explode?
T h i r d m a n . No, they were empty.
F i ft h m a n . Empty?
T h i r d m a n . Yeah, someone left empty suitcases.
F i r s t m a n . Deliberately?
S e c o n d m a n . Why would they have deliberately left empty
ones?
F i r s t m a n . Well, perhaps they were giving a warning? To scare
everyone.
T h i r d m a n . Well they succeeded. We were stuck there for three
hours, probing it all with the robot.
F i ft h m a n . Well, we had … did the boys tell you?
T h i r d m a n . Yes….
F i ft h m a n . Could have been an accident, could have been bloody
anything. Someone turned on the gas, two people in the flat,
then a spark from the doorbell set it off….
T h i r d m a n . The doorbell?
F i ft h m a n . Yeah, from the doorbell … some kid, little fool … old
woman and her friend were chasing him to give him what-for
for some reason or other … anyway, he was going mad, running
up the stairs, ringing all the doorbells on his way, so the people
would come out of their flats and stop the women, ask why
they were ringing and he could keep running and get away.
T h i r d m a n . Cunning!
F i ft h m a n . Yeah right, cunning—so he rings the doorbell of this
flat and is blown away….
F o u r t h m a n . Probably scared they wanted to beat him up,
probably….
F i ft h m a n . Yeah, got their own back, alright. They’re still alive,
themselves. Not sure about the kid yet.
T h i r d m a n . Old cows! What the hell were they playing at?
F i ft h m a n . We questioned the women and asked them why they
scared the kid so much that he started racing around the block,
and one goes, “We do that a lot, but nothing’s ever blown up
before.” I mean honestly … and the other one hasn’t said a word
so far, it’s probably the shock…. She won’t say anything, just
keeps writing—some man’s name and then asks him to forgive

her, writing and writing away…. “Forgive me,” and this bloke’s
name. Then she looks around and shows us the bit of paper and
moans….
T h i r d m a n . Anything can happen after something like that….
F o u r t h m a n . That’s right, some people tum into beasts after an
experience like that….
S e c o n d m a n . What?
F i ft h m a n . So why is it you keep taking photos of all this stuff?
S e c o n d m a n . Why? I don’t know, like, for a laugh, and then
maybe we can do an exhibition or something, like, “This is what
not to do,” so everyone looks at all these horrible sights and is
horrified and is more careful in future….
F i ft h m a n . You’re talking shit.
S e c o n d m a n . Yeah?...
F i ft h m a n . Yeah! Look how beautiful it is! (Takes the photo from
the F i r s t m a n .) Eh? If it hadn’t been beautiful, you wouldn’t
have taken a picture of it. That’s right! If someone looks at these
pictures they see beauty in them and not horror. And so off they
go to bring this beauty into being. And that’s how everyone is
infected. Because after all, it’s not about how many die in all
this—the explosions, murders, terrorism … it’s about something
else, way more frightening—this is the beginning of a chain
reaction. Everyone, I mean everyone, is infected. Innocent
people get killed—so then the innocent become infected and
the peacemakers go about doing violence with the zeal of the
converted. And no one wants to stop. No one! But all these
little thoughts, they’re neither here nor there. It’s even funny,
how run-of-the-mill they are! Still, your idea is damaging, these
photographs … an exhibition … it’s like the empty suitcases on
the runway. Eh? Everyone studies them, analyzes them—but
they don’t explode here and now, they explode later, in each
person, in their life, each one differently. What?... Because it’s
so easy now—my friend told me this story, about how late
at night he threw his old dog off the balcony … easier that
way, the sweepers will clear it up in the morning, no hassle,
just chucked it off, and that’s that, an old dog. Horrible, isn’t
it? I’m telling you that as an example of something terrible …

because it is terrible…. So maybe, if you see what I mean, you
go off and tell your friends that you’ve got this colonel whose
friend is a sadist, and you tell them what he did with his dog,
and they go off and tell their friends and then someone sees
the point of it, I mean, after all, it’s handy—no paying to have
it put down—just out on the balcony and over! And if no one
had told him, would he have thought of it by himself, eh? Or
he thinks, someone else has done it already, so why shouldn’t
I go ahead?
F o u r t h m a n . So you reckon even talking about it, showing
it should be forbidden…. You reckon, yeah, that once it’s
happened, that’s it. Bombs, murder, violence—let it go on. So
long as we’re kept in a cage, right, kept so we know nothing,
nothing, about it….
F i ft h m a n . I reckon that unless you show this lot (He points at
the FIRST and S e c o n d m a n .) you mean business, they’ll
fuck you over totally soon. Whenever I see you lot off duty
they’re always on your back. Eh? What? You sort out your own
problems first, and then think about other people’s. So stop the
arguing. Alright, relax!
He gets up and goes into the shower room. The F i r s t , S e c o n d ,
T h i r d and F o u r t h m a n start getting dressed. Suddenly the F i f t h
m a n comes back in, goes over to the others and, completely unexpectedly, starts
to sing:
Happy Birthday to you!

Happy Birthday, Mister President!
Eh? How did that sound?

S e c o n d m a n . Like Marilyn Monroe.
F i ft h m a n . Right! No one, no one, sings that from the heart, with
real feeling. At all those anniversaries, concerts, at home …
they all try to sing it like she did back then to the President.
Did you know that the President and the rest, they were all
waiting for her that night, but she was late, and she was … she
needed a fix, she was desperate…. Like, I mean, think about it,
she needed help, help first, work it all out later…. That voice,
those gestures—typical of heroin addicts … there’s your happy
birthday for you. And everyone took it as the norm, everyone
wanted to copy her. Imagine…. Eh? Alright, relax…. He goes
out. […]
Andrei Rodionov
(b. 1971)
Rodionov, the author of six books of poetry, became known for

the artful readings of his dark and comic ballads, frequently
performed to musical accompaniment. He worked with the punk
group Brothers-Kings and rock group Elochnye Igrushki (X-Mas
Tree Ornaments). Rodionov’s poems are frequently plot-based,
and thus gravitate to the so-called “new epic” or narrative trend
in contemporary Russian poetry. The winner of the Russian Slam
competition in 2002, Rodionov has organized and hosted many
slam competitions in Moscow and other Russian cities. Has lived
in Moscow, the Moscow region, and Perm’.
Andrei Rodionov 251
“A beauty and junkie with long legs…”
A beauty and junkie with long legs

Has lived with me for about a year.
She’s the ex of a famous musician,
A totally strung-out raver-freak.
I know she probably isn’t cheating on me—

Lately, she’s afraid of something:
Tries not to hang with her old friends,
Prefers to communicate with a disposable syringe.
I get her: the bitch is tired—

Even a large frigate needs a safe harbor.
She gets to rest with me—I’m boring and quiet,
And I never swear around her.
She works as a secretary, I steal a bit

From second-hands, USA Global shops,
Deal a little dope, dance on the Arbat:
Shake my ass at raves in front of chumps.
Mom says it’s all the wife’s fault,

That I’m headed for a breakdown—I know it myself.
The cotton ball’s brown at the tip of the needle,
But I’m not afraid—this is my life.
I try to be strong, I try to be bold,

Try to drink as much as her former “friends”—
Try to keep it real, give myself whole,
Though I’m surrounded for life by second-hands.
She’s also “second,” in her own fashion:

Things get tired and seek quiet hosts.
And by the way, heroin, unlike nature
Doesn’t leave the impression of paradise lost.
“Once a month, he fought or got beat up…”
Once a month, he fought or got beat up—

paid with blood for his nerves.
These were periods of a sort,
as if, once a month, someone crashed his server.
The next day, with a light coat of make-up,

he’d go out on the street, as if born anew.
But yesterday, when they blew up The Chicken Grill at the Red Gate,
he got surveilled on one of the cameras, poor boy.
They drove up and carted him off to Petrovka.

“What were you doing yesterday near The Chicken Grill?”
“Bought some chicken to go to Perlovka.”
“And did you notice a red sports car there?”
“Not only did I notice it, I told the driver to fuck off.”
“Tell us about the driver?” “Some creep.
Got out of the car and slammed me in the mug
with a sucker punch, then jumped back in his heap.”
“And where did you go?” “I went to three stations

and managed to catch the last train.”
“Where do you work?” “I’m a journalist for LiveJournal
and have my own page on the web!
Then, on the train, I got into a fight.

Beat up a bum—already had dirt on my shoes.
I couldn’t stand it, the stench was so bad,
So I forced him to get off at Yauza.
When I got there, I met some girl

who’d just had it out with her husband, it seems.
We bought some vodka and three ‘Neva’ beers,
and ate my chicken near the dentist’s.
Andrei Rodionov 253
Believe me, I didn’t blow up The Chicken Grill!

I fucking love fried chicken, okay?
That’s totally not my style,
I don’t know why they found a fuse at my place!”
Then the whole department beat him—

whipped him in the face with a wire.
He shed blood a second time, and for nothing,
but he never confessed to someone else’s crime.
There was something about him that Pushkin had lent

to the image of Lensky:
sublime obstinacy, a completely womanish stubbornness.
Shedding blood every month—there’s something feminine in it.
No wonder the cop called him a whore and pain in the ass.
Since then, he doesn’t like chicken meat

and practically stopped his monthly bouts.
He’s started acting kind of like a fruit,
and shut down his LiveJournal account.
Translated by Boris Dralyuk

E x er pts from
Ov er k ill :
Se x a nd V iolence in R ussi a n P opul a r C ultur e
Eliot Borenstein
Overkill: Bespredel and Gratuitous Violence1
Rita once again examined the premises where

this woman had decided not just to live, but to
live in harmony with herself and with the whole
world. There was nothing pathetic or wretched
in what she saw there—the pathetic or wretched
remained up there, where Rita had come from.
Here the usual standards didn’t work—this
must be how the different understandings
of life and death, of good and evil, of beauty
and ugliness, fall apart, when a person steps
over the borders of earthly existence and
the real essence of life opens up before him.
But can this essence really open up to a person
only in a forgotten sewer, on a pile of filthy rags
and old cardboard Coca Cola boxes, ten meters
from a pipe pouring out a turbid stream of shit
and fuel oil, infecting the atmosphere with
miasmas?
—Sergei Pugachev, You’re Just a Slut, My Dear!
(Ty prosto shliukha, dorogaia!)
In 1999, the reading public was treated to a new addition to the

emerging canon of Russian pulp fiction: a potboiler by Sergei
1
Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Culture (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2008), 195-208.
Eliot Borenstein. Overkill 255
Pugachev entitled You’re Just a Slut, My Dear! Even in a market where

lurid paperback covers are taken for granted, You’re Just a Slut, My
Dear! stands out for its explicit sexualized violence: a man smiles as
he holds a beautiful woman by the hair and forces her to suck on
the barrel of a gun. When the novel begins, a young woman, Rita
Prozorova, has just been fighting with her mother, whom she holds
in utmost contempt. So naturally Rita kills her with a blunt object,
slaughters a nosy neighbor who stumbles upon the scene, and sets
fire to her apartment, all in the first chapter. The body count does
not stop there; if anything, Rita becomes an even more prodigious
killer as the novel wears on, leaving behind a trail of corpses stretch-
ing like breadcrumbs from her native provincial town of Pskov all
the way to Moscow. Fairly early on, her long-lost fiancé’s criminal
associates turn her into a heroin addict and gang-rape her, launch-
ing her on a quest for vengeance that culminates in a bloodbath.
But the road to revenge is not easy: Rita is constantly obliged to
avoid the many predators who want a piece of her—literally. When
she arrives in Moscow, she barely escapes a ring of kidnappers who
lure young provincial women to their home, drug them, and then
sell their organs to rich Americans and Europeans who need trans-
plants. At times, Rita wonders how such things can happen. After
all, she has seen numerous films where justice triumphs and where
legal procedure steps in to facilitate the determination of guilt and
innocence. Then she remembers: “But that’s not how it is in our
country. That’s what she saw on video. That’s in America. But we’re
not America; we have no laws” (31).
It is fitting that Rita compares her own lived experience to the
stories about America that she has seen on TV, since You’re Just
a Slut, My Dear! posits an imaginary Russia as a counterpoint to
the hyperreality of near-perfect order embodied by American police
procedurals. One of the most likely sources of her knowledge of the
rights and privileges of American crime suspects is the long-running
television show Law and Order, which Russian viewers could watch
twice a day at the time that Pugachev’s novel was published. In
its Russian translation, Law and Order (Zakon i poriadok) had the
ring of a cruel joke, since domestic television and the print media
were quite effectively constructing a crime-ridden Russia in which
neither law nor order was anywhere to be found. In fact, the world
in which Rita Prozorova fights for survival is defined precisely by
their absence: the world of bespredel.
Though the bloody backdrops of the detektiv (detective novel)
and the boevik (thriller) are evidence of each genre’s preoccupation
with violent crime, neither of them can match bespredel for sheer
sensationalism or pessimism. Even Konstantinov’s multivolume
saga of murder and betrayal allows for some hope that the forces of
good can at least survive, if not triumph, while the forces of evil have
the reassuring virtue of being understandable and even logical—
nothing illustrates the economic doctrine of “rational choice” better
than the self-interested actions of organized criminals. Indeed, the
cardinal virtue of organized crime is the very fact that it is organized.
At its most extreme, bespredel inspires horror precisely because it
is chaotic, random, and without motivation. If organized crime is
powerful thanks to its stranglehold on corrupt law-enforcement
agencies, that means it relies on the functioning (or well-planned
dysfunction) of an overall system. Bandit Petersburg is a far better
place to live in than lawless Russia.
Bespredel is a particularly difficult word to render in English.
Literally meaning “without limits” or “without boundaries,” this
noun is used freely and fluidly in contemporary Russian discourse,
accruing new contents and contexts over time. Bespredel is an
evolving concept; one of the few features that unite all its various
uses and definitions is that it is always something to be lamented
and decried (even when this disapprobation barely conceals the
exploitation and sensationalism that keep the thematics of bespredel
alive). My use of it as a rubric for the purposes of this chapter
might not strike a Russian speaker as intuitive, but my approach is
informed by the broad, varied, and at times contradictory manner
in which the term is deployed. A number of English words suggest
themselves as possible equivalents, but only for particular aspects
of bespredel as it is understood by the various constituencies that
invoke it. As it stands today, bespredel is an important Russian
discursive category but a far from scholarly one. Rather than settle
on any one of several English synonyms, I prefer to use all of them
and none of them, keeping bespredel as an umbrella term to preserve
its polyvalent strangeness but using the English words to highlight

the concept’s key features.
The term bespredel seems to originate, appropriately enough,
in the world of organized crime and the national prison camp
system (the zone). In this context, Vadim Volkov defines it as the
“unjustified use of violence,”2 the violations of the norms of the
criminal world. Here bespredel, with its literal lack of boundaries,
actually functions to delineate the limits of proper lawlessness: the
declaration that an enemy is engaging in bespredel effectively makes
him an outlaw among thieves. By violating the rules of good criminal
conduct, the bespredel’shchik (the person who commits bespredel) in
effect also suspends these rules as they relate to him. Reminiscent
of Agamben’s “state of exception,” the ability of organized crime
to identify and punish those who threaten to disorganize crime
constitutes the criminal leaders’ authority […]. Bespredel is the
mathematical limit of violence, always to be approached but never
reached. When invoked in film and fiction, bespredel transposes
a nostalgia for the orderly days of Soviet power to the context of
crime: the “good” thieves respect the laws of the criminal fraternity,
while the gang leaders of today are simply scum who do not
know the meaning of the word “respect.” Ironically, this criminal
generation gap replicates the central anxiety of perestroika […]: what
is wrong with kids today?
Bespredel proved to be far too evocative a term to be limited to
gangland misbehavior, and, as Volkov notes, the word has become
a part of Russians’ everyday vocabulary, particularly in the realm of
politics. Thus the Russian defense minister decried the 1999 NATO
bombings of Yugoslavia as bespredel, while Vladimir Putin, in one
of his early speeches as acting president of Russia, used the word
to describe the alternative to his infamous “dictatorship of law”
(Volkov 82). The term’s political meaning preserves its criminal
roots, since it is applied when politicians and world leaders
overstep their bounds. Even more broadly, when invoked as part
2
Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian
Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 195.
of a conversational litany of post-Soviet evils, the boundlessness

of bespredel means total chaos, describing a state of pure and utter
lawlessness, with crime and corruption running rampant. In this
context, bespredel is a post-perestroika variation on what Nancy Ries
calls a “perestroika epic”: tales of “complete disintegration” (polnaia
razrukha). This “folkloric genre” contained many of the features of
bespredel, particularly the emphasis on blood, gore, and violence.3
Yet bespredel differs in two crucial ways. First, I would argue that it is
not the source of the twisted Dostoevskian pride that Ries discovers
in complete disintegration. Complete disintegration, a variation
on the Russian tale, sets up Russia as an anti-Disneyland that
unites people in their common experience and shared suffering,
suggesting a particularly Russian strength in adversity that no other
nation could hope to match (Ries, Russian Talk, 50). Bespredel may be
fascinating, but it is not heroic: bespredel puts the ordinary person in
the position of victim. This leads to the second point, which is the
question of agency: though tales of complete disintegration could
(and mostly likely did) lead to the eternal Russian question, who’s
to blame?, the focus was on collapse itself, not on those who took
advantage of postsocialist chaos. Bespredel, with its implicit focus
on the lack of limits, is all about the actions taken by people who
recognize no strictures.
Bespredel is horrifying because it is chaotic. The violence
of bespredel is unnecessary by definition: it is popular culture’s
gratuitous violence decried by critics throughout the world. This
gratuitousness is crucial, defining both the aesthetics and the
philosophy of bespredel. Aesthetically, bespredel is clearly about
overkill in that it literally denotes a slaying that continues long
after life has expired: no violence can be too much, no detail can be
too graphic. Reminiscent of the ultraviolence of Anthony Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange, bespredel’s aesthetic certainly found common
cause with the films of Quentin Tarantino (especially Reservoir
Dogs). Philosophically, bespredel is a Dostoevskian nightmare world
3
Nancy Ries, Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1997), 44-47.
in which the absence of God turns men into beasts. Or rather,

bespredel gives a demonic twist to early-twentieth-century French
thought, which put a different value on the gratuitous: l’acte gratuite
(the gratuitous act). Demonstrating the principle that true human
freedom could be expressed only in an action that had no motivation
and no purpose, the most famous literary examples of l’acte gratuite
were instances of murder: Lafcadio, the hero of Andre Gide’s Les
Caves du Vatican (The Cellars of the Vatican), who throws a man off
a train with no warning and no consequence, and Meursault, the
narrator of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (The Stranger), whose fatal
shooting of an Arab is maddening in its apparent randomness.
Bespredel posits a limitless, irresponsible human freedom that can
take shape only in senseless violence.4
Finally, I apply the word bespredel to an important component
of post-Soviet mass culture that is not usually covered by the term
but that makes the actions and consequences of bespredel its central
theme: the media representation of “true crime.” This includes the
sensationalistic and lurid reports on criminal violence in newspapers
and on television, as well as the documentary books and even
novels (such as You’re Just a Slut, My Dear!) that find their primary
purpose in the graphic depiction of violence. The audiovisual
representation of violent crime comes as close to the aesthetic of
pornography as violent entertainment can get (short of the snuff
film), while the transformation of true crime into narrative entails
choices that result in quite different stories from those found in the
detektiv or the boevik. True-crime narratives lack positive heroes,
focusing almost entirely on the criminals who, in other genres,
would be the object of disapproval. Here the story is all about the
crimes themselves, with only a minimal moral framework and little
hope of redemption. Violence in true crime cannot be redemptive,
for it cannot have meaning. It is, to borrow the title Marini-
4
Thus I take issue with L. D. Gudkov’s observation that “mass literature” deals
entirely in absolutes (Lev Gudkov, “Massovaia literature kak problema. Dlia kogo?
Razdrazhennye zametki cheloveka so storony,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 22
(1996): 95). His argument may well hold true for the boevik, but it has limited
applicability to the detektiv and fails to account for bespredel.
na5 used in a different mode, “death for death’s sake,” violence

that is fascinating simply because it is violence. The pleasure to be
found in consuming this particular type of bespredel narrative is in
the secondhand, guilt-free enjoyment of the acts themselves and in
the reassurance of identifying with the performer of violence rather
than with the victim. The external moral context is, of course, one of
disapproval, but the reader’s or viewer’s shock at real violence only
adds to the thrill of identification with the fictive violence, all the
while confirming the basic message of bespredel in all its forms: we
live in a world of unmitigated, but fascinating, horror.
Honor among Thieves
Bespredel is an untidy term, but its messiness is helpful to anyone

interested in the discourse of Russian violent crime, its evolution, and
its growing hegemony over the culture at large. The word manages to
be conversational and neutral (available to any speaker who cares to
invoke it, without violating linguistic etiquette) and clearly marked;
its origins in the Russian prison camp culture and its relevance to
contemporary gangland culture have not been forgotten. The very
fact that grandmothers and government officials use the word
routinely is evidence that the once rarefied blatnoi (criminal) culture
has moved beyond not only its initial isolation but also its Brezhnev-
era status as the source of an added piquancy to the daring songs
of the Russian bards, who appropriated the slang of the zone in
their own stylized, pseudocriminal songs. The first years of Russian
independence saw a minor boom in dictionaries, encyclopedias,
and ethnographic studies of the zone;6 with the benefit of hindsight,
5
Aleksandra Marinina is one of the most famous post-Soviet authors of mystery
novels. Her cycle of novels with the protagonist Anastasiya Kamenskaya was
screened as mini-series on Russian TV and gained incredible popularity.
6
The list includes, but is by no means limited to, Baldaev et al., Slovar’ tiuremno-
lagerno-blatnogo zhargona (The dictionary of prison-camp-criminal slang, 1992);
Edvard Maksimovskii. Imperiia strakha (Empire of fear, l991); and Lev Mil’ianen’kov’s
Eliot Borenstein 261
their publication seems almost prescient, as though the editors

foresaw that the smart cultural consumer of the 1990s would have
to acquire a basic literacy in organized violence. Now the helpful
glossary at the back of Dotsenko’s first Mad Dog novel (Mad Dog in
Prison) looks touchingly quaint, if not embarrassingly uncool: what
Russian reader does not know that nishtiak means “good,” or bazar
means “conversation”? (414-15). The same decade that witnessed an
obsession with the mastery of English for career advancement and
edification—with audiocassettes, guides for self-study, and ads for
special classes on nearly every urban street corner—saw a subtler
(and probably more successful) drive for linguistic competence: by
the end of the 1990s, everyone knew how to speak crime.
In his On the Other Side of the Law: An Encyclopedia of the Criminal
World (1992), Lev Mil’ianenkov includes an entry for bespredel:
“lawlessness, arbitrariness (samoupravstvo, proizvol); a thief who
has left the world of thieves and ceased his criminal activities”
(84). Thus Mil’ianenkov associates bespredel with the traditional
ways of Soviet-era crime, but its rise as both a linguistic term and
a discursive phenomenon is the result of the drastic changes that
have shaken Russian traditional culture just as surely as they have
transformed the culture at large. The word bespredel has escaped
the bounds of the prison camp and thieves’ gang precisely because
its culture of origin has been threatened by the lawlessness that the
word describes.
The Soviet underworld was one of the many subcultures
that sprang up in opposition to officially sanctioned culture, and,
like so many of them, it mirrored the structures that it purport-
edly opposed. Hence the Russian tendency to speak of such sub-
cultures as “antiworlds” (antimiry), since they are by no means
independent of official influence. The product of a fundamen-
tally binary culture, they are to Soviet culture what Satanism is to
Christianity: a deliberate inversion that wears its influences on its
Po tu storonu zakona; Entsiklopediia prestupnogo mira (On the other side of the
law: An encyclopedia of the criminal world, 1992). For an analysis of the material
presented in these books, see Condee (“Body Graphics”).
sleeve.7 This criminal fraternity is truly organized crime, for it is

just as fundamentally systemic as the Soviet Union itself. It arose,
appropriately enough, within the Soviet labor camps and prisons
during the 1930s, and the power of its leaders and its cultural codes
is well documented by political prisoners from the purges onward,
who were obliged to tread lightly around their nonpolitical (and
hence more ideologically trustworthy) inmates. […] The leaders of
the Soviet underworld were known as vory v zakone, which is usually
rendered as “thieves-in-law,” an unfortunately literal translation
that in English suggests an extended family (Married to the Mob)
rather than a particularly authoritative status. I will follow the
convention adopted by Volkov (to whom I am also more generally
indebted for my discussion of the vory v zakone) and simply call
them “thieves,” a shorthand commonly used in Russian as well.8
This thieves’ subculture was highly ritualized, with a strict
hierarchy of subordination and control, and behavioral codes that
regulated life both in and out of the zone. Thieves were forbidden
to cooperate with the state in any fashion (even military service,
which was theoretically mandatory for all adult men, prevented
a criminal from rising in the ranks). Nor was a thief allowed to be
gainfully employed, since honest physical labor (so idealized by the
Soviet regime) was beneath his dignity. Devotion to the underworld
left no room for any conflicting loyalties, resulting in a “criminal
fraternity” truly worthy of the name: thieves had to break off all
contact with biological relatives and were forbidden to marry or
have children. Thus the thieves abided by a code that was quasi-
monastic in that it segregated them entirely from the “secular”
world of both government and family, even if it did not celebrate the
total self-denial required of true monastic orders (sex was fine, but
heterosexual attachment was not; robbery was essential, but luxury
was proscribed). The result was akin to a warrior brotherhood, like
7
This is particularly evident in criminal tattoos, with their “blasphemous” caricatures
of Brezhnev, Stalin, Lenin, and Marx (D.S. Baldaev, V.K. Belko, and I.M. Isupov. Slovar’
tiuremno-lagerno-blatnogo zhargona (Moscow: Krai Moskvy, 1992), 477-90).
8
See Volkov’s detailed description of thieves-in-law (54-59).
the mythic Cossacks celebrated by Nikolai Gogol, and was also

far from antithetical to the masculine ethos perennially celebrated
by official Soviet ideology.9 Indeed, the thieves’ world relied on
a collectivist spirit that, in other contexts, a true Leninist could not
have helped but admire: all thieves had to tithe their earnings into
a central set of communal funds (the obshchak) that functioned as
a social safety net for criminals during their frequent periods of
imprisonment, supplying food, drugs, tobacco, and bribes to make
zone life bearable (Volkov 54-58).
The details of the thieves’ code are less important for my
purposes than the mere fact of the code’s existence, the reliance
on a strict hierarchy and unbendable rules. Thieves’ culture was
systemic through and through, betraying the influences of Soviet
ideology, the military, and the prison camps—institutions to which
thieves’ culture was hostile by definition. The thieves’ code literally
inscribed itself on its adherents’ bodies, with tattoos of images and
slogans that both reminded criminals of their most important pre-
cepts and alerted them to the status of their interlocutors. Whatever
the source of the term “thief-in-law,” it is perfectly appropriate,
even if the juxtaposition of “thief” and “law” sounds paradoxical.
These are criminals who, when faced with the dehumanizing
conditions of prison camps, do not revert to a state of nature, nor
do they descend into a Hobbesian nightmare of total chaos. Quite
the contrary, the thieves’ world can be seen as reassuring evidence
of a human tendency toward order and control, which is part of
the thieves’ mythic appeal. On the one hand, they are outlaws, but
on the other, they follow their own rules and are thus predictable.10
9
See Borenstein, Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction,
1917-1929 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 1-42.
10
Nancy Ries notes that in her fieldwork in 1990 and 1992, the mafia was often
invoked by Russians as “the supreme symbol of evil and terror”; four to five years
later, “the terror the mafia provided was sometimes represented as the means
by which avarice and corruption might be reined in” (“Honest Bandits,” 30.5). She
argues that mafia served as “both the destroyer of any hopes for justice and social
order and also the most likely potential source of justice and order” (278, emphasis
in the original). See also Verdery on the “conceptual mafia,” or “mafia-as-symbol” of
anxiety over the market economy and the post-socialist power vacuum (Katherine
An ordinary person’s encounter with a thief could be easily

survivable because a thief is not a blood-crazed sadist. Just as the
orderly old-fashioned horror stories and monster movies are only
minimally threatening (vampires cannot enter your house if you
do not invite them in), the thief represents violent crime that is
understandable and manageable precisely because it is always being
managed.
Also important is the primacy of zone experience for the thieves’
world; as Volkov argues, “prison life was its ultimate system of
reference” (55). Thus the thieves’ code was formed in a context in
which total freedom of action was excluded by definition. The limits
were always visible: they were the barbed wire surrounding the
camps and the armed guards keeping watch over the inmates. The
thieves’ code implicitly accepted these boundaries, for the goal was
to improve life in prison rather than to escape.11 The thieves’ code,
rather than fighting against the limits on freedom, multiplied them:
the barbed wire of the zone became metaphorical and portable,
structuring criminals’ conduct.
It is in this context that the notion of bespredel makes sense.
A culture built on accommodation with incarceration cannot
accept a state of pure lawlessness. Bespredel is about more than
simply transgression (the concept implicit in the Russian word for
crime, prestuplenie); it is about not recognizing the existence of any
boundaries to transgress. The thieves’ insistence on orderliness
and systems and their Foucauldian assumption of self-surveillance
and self-discipline make bespredel the worst possible crime: it is the
crime that no longer recognizes itself as crime. Punishing a criminal
for violating the thieves’ code was already serious, but a declaration
of bespredel meant that the offender had placed himself not merely
outside the law but outside the outlaw. Thus bespredel could be
fought only by eradicating it at the source, since the offender could
Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996], 219).
11
In fact, prison sentences were an integral part of the thief’s experience; one could
not become a true thief-in-law without spending time behind bars.
no longer be incorporated into the (anti-)social body. Bespredel is

abomination.
The rise of bespredel is connected to the pathos of the thieves-
in-law, who are something of a dying breed in the post-Soviet era.
Volkov contrasts the thieves with the modem breed of “bandits,”
who have a stranglehold on the economy in major metropolitan
areas such as Petersburg and Yekaterinburg: “The thief’s income
comes from the illegal secondary redistribution of property and
consists of the appropriation, by illegal means, of the private
possessions of other citizens or of state property. The bandit
aspires to receive a share of other entrepreneurs’ income, which,
as he claims, has been produced under his patronage or with the
participation of the organized group he represents” (Volkov 60). As
pure abstractions, thieves and bandits represent polar opposites,
though the two groups have reached something of an equilibrium
in recent years.12 The thieves’ way of life is a product of the zone,
while the bandits are firmly rooted in civilian life. Bandits reject the
monastic form of the thieves’ code, marrying and having children,
although their attention to physical fitness and propensity to ban
alcohol and drugs make the thieves look almost hedonistic (Volkov
60). If the bandits look upon the thieves as living relics, the thieves
scorn the bandits for their refusal to follow the code. The bandits,
whose ranks are filled with veterans of Russia’s military conflicts
and former participants in sports clubs, are seen as disrespectful
and unnecessarily violent. If the concept of bespredel has spread
beyond the world of organized crime, it is in part because the
development of bandit culture has led to more and more instances
of what the thieves consider bespredel. From the point of view of the
thieves’ code, much of banditry is bespredel, or it would be, if it were
committed by thieves.
Two opposing tendencies have facilitated the spread of bespredel
as a phenomenon and as a concept: the first is the generational conflict
between these two broad segments of the Russian underworld, and
the second is their gradual reconciliation. As thief culture and bandit
12
In the context, the late 1990s-early 2000s.
culture have grown together, the thieves have relaxed some of their
strictures, while the bandits have adopted many of the trappings
of thief culture, even insisting on undergoing the “coronation”
ritual that installs a new thief-in-law. And they have also inherited
the concept of bespredel: accusing a rival gangleader of bespredel
is fighting words. What constitutes bespredel for a given criminal
formation is less important than the fact that bespredel remains an
operative concept. Even a bandit world still recognizes its own rule
of law.
In contemporary Russian narratives about organized crime,
bespredel sparks anxiety among the criminals themselves, for it is
only people who belong to the underworld who can determine what
behavior is considered out of bounds. When bespredel is presented
as a result of the rise of bandits and the fall of thieves, such stories
invariably side with the thieves, for reasons that are immediately
comprehensible. The thieves stand for restraint, tradition, and
honor, while the bandits are corrupt even by criminal standards.
The political implications are never far beneath the surface: the
old-fashioned thieves, often played by beloved Soviet-era actors on
screen, take pride in their dying world just as their counterparts in
law enforcement and the military might lament their motherland’s
loss of great-power status. The fact that the thieves are criminals
by definition only makes the comparison stronger, containing an
implicit recognition that the lost great power itself was hardly
angelic or perfect. But organized crime narratives present both the
thieves and Soviet power as inherently ideological, which is viewed
positively when compared with Yeltsin’s government, “wild”
capitalism, and mercenary bandits. These post-Soviet phenomena
represent the triumph of capitalism exactly as it is portrayed by its
opponents rather than its boosters: all values are rendered valueless
if they cannot be expressed in the cash nexus. For the new generation
of criminals, as well as for the businessmen they extort and the state
officials they bribe, everything is fungible: money, property, and
human life. For the thief, such indifference is the essence of bespredel.
This particular formulation of bespredel is expressed most
clearly in Konstantinov’s Bandit Petersburg, particularly the fourth
book, appropriately entitled The Thief (Vor)(which was filmed as
the first miniseries, Baron). […] The Thief is focused on the conflict
between an old thief-in-law bearing the noble nickname of “Baron”
and the slippery bandit leader nicknamed “Antibiotic.” The reader’s
and viewer’s sympathies are aligned from the very beginning with
the Baron, who, as is fitting for the representative of a dying era, is
pulling off his last heist before succumbing to terminal cancer. The
Baron is educated, eloquent, and even gentle when circumstances
allow, and Konstantinov’s story gives him several occasions
to philosophize about the state of Russia and the underworld.
Readers and viewers first meet the Baron when the story begins,
as he is breaking into an apartment, but only the novel includes his
meditation on Russia’s criminal mayhem:
If in the old days, a [thief] with rotten tendencies took a long

time to turn bad … after the triumph of democracy in Russia,
which opened the gates to the road into the radiant capitalist
future … formerly, decent thieves and movers and shakers went
savage and turned into scum, for whom walking through blood
was just as simple as stepping over a puddle…. Why even talk
about the young people, if even respectable bosses (avtoritety)
no longer try to resolve arguments and conflicts peacefully?
Who needs words if a bullet, knife, or grenade can always easily
compensate for the lack of fair arguments? Whoever is stronger
is right. Of course, it was just like that before, but human life was
more respected in the criminal world…. No question, serious
people were killed before, only it wasn’t today’s low hits, but the
execution of sentences—and everybody knew for what…. While
bloodthirsty, trigger-happy bespredel’shchiki could be found and
punished by the thieves’ world more quickly and effectively than
by the cops…. But that was before, and now was the time of the
collaborators (ssuchennykh) who twisted the thieves’ law like card
sharks at a casino. (10-11)
Later the Baron laments the corruption of the country brought

on by the new-style bandits who, unlike thieves, work with the
state authorities, leading to a complete collapse of both state and
underworld law: “[T]his was awful, because it gave rise to bespredel,
which is unavoidable in an organization whose ideological basis
was collaboration (ssuchennost’), lack of principle, and treachery in
the name of power and money...” (147).
It is only when the Baron gives an interview to the journalist

(and authorial stand-in) Andrei Seregin that he gets the chance
to explain his views in depth, this time in both the film version
and the novel. His entire monologue is a requiem for the thieves”
world: “Our world is fading…. Now there’s nothing but bespredel”
conducted by complete “morons” (debily), whose underdeveloped
brains know only food, sex, and fear. In the old days, criminals lived
according to the “rules” (poniatiia), murdered only when necessary,
and never killed cops, but for today’s thugs, murder is always
justified if it can lead to greater profits (l67-68). This is more than
just a criminal matter, for the Baron insists that bespredel is useful to
Russia’s enemies: “I can only tell you one thing: a strong criminal
world, with its own laws and rules, with traditions and without
bespredel, is only possible in a strong country. And who needs
a strong Russia? [The West] needs a weak Russia” (168).
One of the intrinsic problems caused by the new world of
bandit crime, which is impossible to disentangle from “legitimate”
business and the business of state, is that it is becoming coterminous
with Russia itself (“I always felt that the criminal world should
be small, and not all-encompassing…” [168]). Here we return to
the geographic metaphor implicit in bespredel: crime must have
boundaries and must know its limits. The criminalization of Russia
is, in this sense, the apotheosis of one of Russia’s central myths,
the notion of the motherland’s “boundlessness” (neob”iatnost’),
its wide-open spaces (prostory) that in turn define the expansive
national character […].13 If bespredel were not such an irredeemably
marked term, Rossiia bespredel’naia would sound like just
another variation on national boosterism. Bespredel is a demonic
inversion of everything that is good in Russia’s own mythic self-
conception.
Even as the West shares some of the blame for the mayhem of the
1990s, Western countries also have the most to lose by a postsocialist
13
This myth, which was touted so successfully by Gogol (the troika scene in Dead
Souls, his representation of the Cossacks as the embodiment of Russia’s boundless
frontier spirit), was taken up by Stalinist culture as well, most notably in the “Song
of the Motherland” made famous in the film Circus: “Broad is my native land / So
many forests, fields and rivers! / I don’t know any other such country / In which man
can breathe so freely.”
Russia that has succumbed to bespredel. Like the troika at the end of
Gogol’s Dead Souls, bespredel in Russia is a terrible force with which
the rest of the world will have to reckon. “You know, sometimes
I think that there’s going to be a new iron curtain, only this time it
will be the West that establishes it out of fear of our bespredel” (168).
Or perhaps bespredel is the criminal manifestation of Dostoevsky’s
nightmare scenario in Demons (Besy): once all traditional authorities
have been overthrown, the country will descend into a Boschian
nightmare that could eventually sweep up the whole world in its
wake. An old thief presents just such a view on his deathbed in one
of the novels in Evgeny Sukhov’s I Am a Thief-in-Law series:
Proper (pravil’nye) thieves are being replaced … by

bespredel’shchiki…. Yes, before there was fear. And there was the
law—harsh, strict, but fair. Everything was held together by fear
in Soviet life. And in thieves’ life—by the law. And now there’s
nothing left. Neither fear nor the law. Freedom and anarchy. And
in Rus’, freedom was always called liberty (volia). Vol’nitsa (wild
liberty). Russian liberty gone wild is a terrible thing. Wild liberty
is …merciless and bloody. Pointless cruelty… (Oboroten’).
If I invoke Gogol and Dostoevsky in connection with thieves-

in-law, it is not to appeal to a prophetic literary tradition but to put
bespredel in the context of perennial Russian laments and jeremiads
about the country’s fate (hence the Baron’s conclusion that only
cruelty on the part of the state can counter the cruelty of criminal
bespredel [169]). In the pre-Soviet context of political upheavals and
dissent, such fears of chaos were often part of a generational conflict,
the older liberals watching in horror as their offspring militated for
radical solutions. Post-Soviet bespredel is also troped as a generation
gap, in this case decrying the moral degeneracy of younger criminals
who do not know the meaning of the word “respect.” Bespredel
takes the anxious hand-wringing over the younger generation that
was so prominent in perestroika and ups the ante significantly, for
the question of total honesty, idealism, and integrity is no longer
even on the table. The very fact that the latest iteration of panic over
wayward youth is situated in a context that takes criminality for
granted is itself a sign of all-pervasive bespredel. […]
Part 3
Wr i t i ng Pol i t ic s
In his book Art Power, Boris Groys argues that “art becomes politically
effective only when it is made beyond or outside the art market, and
in the context of political propaganda.”1 In making this statement,
Groys anticipates the response that art that promotes political
views is not really art. He cites the videos strategically released by
Islamist separatist groups as examples of such art to illustrate his
point. With this provocative gesture, Groys argues that propaganda
art, whether we think it is good art or not, speaks powerfully—its
very function is to get our attention—while other forms of art can
only circulate as commodities in an already-crowded market. In
this way, an artist can “challenge a regime based on an ideological
vision in a much more effective way than he or she can challenge
the art market.”2
As a way of responding to Groys’ thesis, we may look to the
various ways in which artists have responded to the consolidation
of political and economic power in post-Soviet Russia. Perhaps the
most visible responses are the public protests that began in 2011
when it was announced that Putin would run for an unprecedented
third term as president in 2012. The Russian constitution does not
allow any president to serve more than two consecutive terms, and
it was widely perceived that Dmitrii Medvedev’s presidency from
2008-2012, while Putin served a second term as Prime Minister (his
1
Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 7.
2
Ibid., p. 8.
272 Part 3. Writing Politics
first term as Prime Minister lasted from 1999-2000), allowed for

a “tandem” approach to the presidency. The writer Eduard Limonov,
long a critic of Putin, participated in multiple public protests. The
writers Dmitrii Bykov and Boris Akunin were among the many
prominent public figures who marched with protesters to demand
fair elections. Other actions by cultural figures were performed
for distribution on YouTube and other video hosting sites. These
include guerrilla performances by the feminist punk collective
Pussy Riot, whose video performance of “Punk Prayer—Mother of
God, Chase Putin Away,” filmed in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the
Savior, led to the subsequent arrest of three of the band’s members.
Also noteworthy is the popular video series “Citizen Poet,” which
features satirical poems written by Bykov and performed by the
actor Mikhail Efremov. The March 28, 2011, episode “Here’s How
the Tandem Works” (V tandeme vot chto proiskhodit) was not aired,
as Bykov found that his verses had been modified by the television
station Dozhd’ prior to airing. Videos of Bykov and Efremov reading
the original text, as well as the text itself (“He’s the president, but
I’m the leader”), continue to circulate online.
Returning to Groys’s proposal, should we regard these actions
as effective challenges to the regime, while the writers’ literature
should be considered a commodity that circulates only to support
the market? Instead, we may consider that literature, the methods
of distribution it relies upon, and even its readers, disrupt the
binary construction that posits the goal of challenging political
regimes against the goal of challenging the market. Products of
popular culture, such as blockbuster films and bestseller novels,
may support reigning ideologies and at the same time harness the
power of the market to circulate them. Aleksandr Tarasov’s essay
“The Anti-Matrix” argues that the blockbuster films in the Night
Watch series encourage viewers to remain plugged into the world
of market commodities and state power. “Dark” forces associated
with commodities and popular culture, and “light” forces associated
with state institutions are thoroughly implicated in each other;
correspondingly, the film successfully propagandizes both state
and market ideologies. Still, while Tarasov values the ideology of
The Matrix and its depiction of “average citizens resisting a soulless
machine,” he does not acknowledge that in a consumerist society,

the act of watching the film and participating in the larger institution
of the entertainment industry can stand in for the meaningful action
that the film advocates.
Post-Soviet consumerism is a major theme for Victor Pelevin,
who creatively and methodically illustrates connections between
market and political discourses. Pelevin demonstrates that the
mythology of power is inseparable from the “hyperreality of
simulacra” (Baudrillard). Media images are indistinguishable from
advertisements; they “sell” politicians and their initiatives. Pelevin
first articulated this idea in his novel Generation ‘P’ (translated into
English as Homo Zapiens). Developments on this theme can be found
in his other novels as well. These include Omon Ra, The Life of Insects,
Buddha’s Little Finger, and The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, among
others.
Works by Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Prokhanov present
violence as a force that can destroy existing power structures,
including the institution of literature itself. Limonov, once a poet
who lived in New York and Paris, by his own admission “killed” his
literary persona in order to establish the National Bolshevik Party
and begin a life in politics. His writings, life, and even his body
are fashioned in a way that supports his radical political agenda.
Prokhanov’s novel Mr. Hexogen gives voice to extremist conspiracy
theories about who was behind the September 1999 apartment
bombings that were blamed on Chechen separatists and generally,
those whom Prokhanov (and Limonov) defines as “enemies of the
nation,” i.e., liberals, Jews, the West, etc. Mr. Hexogen may qualify
as an example of what Groys calls propaganda art, but as Ilya
Kukulin’s study points out, the work troublingly erodes long-held
boundaries between the institutions of propaganda, literature, and
their audiences.
The cruel world of Vladimir Sorokin’s fiction does not wield
violence, but leads the reader to question the pervasiveness of
violence in everyday life. If in his earlier works he dismantled
authoritarian discourses of power to reveal the rhetorical violence
concealed within them, his more recent works, such as Day of
the Oprichnik (2006), and Sugar Kremlin (2008) challenge the neo-
traditionalist political and cultural discourses that have moved into

the mainstream during the Putin era. In Day of the Oprichnik neo-
traditionalist power structures manifest themselves in dystopian
scenes of mutual copulation (the “caterpillar” of chain copulation),
rape, and mutual torture among the leader’s guards. In Sugar Kremlin
the same dystopian society is depicted from various points of view.
The short story “Petrushka,” about a jester’s performances at the
Kremlin, evaluates the degraded position of the artist-performer. In
the atmosphere of everyday violence that permeates Sugar Kremlin,
entertainment and art are not diversions or a medium for reflection,
but an obligatory and sadistic institution that structures behavior
at work and in the home. In contrast to mechanized household
devices performing their programmed functions, humans appear
as base and savage creatures, with little holding them together other
than their machine counterparts.
Akunin’s series of crime novels featuring the detective Erast
Fandorin are set in the nineteenth century but deal with present
day issues, including post-Soviet nostalgia for the imperial past.
While crime fiction often depicts non-normative behavior with the
intention of moving readers toward identification with the detective
who punishes its perpetrators, Akunin’s novels suggest that the
social and political problems that plague Russia today have a long
history in its past. As Elena Baraban’s study demonstrates, Akunin’s
works critique the tendency to idealize the past (or any era) as
a golden age and instead turn the reader’s focus to institutional
problems of the present.
All of the authors discussed in this chapter—Akunin, Bykov,
Limonov, Pelevin, Prokhanov, and Sorokin—have publicly voiced
their opposition to Putin’s rule. All are genuinely popular and read by
wide audiences. At the same time, it is vital to recognize distinctions
in their attitudes toward violence and reigning ideologies, and
the reasons behind their decisions to distribute their work freely
online (Akunin, Bykov, Pelevin, Sorokin) or harness the power of
social media, newspapers, and other fora to promote their positions
(Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, Prokhanov’s ultra-nationalist
views). The intersection of literature, media, and politics points
to the need for reading practices that engage post-Soviet writing
beyond the value that the market places upon it and beyond the
conventional venues for the distribution of propaganda. With their
potential to expand into the discourses and practices of everyday
life, the writings collected in this chapter invite our analysis.
Vladimir Sorokin
(b. 1955, Bykovo, Moscow Region)
Born into a professor’s family, Sorokin graduated from the

Moscow Institute of Gas and Oil, but worked mainly as a graphic
designer. In the 1980s his literary texts, which developed the
ideas of Conceptualism, began to be known in non-conformist
circles and circulated in samizdat. Later they were published
abroad, mainly in Germany. Since perestroika, his works have
been published in multiple Russian editions. His first books
of short stories appeared in Russia in 1992, and produced
a shock effect. His novel Four Stout Hearts (Serdtsa chetyrekh) was
short-listed for the first Russian Booker prize in 1992. Sorokin’s
intentionally shocking destruction of literary conventions, his
use of sex, cruelty, and physical pathology as illustrations of
authoritative discourses, have made him unacceptable to the
Russian literary establishment. In the early 2000s Sorokin and
his novel Blue Lard were targeted by the pro-government youth
group Moving Together, which led a campaign to persecute the
author on the grounds of distributing pornography. Since 1999,
and ironically following Moving Together’s campaign, Sorokin’s
work has gained broad popularity. Along with several novels and
numerous short stories and plays, Sorokin wrote the screenplays
for such feature films as The Kopeck (dir. Ivan Dykhovichnyi),
4 and Dau (dir. Ilya Khrzhanovsky), and Moscow and The Target (dir.
Aleksandr Zeldovich). In 2006 Sorokin published the novel Day of
the Oprichnik, in which—in an allusion to the neo-traditionalism
of the Putin era—the monarchy and oprichnina (the Tsar’s death

squads from the time of Ivan the Terrible) are restored. In 2008
he published a sequel to this novel, a collection of short stories
titled Sugar Kremlin, which offers a panorama of social types
living in this dystopian Russia. The story “Petrushka,” included
here, comes from this collection. In 2010 his novel The Snowstorm
(Metel’) received the NOS Prize for New Writing. Sorokin lives in
Moscow and Berlin.
“Russi a I s S lipping B ack

into a n Author ita r i a n E mpir e ”
Spiegel Interview with Vladimir Sorokin1
SPIEGEL: Mr. Sorokin, in your new novel “Day of the Oprichnik,”

you portray an authoritarian Russia ruled by a group of
members of the secret police. The story is set in the future, but
this future is similar to the past under Ivan the Terrible. Aren’t
you really drawing parallels to today’s Russia?
Sorokin: Of course it’s a book about the present. Unfortunately, the
only way one can describe it is by using the tools of satire. We
still live in a country that was established by Ivan the Terrible.
SPIEGEL: His reign was in the sixteenth century. The czardom was
followed by the Soviet Union, then democracy under (former
President Boris) Yeltsin and (current President Vladimir) Putin.
Has Russia not yet completed its break with the past?
Sorokin: Nothing has changed when it comes to the divide between
the people and the state. The state demands a sacred willingness
to make sacrifices from the people.
SPIEGEL: The absolute ruler in your book bears some resemblance
to President Vladimir Putin....
Sorokin: ... Which was not my intention. Coming up with a Putin
satire wouldn’t be very thrilling. I’m an artist, not a journalist.
And a novel is not a documentary. In my book, I am searching
1
© Spiegel Online, February 2, 2007. By Martin Doerry and Matthias Schepp, trans.
from the German by Christopher Sultan.
for an answer to the question of what distinguishes Russia from

true democracies.
SPIEGEL: What explanation have you found?
Sorokin: Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen can say of
themselves: “I am the state.” I cannot say that. In Russia only
the people in the Kremlin can say that. All other citizens are
nothing more than human material with which they can do all
kinds of things.
SPIEGEL: In old Russian, the word “oprichnik” means “a special
one.” Do you feel that the divide between the top and the
bottom in Russia today can no longer be bridged?
Sorokin: In our country there are special people who are permitted
to do anything. They are the sacrificial priests of power. Anyone
who is not a member of this group has no clout with the
state. One can be as pure as can be—just as magnate Mikhail
Khodorkovsky was—and still lose everything in a flash and
end up in prison. The Khodorkovsky case is typical of the
“oprichnina”—the system of oppression I describe.
SPIEGEL: Does a character like Khodorkovsky appear in your
book?
Sorokin: Such a parallel didn’t occur to me. However, my book
does begin with an attack on a rich man. This is almost a daily
occurrence nowadays. It has always been that way in Russia.
Only those who are loyal to the people in power can become
wealthy.
SPIEGEL: How is the elite reacting to the literary images you paint?
Sorokin: The reaction to my book has been tumultuous. But I had no
other choice than to put all this on paper. I have been carrying
around this wish for a long time, and so it took me only three
months to write it.
SPIEGEL: Why did you suddenly feel the need to write this book?
Sorokin: The citizen lives in each of us. In the days of Brezhnev,
Andropov, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin, I was constantly trying
to suppress the responsible citizen in me. I told myself that
I was, after all, an artist. As a storyteller I was influenced by the
Moscow underground, where it was common to be apolitical.
This was one of our favorite anecdotes: as German troops
marched into Paris, Picasso sat there and drew an apple. That
was our attitude—you must sit there and draw your apple, no
matter what happens around you. I held fast to that principle
until I was 50. Now the citizen in me has come to life.
SPIEGEL: Some of your novels are filled with violence. In “Ice,” for
example, human beings are mistreated with hammers made of
ice. Why is Russian society still so preoccupied with violence?
Sorokin: As a child I perceived violence as a sort of natural law.
In the totalitarian Soviet Union, oppression held everything
together. It was the sinister energy of our country. I had that
sense by as early as kindergarten and grade school. Later on
I wanted to understand why human beings are unable to do
without violence. It’s a mystery I haven’t solved to this day. Yes,
violence is my main theme.
SPIEGEL: How is this sinister energy reflected in Russia today?
Sorokin: It is alive in every bureaucrat. Whenever you encounter
a minor official, he lets you know that he is above you and that
you depend on him. It is reflected in the superpower mentality
that nourishes the Kremlin. An empire always demands
sacrifices from its people.
SPIEGEL: Criminal proceedings were launched against you five
years ago for supposedly pornographic passages in your novel
“Blue Lard.” Is censorship about to be reintroduced in Russia?
Sorokin: What happened at the time was an attempt to test writers’
steadfastness and the public’s willingness to accept open
censorship. It didn’t work.
SPIEGEL: Did the pressure that was applied to you intimidate
other writers?
Sorokin: Certainly. I have Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to
thank that a Russian writer can not only write anything he wants
today, but also publish it. I don’t know what will happen in the
future. The media—television, newspapers, and magazines—
are already controlled by the state today.
SPIEGEL: One of the characters in your book brags “that not
just one diplomat was expelled from Moscow, not just one
journalist was thrown from the television tower and not just one
whistleblower was drowned in the river.” When you wrote this
you knew nothing about the murder of investigative journalist

Anna Politkovskaya.
Sorokin: I just imagined what would happen to Russia if it isolated
itself completely from the Western world—that is, if it erected
a new Iron Curtain. There is much talk about Russia being
a fortress. Orthodox churches, autocracy, and national traditions
are supposed to form a new national ideology. This would mean
that Russia would be overtaken by its past, and our past would
be our future.
SPIEGEL: How realistic is such a relapse in a globalized world?
Sorokin: Putin likes to quote a sentence from Czar Alexander III,
who said that Russia has only two allies—the army and the
navy. As a citizen, this makes me sit up and take notice. This is
a concept of self-imposed isolation, a defense strategy that sees
Russia surrounded by enemies. When I turn on the TV I see
a general calmly claiming that our missiles are ahead of the latest
American models by three five-year plans. It’s a nightmare. We
are creating a concept of the enemy, just as they did in the Soviet
era. This is a giant step backward.
SPIEGEL: You have no confidence in the current Kremlin
administration?
Sorokin: This is their fault, not mine. My television teaches me that
everything was wonderful in the Soviet Union. According to
the programs I watch, the KGB and apparatchiks were angels,
and the Stalin era was so festive that the heroes of the day must
still be celebrated today.
SPIEGEL: Why is there no opposition from Russia’s legendary
intelligentsia?
Sorokin: It’s astonishing. I can’t help but gain the impression that our
champions of the freedom of opinion—writers, emigrants, and
civil rights activists—had only one goal in mind: the collapse of
the Soviet Union, started by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. And now
they are all silent.
SPIEGEL: How do you feel about the former chess world champion,
Garry Kasparov, who is trying to build an opposition movement?
Sorokin: I have respect for him and other members of the opposition
movement, like former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and
(politician) Irina Khakamada. But these politicians do not exist

for most people. About the only place you will find them is on
the Internet. If a state-owned station were to report tomorrow
that Kasyanov was visiting Russian cities and talking to the
people, the manager of that station would be looking for a new
job the next day.
SPIEGEL: What can be done?
Sorokin: It’s pointless to expect change to be ordered from above.
The bureaucracy has grown such powerful roots, and corruption
is so widespread, that these people have no interest in changing
anything.
SPIEGEL: In other words, everything is hopeless?
Sorokin: Everyone must awaken the citizen within himself. The
Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev once said that Russia
has many ideas and few goods. It was that way throughout
the entire twentieth century. Only in the last 15 years have
the Russians managed to dress up and eat their fill. However,
people with full bellies tend to become drowsy. This explains,
for example, the disinterest among students. In no other country
are they as apathetic as they are here.
SPIEGEL: With so much pessimism, do you even like your fellow
Russian people?
Sorokin: The word “people” is unpleasant to me. The phrase
“Soviet people” was drummed into us from childhood on. I love
concrete people, enlightened people who live conscious lives
and do not simply sit there and vegetate. To love the people you
have to be the general secretary of the Communist Party or an
absolute dictator. The poet Josef Brodsky once said, “The trees
are more important to me than the forest.”
SPIEGEL: In your book you describe a wall with which Russia
isolates itself from the West. Why is this wall built?
Sorokin: After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, former party
officials burned their party books and traded in their black
Volga limousines for black German-made sedans. That was
it. We had no purifying revolution. Neither Communist Party
officials nor KGB generals were forced to give up the reins of
power. In August 1991, I was in the crowd standing in front
of the Lubyanka KGB building when the monument to KGB

founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was toppled. It seemed as if a new
era was about to begin. But we underestimated the power of
the Soviet Union. It became ingrained in people’s consciousness
over the course of seven decades. After German reunification,
West Germany became a mirror for former East German
citizens. We didn’t have that.
SPIEGEL: You hold a degree in petroleum engineering. Was the
latest confrontation with Belarus over natural gas and oil an
expression of Moscow’s power politics?
Sorokin: Our government hasn’t become accustomed yet to the fact
that Georgia, Azerbaijan, the Baltic states—in fact, the entire
former Soviet Union—are now independent countries. Inciden-
tally, I wrote my thesis on the development of dampers for oil
pipelines.
SPIEGEL: Did this expertise come in handy in your book?
Sorokin: Yes, there is a sentence in it that reads: “We shut the
damper, as the czar ordered.”
SPIEGEL: How should German politicians, including Chancellor
Angela Merkel, behave in dealing with the Russian government?
Sorokin: The West should be even more vocal in insisting that the
Russians respect human rights. All compromise aside, I ask
myself whether Russia is moving in the direction of democracy.
I don’t believe it is! Bit by bit, Russia is slipping back into an
authoritarian empire. The worst thing that can happen to us is
indifference in the West—that is, if it were interested in nothing
but oil and gas. I am always surprised when I watch the weather
report on German television. First they show the map of Europe
and then the camera moves to the right. Then comes Kiev, then
Moscow and then everything stops. This seems to be the West’s
view of us—of a wild Russia that begins past Moscow, a place
one prefers not to see. This is a big mistake. The West must pay
closer attention.
SPIEGEL: Does the West understand Russia?
Sorokin: Yes and no. In Russia no one is surprised when an official
accepts a bribe while at the same time portraying the state as
some sacred entity to which the bourgeois should pay homage.
This all sounds absurd to you. But for Russians it is completely

normal.
SPIEGEL: There used to be a similar attitude toward the state
in Germany. But that changed after the Nazi dictatorship.
Nowadays the state plays a more modest role in society, just as
it does in America.
Sorokin: That just happens to be democracy. The Russian writer
Vladimir Nabokov once said, “In a democracy, portraits of
a nation’s leader should never exceed the size of a postage
stamp.” That won’t happen so quickly in our country.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Sorokin, we thank you for this interview.
Interview conducted by Martin Doerry and Matthias Schepp.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.
Vladimir Sorokin 285
Petrushk a 1
The dwarf Petr “Petrusha” Samuilovich Boreyko, who served as

a harlequin in the Kremlin Chamber of Merriment, returned to
his home after Friday’s concert for the Kremlin Inner Circle in the
third hour of the morning. The merrymakers’ big red bus, which, as
usual, dropped the dwarfs off at night after the performance, drove
him up to the very entrance of the nine-story brick house on Malo-
Gruzinskaya Street.
The driver opened the door and announced:
“Green Petrushka—out!”
Petrusha, who’d been dozing in the back seat, awoke, slid down
to the floor, and slowly walked toward the exit. Another twenty-
six dwarfs dozed in the bus’s dim interior, in what seemed like
disproportionately large seats. They were all in their merrymaking
costumes, makeup, caps, and hats. And all were, without exception,
sleeping. After walking down the aisle between the sleeping Baba
Yagas, wood- and water-goblins, hags, and witches, Petrusha
extended his little-bitty hand to the driver and said in a hoarse,
creakingly high voice:
“So long, Volodya.”
The driver enclosed the little hand in his tattooed fingers:
1
From Vladimir Sorokin, Sakharnyi Kreml’ (The Sugar Kremlin) (Moscow: Astrel’; AST,
2008’).
“Sleep well.”
Petrusha descended the steps in a sweeping, swinging manner,
and jumped down onto the asphalt, which was wet from the
incessant drizzle. The door closed and the bus drove off. Petrusha
began to climb up other steps—stone ones—toward the entrance.
He wore the costume of the Green Petrushka: a tri-peaked green hat
with bells, a little green caftan with huge buttons, iridescent green
breeches, and short green booties with curled toes. Petrusha’s face
was also green, but with red freckles and a big scarlet nose. Behind
Petrusha’s back dangled a green balalaika, which shone brightly
even at night.
Another three Petrushkas—Red, Blue, and Gold—still slept
aboard the departed bus.
Petrusha pulled out a plastic key, applying it to the lock of the
scratched and graffitied door. The door squeaked, opened. The
dwarf slipped into the dimly lighted entrance. It wasn’t very clean
here, but at least there were no traces of destruction or arson: the
Council of Roads had redeemed the house and zemshchina three
years ago. Petrusha summoned the elevator, but it didn’t res-
pond.
“Shit-clarinet!” Petrusha creaked out his usual expletive,
remembering that it was no longer Friday, but Saturday, and on
weekends, by order of the city council, not a single elevator was
to work in all of mother-Moscow. Economizing! A foreign word....
And in Russian—frugality.
Petrusha trudged up to the fifth floor on foot. He had to get
a serious pivoting start on each step, tilting severely to one side or
the other. His little bells rang, keeping time with his oscillations,
and his green balalaika fidgeted behind his back. And so, with these
swings, he overcame all five floors, and approached door No. 52, to
which he applied the same rectangular key. The door sang out “Oh,
someone’s come down from the hill!” and opened.
A light immediately came on in the apartment and a big beige-
silver robot named Yegorr rolled out:
“Greetings, Petr Samuilovich!”
“Hi, Yegorro,” Petrusha said wearily, leaning against a low hall-
stand and catching his breath after the long ascent.
Vladimir Sorokin. Petrushka 287
The robot rolled right up to him, its beige plastic stomach

opened, lit up: there was a shot of vodka inside the robot. And
the “March of the Toreadors” from Carmen immediately sounded.
Four years ago this had become a tradition after each nighttime
performance in the Kremlin.
Having caught his breath, Petrusha removed the shot from the
robot’s stomach, clinked the glass against its silvery forehead, drank
the vodka, and put the glass back in place. He took off his balalaika,
gave it to the robot. Leaning against the hall-stand, he pulled off
his boots. Then he took off his Green Petrushka outfit, hanging it
all on Yegorr’s hands. The robot rolled off, rumbling, toward the
wardrobe.
With nothing else on but little black underpants, Petrusha
wearily stretched, yawned, and padded into the bathroom. The
faucet was still making noise in here, filling the tub with foaming
water. Petrusha noticed with satisfaction that what the robot had
added to the water wasn’t “Apple Dream,” which had come to bore
him, but the “Tale of the Seven Seas.” He pulled off his underpants,
tumbled over the edge of the tub, and plunged into the water.
The foam smelled of the sea. Petrusha submerged himself in it
at once. The warm water, bubbling around his small, tired body, felt
delightful. The vodka blossomed like a hot flower in his stomach.
“Swell...,” Petrusha exhaled and closed his eyes.
Yegorr rolled into the bathroom with a lit “Homeland”
cigarette. Without opening his eyes, Petrusha parted his lips, which
were painted scarlet. The robot placed the cigarette between them,
turned, and stood still with an ashtray. Petrusha inhaled deeply
with great pleasure, releasing a stream of smoke from his brightly
colored mouth. Confronted by the smoke, the foam flickered with
annoyance. Petrusha took another drag, mumbled. The robot took
the cigarette from him. With a groan of pleasure, Petrusha grabbed
his scarlet nose, pulled it off, and tossed it onto the floor. Then he
began washing the makeup from his face.
Having washed it all away, he again opened his little mouth,
with its thin, pale lips. The robot placed the cigarette in it. The
water stopped flowing. Petrusha smoked, lying relaxed in the tub
and gazing at the dark-blue ceiling plastered with shiny stars. The
performance had gone smoothly: he played the harlequin and

danced quickly and gracefully, as always, with a “twinkle,” turning
like a “spindle,” walking like a “poker,” “duck,” “blizzard,”
“grouse,” “pike,” “samovar,” “roly-poly”—and when he passed
by as an “American” with a pratfall, the entire Inner Circle, which
had gathered in the Faceted Chamber, clapped and whistled
approvingly, while Prince Boris Yurievich Oboluev tossed gold
pieces at him twice.
“Two gold and two silver ... ten rubles...,” he murmured,
remembering and gazing at the stars.
“What would you like, sir?” asked the robot.
“Nothing,” Petrusha flicked ash into the foam. “Gimme a little
more vodka.”
“Yes, sir,” the robot opened its stomach.
Petrusha removed the shot glass, emptied it into his mouth, and
handed it back to the robot.
“Phew ... alright ....” he murmured, first taking a breath and
then a drag from the cigarette.
“All’s well that ends well,” said the robot.
“Exactly,” Petrusha closed his eyes, leaning back against the
plastic headrest. “Rustle me up some grub. Just don’t heat any-
thing up.”
“Yes, sir.”
The robot rolled away. Petrusha finished smoking and spat the
butt into the foam. He got up, turned on the shower. Strong jets of
water hit him from the outlet above. Petrusha hunched over, folding
his hands over his genitals. Then he straightened up, tossing back
his head and placing his face under the jets. He felt quite well, his
fatigue flowing away with the water.
“Well, then,” he turned off the shower and got out of the tub.
He took a terry robe from a low hanger, put it on, climbed
a wooden ladder in front of the sink, and glanced at himself in
the mirror: a broad face with small, puffy eyes, a snub nose, and
a small, stubborn mouth. He took a comb from the shelf and
combed his sparse, sand-colored hair.
“Well, then,” he repeated, and stuck out a sharp, white-coated
tongue. “Be well, Petrusha!”
He got down from the little ladder with a swing and went into
the living room. Yegorr had almost finished setting the table.
“Things going alright?” Petrusha slapped Yegorr’s eternally
cold plastic ass with his palm, which was warm and pale after the
bath.
“As soot is white,” the robot answered, laying out the zakuski.
“Re-fresh!”
“Yes, sir.”
Petrusha removed the shot glass from Yegorr, drank half,
speared a pickled mushroom with his fork, sent it into his mouth,
and commenced chewing. Then he drained the glass, grabbed
a pickle, sat down at the table, and started crunching it. Before him
lay a plate of boiled and smoked sausages that the robot had sliced,
a saucer with eggplant caviar, and a not-very-carefully opened can
of sprats in tomato sauce. In the center of the table stood a Sugar
Kremlin. Petrusha had already eaten all the double-headed eagles
and a part of the walls.
“News?” he asked.
“No news,” Yegorr replied.
“That’s good news,” Petrusha nodded, took a piece of black
bread, and greedily pounced on the food.
He ate quickly and with obvious effort, as if he were working,
which caused his head to jerk, while his facial muscles rippled
furiously beneath his skin, which was pale, unhealthy, and worn
out by makeup.
“Refresh!” he ordered with his mouth full.
The robot obediently flew open.
After drinking the fourth shot, Petrusha suddenly became very
drunk and started swaying on his chair. His little hands moved
clumsily; he knocked over the can of sprats, broke off a piece
of bread, and tried to sop up the sauce that had spilled on the
table.
“From be-e-yond the sea-ea—fro-om another sho-ore,” he sang,
winking to the robot.
“He came sailing to us, Uncle Ye-e-gor,” the robot immediately
picked up the song.
“Got himself a gre-ey wagon,” sang the dwarf, hiccoughing.
“And a crea-ea-ea-ky nag,” sang the robot.

“Yes, and ho-ho-ho-ho-houyhnhnm!” they sang together.
Petrusha broke out laughing, leaning back and dropping his
fork. Clutching the piece of bread with the sopped-up sauce in his
hand, he chortled creakily, swaying. The robot stood still, blinking
its blue eyes.
“Refresh!” Petrusha shook his head.
The plastic stomach flew open. Petrusha took the shot, sipped
at it, and carefully placed it on the table:
“Well, then….”
He shifted the watery gaze of his small eyes to the robot:
“What’s the plural of glass?”
“Smithereens!” the robot replied.
“Good boy,” Petrusha hiccoughed. “And things’re going
alright?”
“As soot is white!”
“Go-o-od boy!” Petrusha pounded his fist on the table.
The unfinished shot toppled.
“Shit-clarinet … refresh!”
The robot flew open. The little-bitty hand pulled out a shot of
vodka. The watery little eyes spotted the Sugar Kremlin:
“So.”
He clambered up and stood on the seat of the chair, and then
reached for the Kremlin, stretching himself flat on the table. When
he got to it, he broke a merlong off the Kremlin wall, shoved it into
his mouth, and crawled back, planting his palm in the sausage. He
sat down on the chair with a sweeping jump and loudly crunched
into the sugar:
“And, umm... things going alright?”
“As soot is white.”
Petrusha crushed the merlong of the Kremlin wall with his
molars.
“Look, Yegorro,” he said thoughtfully, “lemme me have....”
“What would you like?”
“Gimme Ritulya.”
A not very high-quality hologram of a young dwarf maiden,
sitting in a rocking-chair in a garden, appeared in the room. The
dwarf girl was rocking, smiling, and cooling herself with a fan that
seemed humongous in her miniature little hands.
“Turn around!” Petrusha commanded the robot.
The robot turned away.
Petrusha climbed down from the table with the shot glass in his
hand, walked over to the hologram, and sat down awkwardly on
the soft floor covering, spilling vodka.
“Hello, Ritulya,” he croaked. “Hello, my dear.”
The small woman continued to rock and smile. Periodically, she
would bring the fan up to her face, hide behind it, and wink.
“Ritulya. It was the same today again. Had the harlequinade
without you. The sixty-second performance. Without you,”
Petrusha muttered disjointedly. “Sixty-second! And without you.
Eh? Like that. And everyone misses you. Terribly. All of ‘em!
Nastya, Borka, Cucumber, Marinka. And what’s ‘is name ... the
newbie ... Lil’ Samson. Plays the water-goblin. All of ‘em, all of
‘em. And I love you terribly. Terribly! And I’ll wait for you. Always.
And it won’t be, you know. Not long. Year and a half. They’ll fly
by quick. You won’t notice. Wham, at home. Won’t even notice.
Fly by like a birdie. Flit, and that’s it. And the term will end. And
everything’ll be, you know. Alright. We have a lot of money, now,
Ritulya. Exceeding much. Today, this prince, you know. Oboluev.
Tossed two gold pieces. Tossed ‘em in my mug! Oboluev. Eh?!
And that’s it. And last time they hurled silver ... just ... well. Like
that. Terrible! They throw and throw.... And Sergei Sergeich said.
Exactly! That they’ll give me a raise in the new year. For long
service. And I’ll have, you know. A hundred and twenty. Gold.
A month. Plus the tossings. Eh?! We live like kings, Ritulya. Be
well, there. Lil’ Rita. Here’s to you.”
Petrusha drank, grimaced, sighed. He carefully placed the
empty glass on the floor and looked at rocking Rita.
“You know. Ritulya. Our lil’ Vitya, here. He had a harlequin gig
on the side. For the secret service. Eh?! And there was one oprichnik
there. Totally stoned. Plastered. Took such a liking to Vitya that he
tossed him three gold pieces. All at once! And then, you know. Even
sat ‘im on his knee. And ho-ho! Plied ‘im with wine. And said we
could, you know. Perform for the oprichnina. ‘Cause the oprichnina
didn’t like dwarfs before. But now, you know. They like ‘em. Eh?!
There. Maybe. Why not? He’ll talk to that one, you know. Bavila.
And that’s it. And we’ll start dancing for the oprichniks. And it’ll all
be alright. All of it! And this fellow treated him. Vitya. So. And our
Vitya, you know. He’s exceeding brazen. Asked the secret service
fellow straight out. Right to his face: when’ll you review the case
of the Kremlin dwarfs?! To his face! Eh?! Vitya! And that fellow
heard ‘im out. Seriously. And all serious, you know. He answers:
soon! That’s how it is. He seriously said: soo-oon! Soo-oon! And that
means—there’ll be a, you know. A review. And then—amnesty. And
all of you, all sixteen of you, will … go … free! There!”
Petrusha screwed up his little eyes—which were swollen from
drink, makeup, and fatigue—to rocking Rita. She was cooling
herself as before, hiding her face behind the fan, winking.
“Amnesty,” Petrusha said, and licked his little lips. “Just you
wait…. I, you know. Told you. I told you! Already. Yes? Just you
wait ... Yegorr!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did I tell Ritulya about amnesty?”
“You did.”
“When?”
“August 12, August 28, September 3, September 17, September
19, October 4.”
Petrusha was deep in thought.
Rita rocked, fanned, smiled, and winked.
“What? What’re you laughing at? Fool.”
He picked up the empty glass and hurled it at the hologram.
The glass flew through smiling Rita, bounced off the wall, and fell
to the floor. The shot glass was made of viviparous transparent
plastic. The robot immediately rolled up, lifted it, and placed it in
its stomach.
“Cunt!” Petrusha shouted, glaring at Rita.
Rita winked from behind her fan.
“Just you wait...,” Petrushka curled his lips with concern,
remembering something. “Wait, wait ... Yegorr!”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want! Quick! The! The! Cap!”
Yegorr rolled up to the wardrobe, opened it, took out the green
tri-peaked Petrushka cap.
“Quick! Give it here!”
The robot rolled toward Petrushka with cap in hand.
“Hurry up, shit-clarinet! Step on it!”
Swaying Petrusha grabbed the cap from him, pulled it over his
head, and threw off his robe, standing naked.
“Gimme the highest!” he shouted.
The hologram of Rita immediately disappeared and was
replaced by another: the sovereign, seated in the royal box of the
Bolshoi Theatre.
“Hail, sovereign Vasily Nikolaich!” cried Petrusha and tried to
walk like a “samovar,” but fell.
“Hail, hail....”
Petrusha turned over and got up, staggering. He bowed to the
sovereign, saluted, and murmured:
“A little gift for Your Royal Highness from the desert’s dryness,
from a lead brick, from a horse’s prick, from a cat’s asshole, from
a lame mongrel, from a hungry whore, from a herpes sore, from
a chopping block, from a headless cock, from a beaten snout, from
rancid sauerkraut, from a bird of prey, from nuclear decay, from
a rotting porch, from a branded crotch, from a broken knee, and
a bit from me.”
He bowed, sticking his wizened little rear right up to the
sovereign’s calm face:
“Yegorr! The fuse!!”
The robot raised his middle finger-lighter to Petrusha’s rear
and ignited a little flame. Petrusha loudly passed gas. It flashed
a greenish-yellow. The quick flame engulfed the sovereign’s head
and died down. A hole had formed in the hologram. The sovereign
sat in the box, as before, but his head and a part of his left shoulder
were gone.
Petrusha stood up straight, staggered away from the hologram,
and peered at it:
“Well, then.”
His completely swollen little eye-slits happily appraised the
damage to the sovereign:
“Swell! Eh, Yegorr?”

“Right, sir.”
“Well, then.... Gimme the previous one.”
Another hologram appeared alongside the first one—exactly
the same, but smaller. In it, the sovereign was only missing his neck
and chin.
“There, see?!” Petrusha came up to the robot and embraced his
faceted hip. “I let ‘er rip downward that time. And, you know. It
was weak that time, eh? A weak fart, eh?”
“Right, sir.”
“But tonight? How’d I do? Super! Eh? Yegorr!”
“Right, sir.”
Petrusha and the robot stood gazing at the holograms. The cap
on Petrusha’s head—swaying, its bells ringing—brushed up, now
and then, against the robot’s narrow waist.
“Re-fresh!” Petrusha ordered.
And stretching out his hand, he pulled the shot glass out of the
robot. Spilling some of its contents, he brought it to his mouth. He
wanted to take a drink, but stopped, grabbed the glass with his left
hand, and showed the hologram a fig with his right:
“Take that!”
He elbowed the robot:
“Yegorr!”
The robot folded its silvery fingers into a fig and showed it to
the hologram:
“Here’s to you, sovereign Vasily Nikolaevich.”
The two figs—one silvery-strict above, the other pinkish-white,
swaying, below—hung in the air for a long time.
Petrusha tired first, lowered his hand.
“Good boy!” he slapped the robot on its rear, drank, and tossed
the glass behind his back. The robot immediately turned around,
picked it up, and placed it into itself.
“It’s...,” Petrusha scratched his bare, hairless chest. “Need, you
know....”
His swollen little eye-slits peered around the room.
“Yegorr!”
“It’s...,” Petrusha’s stubby-fingered little hands fumbled

restlessly across his chest. “I, you know....”
“What would you like,” the robot stared at him.
“How is it...,” the dwarf recalled painfully, and suddenly
plopped down, sprawled out on the carpet, rolled over on his
back—but got up, shook his head.
The bells rang. The robot stared at its master. While he stared at
the robot, stirring his fingers and toes.
“Who’re … you?” Petrusha asked, barely moving his tongue.
“I am the robot Yegorr,” the robot replied.
“And ... things alright?”
“As soot is white.”
“And you ... you know ... well....”
“Who’re … you?”
“I am the robot Yegorr.”
Petrusha raised his hand, reached for the robot, moving his
lips, but suddenly fell backward, quiet. The robot rolled closer to
him, knelt and slowly bent down, picked Petrusha up in its arms,
straightened up and stood. It rolled into the bedroom. Petrusha
slept in its arms, his little mouth agape. The robot placed him in the
unmade bed and covered him with a blanket. It took the cap off the
sleeper’s head and rolled into the living room. It put the cap away
in the wardrobe. Cleared the table. Turned off the hologram. Turned
off the light. Rolled up to the wall. Switched to sleep mode. Its blue
eyes died down.
Translated by Boris Dralyuk

Victor Pelevin
(b. 1962, Moscow)
One of the most popular and internationally acclaimed

contemporary Russian writers, Victor Pelevin is a bright
representative of Russian postmodernism. Born to the family of
a military engineer, he graduated from a Moscow English-
language high school and the Moscow Institute of Energy and
studied at the Literary Institute. He worked at the magazine
Science and Religion, where he published works on East-Asian
mysticism, and his first novel Omon Ra (1992) immediately drew
attention from critics and a wide readership. Pelevin’s subsequent
novels—The Life of Insects (1993), Chapaev and Emptiness (translated
in two variants, Buddha’s Little Finger and The Clay Machine-Gun,
1996), Generation P (available as Homo Zapiens and Babylon, 1999),
The Scared Book of the Werewolf (2003), and Empire V (2006)—were
translated into many languages and furthered his reputation
as one of Russia’s most innovative contemporary authors. He
participated in the international project The Myths along with
Margaret Atwood, David Grossman, Dubravka Ugrešic, and
others, contributing the novel The Helmet of Horror: The Myth
of Theseus and the Minotaur (2005). His prose is marked by the
fusion of mythological narratives and satire. Pelevin’s master-
plot, which structures the majority of his works, illustrates the
transformation of an ordinary human being into a living god.
However, if in earlier works this transformation was depicted
as leading to an ultimate freedom, in his later text, it is typically
interpreted as the metamorphosis of the human into a monster
who has been deformed by the monstrosity of power.
Viktor Pelevin 297

Pelevin, Victor. Homo Zapiens, translated by Andrew Bromfield. London:
Penguin, 2002.
Also available in English

Pelevin, Victor. Omon Ra, translated by Andrew Bromfield. London: New
Directions, 1998.
------. A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories, translated by
Andrew Bromfield. London: New Directions, 1998.
------. The Life of Insects, translated by Andrew Bromfield. London: Penguin, 1999.
------. Buddha’s Little Finger, translated by Andrew Bromfield. London: Penguin,
2001.
------. The Blue Lantern, translated by Andrew Bromfield. London: New Directions,
2002.
------. The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, translated by
Andrew Bromfield. New York: Canongate, 2006.
------. The Yellow Arrow, translated by Andrew Bromfield. London: New Directions,
2009.
------. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, translated by Andrew Bromfield. London:
Penguin, 2009.
C r itic a l R esponses to G ener ation ‘P’

(H omo Z a piens , 1999)
Review of Generation “P”

Gregory Freidin1
Granted, the Soviet Union was one big Potemkin village—

a communist Disneyland stretching over 11 time zones—a virtual
reality, except that those who lived there experienced it as the real
thing. What, then, is today’s Russia like? Before the collapse of
communism, the answer depended pretty much on which side of
the Berlin Wall the observer was facing. These days, according to
Victor Pelevin in his latest and most provocative novel, Generation
“P,” the answer depends—in the final analysis—on the last button
you pressed on the zapper of your boob tube. Welcome, then, to
the oral-obsessive, anal-compulsive, image-saturated, stimulant-
crazy, brand-name infatuated, ghost-infested, violence-ridden, and
confusing Russia of Pelevin’s absolutely sex-free novel, which in the
bargain, has turned out to be a mind-boggling commercial success.
A novelist with a cult following, Pelevin has already produced
two brilliant snapshots of contemporary Russia—one through the
eyes of post-communist citizens metamorphosing into bugs (The
Life of Insects) and another (Chapayev and Void) through the eyes of
a legendary revolutionary duo, Commander Vasily Chapayev and
his sidekick, Petka Void, who shuttle between 1918 and 1996 and
between Moscow and Outer Mongolia under the influence of all
sorts of substances and Buddhist mantras. With the publication of
Published in Foreign Policy, no. 118 (Spring 2000): 165-169.

1
Critical Responses to Generation ‘P’. Gregory Freidin 299
Generation “P,” Pelevin has launched another probe into the post-
communist terra incognita, this time in the form of a dissident poet
trying to find gainful employment in the country’s real world.
A dissident poet? Yes, a dissident poet. Has anyone ever
wondered what happened to Russia’s dissident poets, those quixotic
figures who breathed romance into the cold war the way Omar
Sharif breathed it into the frozen steppe in David Lean’s Doctor
Zhivago? Pelevin found one such poet (unemployed, of course) and
put him to good use as his alter ego: Vavilen Tatarsky, born in 1960,
who became a poet by virtue of his encounter with a volume by
Boris Pasternak in 1980.
Like the author, Tatarsky (a significant name, given the Russian
history of the Tartar yoke) came of age in the halcyon days of Premier
Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, when capitalism’s inroads were measured
by such momentous developments as building the one and only
Pepsi bottling plant to slake the thirst of the entire Evil Empire. The
capitalist beverage, even without ice, did what it was supposed to
do: instill in the young pioneers sipping the warm, clawing liquid
the hope that “some day the far-away proscribed world from the
other side of the ocean would enter their life.” It did. We know it did.
With a vengeance. But the choice of the cola brand that produced
the Soviet Union’s “P” generation may also help explain why the
capitalism and democracy that followed the collapse of communism
have turned out to be—to put it delicately—not the real thing.
As one who has also tasted Pepsi while a captive of communism,
some dozen years earlier, I can attest to the beverage’s ideologically
corrosive effect. It was 1959, the year of innocence; the place
was Moscow’s Sokolniki Park; the event was the U.S. Industrial
and Cultural Fair. For me, a Moscow youth of 13, the free Pepsi
offered at the fair was even more shocking than the fair sculpture
garden consisting of the tormented, twisted figures of American
expressionism and the tantalizing display walls showcasing
hundreds of different models of men’s shoes (incomprehensible
for someone used to treating footwear as a horse treats its hoof).
A line snaked around an exotic-looking bright yellow stall. Behind
it, half a dozen perplexed-looking Russian women dressed in
white uniforms were filling and handing paper cups with the
foaming American drink to Soviet citizens. The clientele looked

about furtively, avoiding each other’s eyes while standing in line.
Hesitating at first, they downed the industrial-tasting cola like
vodka, Russian style, and ambled away only to turn around all of
a sudden and get in line again for another gulp of what had to be,
a mere six years after Joseph Stalin’s death, a treasonous potion.
I, too, made several rounds, an adventure facilitated by the presence
of a public toilet, strategically located nearby and almost as rare in
Moscow then as was a bottle of Pepsi. With each round, I felt my
Soviet loyalties, a matter of course at the time, ebbing away.
Buoyed by the memories and hoping to find another key to
Pelevin’s novel, I tried to research the history of the U.S. Industrial
and Cultural Fair and came across a recording of that event’s other
main attraction: the Kitchen Debate. “You may be ahead of us … in the
development of the thrust of your rockets,” Vice President Richard
Nixon began diplomatically, taking care of both his opponent’s
pride and his missile gap constituency back home, “[but] we are
ahead of you … in color television.” Premier Nikita Khrushchev was
unimpressed: How can one even compare television and rockets?
Forty years later, with the old enmities receding into memory, it
is clear that the rockets and sputnik may have won a few battles,
but it was the color television with its ability to sell anything and
everything to everybody that has won the cold war. The intuition of
Pelevin the novelist supports this Pepsi and color television theory
of history.
Our fictional hero, Vavilen Tatarsky, was born a year after
Pepsi’s promotion came to Russia—the son of a man of the 1960s
generation who, like Mikhail Gorbachev, loved the fiction of the
semi-dissident author Vasily Aksyonov as much as he worshiped
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and therefore decided to give his son a name
that combined elements of both. As he was completing his studies at
the Gorky Literary Institute, Tatarsky looked forward to the idyllic
double existence of a Soviet intellectual: a day job as a producer of
Soviet pulp, with the night devoted exclusively to the creation of
poetry for eternity. But then perestroika made matters complicated,
“improving the Soviet Union so much that it ceased to exist,” and
with it, ending the demand for official Soviet writing.
Critical Responses to Generation ‘P’. Gregory Freidin 301
All that remained was writing for eternity. But, as Pelevin notes:
“The eternity to which Tatarsky [had] decided to devote his works
and days [had] also begun to change…. It turned out that eternity
existed only in so far as Tatarsky believed in it.” Indeed, this eternity
“could exist only thanks to government subsidies or, which is one
and the same thing, as something that was forbidden by the state.”
Disenchanted, Tatarsky abandons poetry and hires himself out as
a salesmen in one of the numerous retail kiosks run by Moscow’s
Chechen mafia—until his way with words finds another application.
He gets rediscovered by an old classmate and fellow poet, who is
now a successful purveyor of PR.
Thanks to this chance encounter, Tatarsky embarks on a grand
career as an advertising copywriter. At first, his special talent is
employed in giving a Russian spin to famous American brands,
in anticipation of an onslaught of U.S. consumer products. One
of Tatarsky’s greatest hits is a slogan for Parliament cigarettes that
evokes the 1993 shelling of the Russian White House: “To Us, Even
the Smoke of the Fatherland is Pleasant and Sweet.” The words are
those of a famous aphorism from Aleksandr Sergeevich Griboedov’s
Woe from Wit, familiar to every Russian schoolchild. Emblematic
of the country’s pride in its letters, the words are now used as
a product wrapper for a commercial hit.
The more Tatarsky is drawn into the world of the make-
believe economy, the more successfully he combines his duties as
an advertising kreator with an exciting career in psychedelic travel
(certain Russian mushrooms apparently facilitate contact with
the God of the Old Testament, as well as the more exotic ancient
Babylonian deities) and Ouija board communications with the
spirit of Che Guevara (the great leftist brand name), who proposes
a heavily Freudian theory of consumer society. Thus enlightened,
Tatarsky finally floats to the top of the super-secret and all-powerful
media conglomerate that uses sophisticated computer graphics
equipment for scripting, producing, and broadcasting a simulated
Russian reality. Only the United States is capable of restricting the
agency’s power—by controlling the speed of the graphics processors.
(Just in case you have wondered why on some days Boris Yeltsin
looked much more animated than on others….)
In Russia, Generation “P” has become required reading for

everyone, and many of its clever one-liners have already entered
the hip argot. Che Guevara’s spirit announces to Tatarsky through
an automatic writing planchette that a new species, Homo Zapiens
(from the television zapper), is taking over the world, whose oral
(consume!) and anal (disgorge cash!) obsessions account for the al-
ternative name of the species, Oranus. Both Homo Zapiens and Ora-
nus are now part of Russian speech, along with “wow impulses”—
a unit of measurement for viewer responses to a commercial.
Before becoming a super adman, Tatarsky writes his last poem,
which can be read as an epigraph to the entire novel. Echoing Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s musings in Crime and Punishment that eternity could
turn out to be “one little room, something like a bath-house in the
country, black with soot, with spiders in every corner” and those of
the Russian rock band DDT in the song, “What is Autumn?,” the
poem morphs into an extended question mark hovering over the
post-Soviet, post-utopian space we call Russia:
What is eternity? It’s a little bath house.

Eternity is a little bath house with cockroaches
But if a Man’ka—a common salesgirl
Stops believing in this little bath house,
What will become of the Motherland and us?
A postmodern consumerist Potemkin village, a color television

screen projection of an advertising culture—this is what Generation
“P” boldly suggests.
Russian Literary Postmodernism in the 1990s
Mark Lipovetsky 2
[…] The protagonist of Chapaev i pustota (The Clay Machine Gun

/ Buddha’s Little Finger, 1996), the decadent poet Pyotr Pustota
(Void), and the central character of the new novel Generation
“P” Vavilen Tatarsky, “creator” of commercials, are essentially
antipodes.
Pustota does not know which of the realities known to him
are authentic and which are fictitious. But he chooses for himself
the world where he is a decadent poet and Chapaev’s Commissar,
and follows this choice consistently. Tatarsky completely belongs
to the given that is today’s reality. In order to escape from reality
he needs to use different “stimulators” like LSD, bad heroin,
mushrooms, or at least a Ouija board for communication with
spirits.
Pustota follows the path of philosophic enlightenment and
finally finds the capability to “check out from the hospital,” or
in other words follow the lead of Chapaev and create his own
reality. Tatarsky also seems to go along the path of elevation,
ranging from the laryok [night food/alcohol stand] salesman to
the live god, the head of the secret order, Haldey’s Guild, which
supplies Russia with illusory reality.
2
Published in The Slavonic and East European Review 79, no. 1 (January 2001):
31-50.
In fact, his elevation is predicted by his name, Vavilen, created

by the combination of letters borrowed from Vasily Aksyonov and
Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, and by the fortunate chance that it coincides
with the name of the city (Babylon). His path is predetermined
not by his personality or search, but by his name, that is by his
“brand.” Tatarsky turns out to be the same thing, a product of the
stuff for which he creates commercials.
In Pustota, Pelevin depicted an almost Romantic image of the
modernist. Here, the modernist was a genuine creator, one who
chose emptiness for the ultimate expression of his freedom. As
for Tatarsky, he is nothing but a human word processor. He is not
a creator, but a “krieitor” (this English word sounds sarcastic in
the Russian adoption), elevated to stardom by pure impersonal
chance. He seems ridiculous with his notebook in which at any
convenient or inconvenient moment he writes down ideas for
commercials.
This comic effect of his “creativity” is especially evident at
the moment of the drug-generated epiphany when he produces
(‘in redemption’) the advertisement “slogan” for God: “Khristos-
Spasitel’. Solidnyi Gospod’ dlia solidnykh gospod” [Christ the
Saviour: Imposing Lord for imposing lords]. His ascent along
the career/mystical ladder certainly reminds one of a computer
game, with its three levels, three puzzles, and three bosses. But in
fact he does not ascend by his will, but is moved as a figurine on
the board. It is illuminating that each new elevation of Tatarsky
occurs right after his boss/mentor’s death of unclear causes that
are linked to some superior forces unknown to Vavilen.
Pelevin used the model of the computer game as a plot model
in his early short novel Prints Gosplana (The prince of Gosplan,
1990). However, the difference between the two is stunning.
The protagonist of the early text recognized the simulative
character of existence within the game when he discovered
that the princess he was courageously trying to save was only
a bunch of sticks and buckets, a dummy wrapped in colorful
rags. But he chose to continue the game because, “when a man
spends so much time and effort on a journey and finally gets
to its end, he no longer sees everything the way it really is. [...]
Critical Responses to Generation “P”. Mark Lipovetsky 305
Although that’s not exactly it either. There is no such thing as the

way everything ‘really is.’ Let’s just say he can’t allow himself to
see.’”3 The Prince of Gosplan managed to fill the flat and fictitious
framework of the game with himself: his individual path, his pain,
losses and revelations. By this means he transformed the simulation
into a reality of his own, free and authentic (for him).
On the contrary, Tatarsky gets accepted into the big game under
the condition of his total depersonalization. The final act of taking
off Tatarsky’s virtual mask, the three-dimensional model that will
be a mystical husband of Ishtar and will appear in all the possible
commercials, symbolically manifests total alienation of Tatarsky
from his face, which in fact never was too bright or distinguished
with individual features. Generation “P” is a manifestation of the
bitter realization that the principal individual strategy of freedom
elaborated by Pelevin in his previous works can be easily turned
into a repressive mechanism for the manipulation of mass con-
sciousness.
The transformation of simulacra into reality becomes industrial
and consumer-oriented. Every commercial in Pelevin’s novel reveals
itself to be the simulacra of happiness and freedom pretending to be
“the real thing”: “Freedom is symbolized by an iron, or a tampon
with wings, or lemonade. That’s what we’re paid for. We bullshit
them from the screen, and they bullshit each other and us, authors.
This is like radioactivity when it does not matter anymore who did
blast the bomb.”4 Within such a disposition, the difference between
the creator of the illusion and the consumer is not that deep. During
the “mass reproduction” of simulacra, the poet Pyotr Pustota is
substituted for by the commercial copywriter Vavilen Tatarsky.
[…] As for Pelevin, his Generation “P” is a logical step after his
neo-baroque Bildungromans (Omon Ra, Life of Insects, Buddha’s Little
Finger). In his previous novels the transfiguration of simulacra into
3
Victor Pelevin, A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia, trans. Andrew Bromfield
(London: New Directions, 1998), 204.
4
Victor Pelevin, Generation “P” (Moscow: Vagrius, 1999), 81. Hereafter references to
this edition are indicated by a page number after the quote.
a reality of individual freedom was the goal of the intellectual and

emotional quest of the extraordinary character. In Generation “P”
he naturally makes an attempt to offer this knowledge to a very
ordinary character, an everyman who is no different from everyone.
But the result of this experiment returns the author to the starting
point of his quest, the hyper-reality of simulacra produced by the
means of commercials that are pictured in Generation “P.” This
scenario is no better than the hyper-reality of simulacra produced
by the Soviet ideology and pictured in Omon Ra, Pelevin’s first
novel. […]
Survival of the Catchiest:
Memes and Postmodern Russia
Eliot Borenstein5
[…]
Though Pelevin is not the only author of “serious” fiction to
incorporate the world of popular culture in his writing, he is
certainly the most prominent. Moreover, Pelevin refuses to draw
boundaries between high and low. Nearly all his work to date has
been informed by an unwavering strategy: the casual conflation
of television commercials, Hollywood movies, Latin American
telenovelas, and (most recently) comic book superheroes, with
Russian religious philosophy, Silver Age mysticism (Blok’s
Beautiful Lady), trite philosophizing about Russia’s destiny,
right-wing national-chauvinist rhetoric, and the Russian literary
canon (along with a distinct admixture of canned Zen wisdom
and hallucinogenic epiphanies). DPP (nn) contains an extended
parody of Spider-Man, who, thanks to Russian phonetics and the
protagonist’s obsessions, quickly metamorphoses into “Pidormen”
(Queer-man). Though much of the scene seems to come from the
Spider-Man film, some of Pidormen’s neurotic anxieties about
his secret identity suggest that Pelevin is also familiar with the
movie’s source material. Pidormen’s secret identity is used as
a metaphor for the protagonist’s fears that his business rival and
metaphysical enemy is seducing him and “turning” him gay.
5
Published in: Slavic and East European Journal 48, no. 3 (2004): 462-83.
While Pelevin is tapping into a long-established subtext of the

superhero genre (secret identity as closet), the superhero trope
and homosexuality are both equally foreign to the main character,
and are both ambient influences that colonize his consciousness.
Thus Pelevin uses the superhero for an effect that is virtually the
mirror image of the recent resurgence of the superhero metaphor
in American prose fiction (the Fantastic Four in Rick Moody’s
The Ice Storm (1994), the entire panoply of 1970s Marvel heroes
in Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and the
Escapist, a WWII mystery man created by Michael Chabon in his
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), in which the
superheroes are connected with a bittersweet nostalgia for an
unhappy childhood. In Pelevin’s hands, the superhero meme is
aggressively alien, while for the American authors, it is reassuringly
familiar.
Pelevin’s apparently indiscriminate borrowing from every
available discourse has placed him firmly within the Postmodernist
camp, but it also facilitates a heightened awareness of the memetic
character of the ambient culture. Where some might want to
preserve the hierarchy between the canonical and the trivial, at
least some of the appeal of Pelevin’s fiction clearly lies in his blithe
insistence on the interchangeability of memes. Each of Pelevin’s
books resembles the sidewalk lotki at which they are so often
sold: the vendors see no problem placing Daniil Andreev side
by side with Danielle Steele, and neither does Pelevin. Pelevin’s
world reifies the notion of the “market of ideas,” since mass-
cultural productions such as Pokemon compete with snippets
of Pushkin and Lermontov for space in our consciousness. If
Pelevin’s characters seem to lack a developed psychology (the
author’s flagrant disregard for the traditions of psychological
realism is one of the many factors that put him at odds with the
Russian literary establishment), this very lack of an inner life
makes them suitable representations of both the Postmodern
“post-self” and Blackmore’s dismissal of the self as a “memeplex,”
a conglomeration of memetic subroutines that creates the illusion
of consciousness. Pelevin gives his readers a self that is all surface,
an all but affectless vessel to be filled with the culture’s ambient
Critical Responses to Generation ‘P’. Eliot Borenstein 309
memes.6 His non-stop references to pop-cultural ephemera are

no doubt a source of humor, but they also serve as a constant
reminder that there can be no boundary between the individual
consciousness and the surrounding memetic environment.
Though memetic concerns run throughout Pelevin’s work,
nowhere are they more prominent than in Generation “P.” From
the beginning, Pelevin shows Russia to be particularly susceptible
to such memetic interventions: “Naskol’ko Tatarskii mog sudit’,
nikakogo srazheniia mezhdu tovarami za nishi v razvorochennykh
otechestvennykh mozgakh ne proiskhodilo; situatsiia bol’she
napominala dymiashchiisia peizazh posle atomnogo vzryva” (“As
far as Tatarsky could tell, no battle was being waged among the
merchandise for niches in the country’s muddled brains; the situation
was more like a smoking landscape after an atomic explosion”
[31]). The novel begins by setting the stage for Russia’s weakened
position as an importer rather than an exporter of culture, using
consumer goods as the symbols of something much less tangible:
a Soviet “Pepsi Generation” that never had the chance to choose
Coke now lives in the ruins of an unloved but powerful country
(“stoilo li meniat’ imperiiu zla na bananovuiu respubliku zla,
kotoraia importiruet banany iz Finliandii” (“Was it worth trading
an evil empire for an evil banana republic that imports bananas
from Finland?” [18]).
[…] By the novel’s end, [Vavilen Tatarsky’s name] is clearly
associated with an ancient city of great thematic importance:
Babylon.7 In the tradition of Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich, Tatarsky’s
name seems to predetermine his course in life: he goes into
advertising, rising from copywriter to “creator,” bringing together
6
The flat, detached tone of most of Pelevin’s works is reminiscent of a number of
American authors who appeal to a similar demographic (disaffected youth): the
later novels of Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick), nearly the entire
fictional output of the late Richard Brautigan, and, most recently, the novels of
Chuck Palahniuk. Vonnegut was quite popular in the Soviet Union in the 1970s,
while Palahniuk’s Fight Club has earned him a loyal following in Russia today.
7
The Russian “Vavilon” is used for both the city of Babylon and the Tower of Babel,
making it far more evocative than it would be in English.
words and images from vastly different traditions in order to move

product. His hilarious slogans grow increasingly absurd and brazen
(an ad for Parliament cigarettes featuring a picture of a burning
Russian White House, with the slogan “I dym otechestva nam
sladok i priiaten” (“The smoke of the fatherland is also sweet and
pleasant”) [59] […]; a campaign for “Head and Shoulders” dandruff
shampoo depicting Stenka Razin’s execution on Lobnoe mesto, the
notorious Kremlin chopping block (300). In developing their media
“concepts,” Tatarsky and his admen indulge in a veritable orgy of
bricolage, in which no obstacles prevent the irreverent juxtaposition
of cultural icons and notions. All pre-existing memes (whether from
Griboedov, the Russian Orthodox Church, or Seven-Up ads) are fair
game, and therefore can be used as the building blocks for the new
memes of commercial culture. This approach is memetic in that
it does not distinguish between poetry and jingles, since both are
strings of information competing for our brains’ attention.8 Pelevin’s
playful examination of advertising shows it to be the most nakedly
memetic of all human endeavors, because a successful ad is one that
we remember in spite of ourselves.9 Moreover, in post-Soviet Russia,
even the loftiest ideological questions prove to be little more than
advertising campaigns, the slicker, more attractive heirs to Soviet
propaganda: Tatarsky is asked to develop a new “Russian idea”
(176). In a move that resonates with the cultural preoccupation with
mind control, Pelevin soon reveals that advertising techniques are
used to both govern and create Russian reality. Advertising proves
to be a kind of hypnosis that keeps the population in line. […]
8
Tatarsky learns the tools of his trade by reading Al Ries and Jack Trout’s 1980 treatise
on the philosophy of advertising, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.
9
This is why so many television commercials entirely dispense with the notion of
explaining the value of a given product, concentrating instead on a memorable
image, phrase, or tune with which the product will be associated.
Eduard Limonov
(b. 1943, Dzerzhinsk, Gorky region)
Limonov began writing poetry in 1958 when he lived in Khar’kov

(Ukraine). In 1967 he moved to Moscow, where he became
known in non-conformist circles, and in 1974 he emigrated from
the USSR. He lived in New York, working at the newspaper
Novoe Russkoe Slovo, then in Paris. In 1979, his first, and most
famous, novel It’s Me, Eddie was published. Shocking in its
openness, it was reminiscent of the best examples of modernist
autobiographical writing (Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Boris Vian).
In the 1980s Limonov continued to explore the potential of the
autobiographical genre in the novels Diary of a Loser (1982), The
Adolescent Savenko (1983), A Young Scoundrel (1986), and We Had
a Great Epoch (1986). In the early 1990s, he returned to Russia,
where he became actively engaged in politics. In 1993 he founded
the National Bolshevik Party, whose ideology represented a
mixture of ultra-nationalist, pro-Soviet, and ultra-left ideas and
which was banned by the authorities in 2007. He participated
in military conflicts in Yugoslavia (on the Serbian side) and in
Abkhazia (on the Abkhazian side), as well as in the Moldova-
Pridenstrov’e conflict (on the side of Pridnestrov’e Republic).
In 2001 Limonov was arrested for the preparation of a military
uprising in Kazakhstan (in defense of the Russian population).
He was sentenced to four years of prison and released in 2003.
Since 2006 Limonov has participated in the opposition movement
The Other Russia. In 2010, Limonov created a new party known
as The Other Russia; however, it is not officially registered.

In the 1990s-2000s, he published the novels Taming the Tiger in
Paris (1994), Anatomy of a Hero (1997), The Book of the Dead (2001),
Captured by the Dead (2002), The Book of Water (2002), My Political
Biography (2002), Sacred Monsters (2004), The Triumph of Metaphysics
(2005), Limonov vs. Putin (2006), and others. He lives in Moscow.
Eduard Limonov 313
A H eroic Attitude to L ife 1
“It’s best to never part with a gun. Best to keep it under a pillow or
on your belt when going out for a walk. But daily life in New York
doesn’t allow for adhering to this precept, so one must arm oneself
as opportunity allows. A knife, a stick, a chain—anything that can
harm your enemy is useful to you.
It’s good to continually train your thoughts on how to attack and
defend, anticipating various configurations of close engagements
and tough situations so that you know beforehand what must be
done in this or that situation. While sitting in a bar, calculate if you
can destroy a possible target with a chair, for example; or slash
someone’s face with a wine glass (having broken its rim; look for
a spot to break the glass), or with a broken bottle. Figure out how
you can attack these three sitting at the next table, or those four
sitting in the corner. What will you use? Out on the streets, at any
hour of day or night, keep on thinking: what kind of weapon can
you tear away from a fence or a wall? What will you use if suddenly
you have to defend yourself?
Unrestrained aggression is just as stupid as cowardice. If you
can avoid a conflict with a moron, do so. If someone merely bumps
into you, you can curse and keep on walking. But if you see that
a fight is unavoidable, pounce first without a warning.
1
Published in: Eduard Limonov, Ubiistvo chasovogo (Dnevnik grazhdanina) (The
murder of a sentry: A Citizen’s diary). St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2002, 129-33. First
published in 1994.
An individual who is always ready to deal with such situations

faces less danger. Ready not just physically (this is self-evident;
one must devote at least one hour per day to physical exercise, two
hours is better), but also mentally: train your imagination so that you
have a hundred such scripts at your disposal. Don’t drink—alcohol
makes you weak and defenseless. Make death part of you; get used
to its presence over your shoulder, be ready to have a rendezvous
with it at any moment. Do all this so that you are not scared of death
while engaged in conflict.”
A yellowed page with this text recently turned up in my New
York papers. I wrote it for myself in the summer of 1976. It bears no
title; only in the margins, penciled in block letters, it says: CODE OF
CONDUCT (how to survive).
Times were tough for me then. In my second year in the U.S.,
I had lost my purpose in life, my wife, my job, and was barely
surviving on meager welfare aid. The loss of my job had sent me
to skid row, the lowest class, the ones who had no choice but to be
cruel. The life of skid row is always extraordinarily cruel. After all,
the lowest layers of society have nothing but their skin for cover.
This explains the desperate, naked inhumanity of my “Code of
Conduct.” This explains my bitter resolve to defend myself.
Bitter it is, of course. The bitterness is due to the circumstances—
but it’s heroic, too. That’s how I see it. It’s a heroic attitude to life.
Given the circumstances, I could have turned into a couch potato
and sunk into a depression, or drunk a gallon of cheap California
chablis every day and turned into a vegetable. Or horrified by this
life, I could have killed myself by any number of pathetic means:
drowned in the fetid waters of the East or the Hudson River, jumped
from a skyscraper’s observation deck or under a rusty subway car,
or—even worse—resign myself to the bottom, remain a shadow in
the country of shadows.
Since having survived and become a writer, having mastered
English and learned French, having read thousands of smart books,
I’ve discovered that the uncomplicated but aggressive “Code of
Conduct” that I had compiled for my own use is part of the great
and famous fraternity of similar codes. Because the Orient is more
honest than the West, the majority of the wise sayings, cynical and
Eduard Limonov. A Heroic Attitude to Life 315
poignant like a stab with a razorblade, originate in the East. “In

a dispute, strike out like vultures; attack and pounce like the hungry
hawks who tear at their prey … like an old wolf, remain vigilant even
on a calm day; in the dark, be wary like a black raven….” Such was
the counsel given to the Mongols by the austere Genghis Khan. The
Japanese samurai and monk Jocho Yamamoto (1659-1719) articulates
his philosophy of action in his book Hagakure: “It is impossible to
perform heroic feats while remaining in a normal state of mind. One
must turn into a fanatic and work oneself into a frenzy in striving
towards death.” The kamikaze pilots wore headbands with an
inscription from Hagakure: “The path of the samurai is death.” One
should not take this as a call to suicide, or as an abnormal love of
death. Jocho Yamamoto, a philosopher of action, proclaims a heroic
attitude to life: it’s about attaining absolute mastery over oneself,
making oneself superhumanly brave. To achieve this, he advises
that we trivialize death, habituating ourselves to it. “To become an
excellent samurai, one must prepare every day, from dawn to dusk,
for death. If a samurai mentally rehearses his death every day, he
will be able to die calmly when the time comes.”
These are the words of the basic commandment of Hagakure,
the philosophy of courage, honor, and dignity (the kamikaze pilots’
motto originates from that same source): “I discovered that the Path
of Samurai is death. In a fifty-fifty death-or-life crisis, simply resolve
to choose instant death. There is nothing complicated about it—just
concentrate and carry on. Some say that perishing without fulfilling
one’s mission is to die in vain but this is a petty imitation of the
samurai code by the Osaka merchants. It’s practically impossible
to make the right decision in the fifty-fifty situation. We all prefer
to live. And so it is only natural that in such situations we always
find excuses for continuing to live. But the one who chooses to go
on living after failing his mission will be disparaged as a coward
and … this is a risky role. If you die while failing your mission, it’s
the death of a fanatic, a death in vain. But it’s not a shameful death.
Such death is in fact the Path of the Samurai.” This tragic and sober
creed could be endorsed by the defenders of the Brest Fortress,
and by the heroes of the Battle at Stalingrad. (This is in spite of the
fact that the Japanese were our enemies in several wars.) It was
endorsed by Marshal Akhromeev. A sentry who failed to guard his

Motherland, he chose to die.
The samurai code, the code of the Brest Fortress and of Stalin-
grad, of Marshal Akhromeev’s attack—these represent a heroic at-
titude to life. In the well-fed, rich countries of the West, the heroic
attitude to life has become an increasingly rare phenomenon. In the
interview he gave to Crisis magazine (1992, issues 10/11), the French
general Pierre Gallois talks about the “devaluation of self-sacrifice.”
“The idea that it is worth risking a significant loss in order to protect
the right cause, or even in order to simply defend oneself, seems to
belong to the past…. In those marginal conflicts that do not directly
threaten the existence of the Western democracies, politicians still
have to take into account the reactions of their electorate who no
longer accept the risk of the loss of human life, even if the loss is
minimal.” “In 1983, it was enough to kill 58 soldiers in one strike
[French soldiers in Lebanon. — E.L.] to make us pack our bags….
The fear of war is a phenomenon characteristic primarily of the
wealthy countries, where each individual is in pursuit, as quickly
as possible, of his own best advantage.”
The May 23 [1992] issue of Sovietskaya Rossiya is disturbing.
“In the area of Dubossary, an intense exchange of fire continues
between units of Moldova’s police and troops of the Transdniestr
militia. Houses are being destroyed; people are being killed.” On
the same page of the paper: “The Soviet Socialist Republic of North
Ossetia and the republic of South Ossetia are in mourning … due to
the tragic events at the village of Kekhvi, where 36 non-combatants
were shot dead by Georgian militants.”
It’s clear that Russia, now cut up into parts and bleeding, can
little afford to lose the idea of self-sacrifice. The Code of Conduct (How
to Survive) for Russia’s Patriots and for the Nationalists should begin
with this phrase, “The path of the Russian Nationalist is Death.”
We can only attain victory with this kamikaze motto. If we, the
Russians, want to survive as a Great Nation and preserve a Great
Superpower, we must make the heroic attitude to life our own.
Translated by Alexei Pavlenko

Aleksandr Prokhanov
(b. 1938, Tbilisi)
Aleksandr Prokhanov is the leading author of the nationalist/

neo-imperialist movement. Editor-in-chief of the ultra-nationalist
newspaper Zavtra, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of
Aviation and worked as an engineer. Beginning in 1970, he
worked as a newspaper correspondent in Afghanistan, Nicaragua,
Cambodia, Angola, and other sites of military conflict. Since the
early 1980s, he has worked in the genre of the military-political
novel, reminiscent of the Soviet “panoramic” novels of the
1940s-50s. His publications glorifying Soviet military operations
earned him the ironic nickname “the nightingale of General HQ.”
During Perestroika, Prokhanov became one of leaders of the anti-
liberal and nationalist movement, and he supported the coups
of 1991 and 1993. In 2002, his novel Mister Hexogen was awarded
the national bestseller prize, after which Prokhanov became
a fashionable writer. He books have been published in large runs
and he frequently appears on various political TV and radio
shows.
M ister H e xogen ( e xcer pts ) 1
“Shamil Basaev2 sends a message: if the build-up of Russian troops

does not stop, if your fighter planes and helicopters remain in
Mozdok, if the violence continues against our Chechen friends
in Dagestan, there will be explosions in Moscow. Not just in
trolleybuses, which only frighten pensioners and free riders, and
not just in market places and underground walkways, but in multi-
story apartment buildings with all their inhabitants. The blasts will
be of such power and devastation that only a fiery pit will be left:
the buildings and people will be vaporized.”
The enemy flashed before Beloseltsev,3 youthful and ruthless.
His eyes burned like black mercury and sparkled with an
incomprehensible hatred. The young Chechen, sitting on the edge
of a city park bench, had brought death to Moscow.
“Basaev says you have a week to respond. Otherwise Russia
will shudder with explosions. The country is already wired.
1
Translated from Aleksandr Prokhanov, Gospodin Geksogen (Moscow: Ad Marginem,
2002): 368-75, 425-35.
2
Shamil Basaev (1965-2006) was leader of the Chechen separatist movement and
one of the architects of the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis and 2004 Beslan
school attack.
3
Prokhanov’s perennial character—he is the protagonist in seven of Prokhanov’s
novels. A highly placed officer of the military intelligence, he is the writer’s
alter ego.
Aleksandr Prokhanov. Mister Hexogen 319
Explosives have been laid in every large city. There are men waiting
at every atomic power plant, dam, and chemical plant. The Chechen
diaspora has spread to every region, every provincial capital. It will
be futile to search for saboteurs. Basaev says he brought Russia to
her knees with a simple raid in Budennovsk. Now he will bring her
to her knees with explosions in Moscow. If the ultimatum is not
accepted, Muscovites will regret that they ever settled in Pechatniki,
they will regret that they ever settled in Moscow. You will convey
Basaev’s ultimatum to the authorities.”
Beloseltsev was struck by the word “Pechatniki.”4
“I have no say in the mobilization of troops or the movement
of squadrons,” he said, trying to understand why Pechatniki had
been mentioned. “I am a retired general. My connections with the
FSB were cut off a long time ago. Our meeting was accidental, as
was my visit to Ismail Khodzhaev. Basaev’s ultimatum, which you
have confided in me, would not reach the authorities. You would do
better to send it directly to the authorities, or indirectly through the
press. I can hardly be of any use to you.”
“Viktor Andreevich, you, and no one else, will relay our ulti-
matum. You have connections with men of power and consequence
who create real policy. Your initiative led to the realization of sever-
al operations that attest to the level of your influence. I was ordered
to relay the ultimatum to you alone, as this is the most efficient way
to change the course of events, to avoid bloodshed on both sides, to
stop the war. You are a patriot, you will not refuse the opportunity
to help Russia in her time of need.”
The Chechen looked at Beloseltsev domineeringly and
amusedly, in complete possession of his will. All of Moscow was
wired.
4
Pechatniki—name of a subway station and region of Moscow, location of the
devastating explosion of an apartment building in 1999. According to authorities,
Chechen terrorists were responsible for this and other similar explosions.
Alternatively, a theory that the explosives were planted by the FSB in order to create
casus belli for the Second Chechen War was discussed as well. See, for instance, Yuri
Felshtinsky and Alexander Litvinenko, Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within, trans.
Geoffrey Andrews (London: S.P.I. Books, 2002).
“Why did you say ‘Pechatniki’?,” Beloseltsev asked, trying

to overcome the hypnotic effect of the Chechen’s lively, shining
eyes.
“Pechatniki? No, you are hearing things, I spoke of Moscow.
Believe me, I am not acting on my own behalf, I am obeying
orders.” The Chechen’s eyes dimmed under his brown eyelids,
his voice changed from commanding and passionate to apologetic
and hesitant, the British accent became more pronounced. “I am
a Muscovite, just as you are. I love Moscow. My life is here, my
relatives, my home. I, like you, do not want these explosions. I fear
them. If we can help the Muscovites, our fellow countrymen, we
will, Viktor Andreevich. Thank you for your time. Allow me to call
you in a few days. Take care.”
The Chechen stood, slender and supple, with a thin jockey’s
waist. He walked toward the alley, fading into the mist, and
disappeared completely into the shadows.
Not a minute to lose; it was time to act. Head straight to the
FSB, find some former colleagues, and without asking with whom
their allegiances lay, inform them of the Chechen threat. But then
a clever investigator, an experienced agent, might unravel the
Swahili Project, thread by thread. The trip to the FSB was abandoned.
He called Grechishnikov, who, fortunately, answered his phone
at the Fund.
“Sure! Come on over! You’re going on a trip? There’s an envelope
with money for you here! Come over, we’ll have a drink before you
hit the road!”
He met his cheerful friend at the Fund. A hint of success
glimmered about him and he gushed with good humor and love
of life.
Fumbling, losing then picking up the thread of the story,
Beloseltsev told of the meeting with the Chechen and laid out the
ultimatum.
“He said that Moscow was wired with explosives … saboteurs
are everywhere … at atomic power stations and chemical plants
… their people are in every province. If the troop deployments
and aerial assaults don’t stop…. I’m convinced this isn’t an empty
threat.”
Grechishnikov’s orange eyes cooled and darkened slightly, as

if a colored lens in them had been changed, but they continued to
sparkle and laugh.
“Goddamn black-asses! I’m sick of them! Wherever you go,
kiosks, the prefecture, the dentist or the bank, you see those black-
asses everywhere, counting up Russian money! We’re through with
them! We’ll cleanse Russia of all those Caucasians. Send the Azeris
back to Baku in the same trains that haul poison. We’ll send the
Chechens by the trainload back to Magadan and arctic Ichkeria.
Don’t get worked up about it! This Vakhid Zairbekov is a specula-
tor and a crook. We’ll nail the bastard so he won’t prey on decent
people anymore.”
“He didn’t try to frighten or blackmail me. I trust my instincts.
He had the eyes of a man who is ready to push the button…. He said
everything is in place … they’ve chosen the buildings, wired the
explosives, their men are ready…. He said Moscow is wired…. He
chose me, told me to get in touch with you, to go to the Kremlin with
their demand to withdraw the troops. He knows about everything,
the trip to Dagestan … believe me, this is serious….”
The orange eyes cooled and darkened again but continued to laugh.
“Well, if you’re so worried, let’s call our friends at the FSB, send
the signal to Moscow Criminal Intelligence. Let them sort out these
Chechen rebels, comb through basements and warehouses. They
can call on the agencies in the Caucasian communities. If there’s
even a trace of explosive they’ll track it down, but it isn’t worth
your getting all worked up about it. These rumors are always flying
around Moscow.”
“You didn’t see his eyes, you didn’t hear his tone of voice …
it was exactly as with General Sheptun…. Look, I know when
someone is only trying to scare me and when he is ready to kill.
They will blow up apartments in Moscow…. He slipped and
mentioned Pechatniki…. That is exactly where we must launch
a massive search.”
Grechishnikov closed his eyelids, his eyes behind them darting
and fluttering, trapped in their sockets.
“I don’t believe that they are ready to set off explosions. But
even if it happens, if they commit these heinous crimes, they will
only hurt themselves, and strange as it may seem, they will play
right into our hands.”
“What do you mean?”
“We need a compelling reason to start the war. We need the
people to support an armed invasion of Chechnya, and this time
we will crush that nest of vipers, in Grozny, Vedeno, Achkhoy-
Martan, the Vedensky and Argunsky Gorges. We will show the
smoky craters in Moscow to the whole world, they will see how we
bury the victims in pieces, and then Europe will not object when we
leave Grozny a noxious pit, filled with the dust of Chechen bones.
Even more important, there must be a reason for the Chosen One to
lead the march to Chechnya and dispense of that filth once and for
all. He will avenge the bombed-out houses, the murdered children
and our disgraced honor. Then the people will carry him into the
Kremlin on their shoulders as their Deliverer.”
“You would welcome the bombings in Moscow? You would use
the blasts in the interest of the Swahili Project? This is pure cynicism!
This is more terrifying than the crimes themselves!”
“Do you really believe that?” Grechishnikov raised his
eyebrows, his large orange eyes burned with rage, passion, and
contempt. “I wouldn’t stop them. Let them blast away. If history
has chosen this path for us, if she prefers to blast us into the future
with these explosions, if God is pleased to utter this word and not
another, then who are we to stand in the way? Who are we to stand
in the way of Divine Providence?”
“You say terrible things. You want these explosions. Maybe
you’re the one behind them? Maybe you are in league with the
Chechens? Are you provoking them to do this?”
“Perhaps,” the red-orange eyes sparkled. “A little history
is made with a little blood. Real history is made with real blood,
but great history is made with great blood. History is written in
blood. Every act of mankind runs red. We are making great history,
slashing our way through any obstacles put in our way by traitors
and dimwits. This is why we need the explosions. They were sent to
help the Swahili Project forge history. If historical progress requires
a truck full of hexogen with a Russian driver, a Chechen to push the
detonator, and an Azerbaijani merchant to hide the explosives, then
we will make it happen.5 Who are we to ignore the hand of God?

We are God’s instruments, our hands do not smell of incense, but
hexogen!”
It seemed to Beloseltsev that he was standing before a madman
who thought he was a god.
“You ought to be grateful that you’ve been forced to take part in
history, pulled out of your dingy hole where you were hiding from
the howling world. The magnificence of historical providence shines
upon you, God’s right hand is upon you. You have already done
much and you will do even more. You’ll see the creation of our new
party, which will bring in the Chosen One. You’ll have money. The
press will be in your hands. Very soon we will create a movement
that will be named after the Russian totem beast and we’ll toss the
bought-out democrats and outdated, hopeless communists out of
the political arena. We will create a powerful lever, and with the
help of the Chosen One, we will spark a revolution. But we need
these explosions to stir up the people, to make them panic. We need
to show the troops why they should invade and demolish Grozny.
We must present the Chosen One to the people with a victory parade
in Chechnya. We must force the Dummy to renounce his authority,
and the grateful people to elect the Chosen One to power. What are
we to do if this requires bloodshed? We will shed it....”
“You are crazy! You need a psychiatrist! I should report our
conversation. I will go to the newspapers and tell the press!”
The orange eyes cleared, like an incandescent lamp that dims
and becomes visibly cooler. Grechishnikov laughed quietly and
contentedly.
“What a trick I played on you. You really are gullible, so
worried about the explosions and the Chechens…. He was only
a false messenger, it was blackmail, trickery…. We can arrest him
and make him confess, if you want. Calm down, my friend…. You
are tired, your nerves are frayed…. Take a vacation and get some
rest. Go to Kenya, or to the Côte d’Azur or your mystical Pskov.
5
Hexogen is a powerful explosive also known as RDX, cyclonite, and T4. It was used
in attacks that destroyed four apartment blocks in three cities, including Moscow,
in 1999, and two stations in the Moscow metro in 2010.
Here’s the money, there’s enough for your trip.” He opened the
box and took out a fat envelope that flashed green with a brick of
dollars. Thanks for stopping by. I have to visit the Chosen One. We’re
discussing the birth of the new party.” He embraced Beloseltsev and
walked him to the door.
Beloseltsev walked along the embankment, between the river
sparkling in the sun and the flashing, glittering limousines that
crawled past the pinkish Kremlin wall. Above the wall, snow-white
cathedrals rose through the trees. Beloseltsev was dumbfounded by
the testing he had just endured. He had first fallen victim to the
impudent young Chechen’s blackmail, and then to Grechishnikov’s
well-meant but cruel practical joke, which took advantage of
a friend’s suspicious nature and propensity to panic. Thank god
the whole thing had already blown over, and he, having calmed
down, was able to move about Moscow, the huge, rolling city, with
its countless lives, each like a tiny seashell set in a stone fortress. The
city was noisy and overflowing and released glassy thin air into the
heavens, but Beloseltsev did not notice, he was too overjoyed with
feelings of oneness with this beloved, eternal city.
Suddenly the sense of panic returned. He remembered
Grechishnikov’s devilish eyes, fiery-orange like torches, and he
realized that Grechishnikov knew about the explosions, was himself
readying them, and had a perverse link with the Chechens, and
that this city—serenely overflowing with glass buildings, golden
cathedrals, and faces flashing through car windows—was wired
and was living out its last few hours and minutes.
He began to run along the embankment, and the bridge across
the river exploded, its tumbling slabs lit up by the heinous flash. The
trusses slammed into the river, carrying cars and pedestrians with
them, making the water boil with the red-hot iron and rocks, as if
hail was bubbling and rippling in the river. Overturned limousines,
broken street lamp posts, and scraps of charred flags fell into the
river, all came crashing down from the sky.
He turned towards the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and
before his eyes the white cathedral sank in a deafening blast, the
onion domes burst, the walls were ripped open and from the gaping
hole poured black smoke, ash, and scorched gilding.
He crossed Manezh Square, glimmering like fish scales with

automobiles and a white stucco palace. The square broke open,
turning everything upside down and collapsing into a black pit; cars
tumbled in, as if tossed from a baking sheet. The Pashkov House,
which not long ago had shined sterile white atop a green hill, had
the appearance of a rotten tooth with a black cavity.
Beloseltsev choked. His eyes bulged and he clutched his heart
and prayed, “Dear God, save Moscow!” The city trembled in the
glassy smoke, as if retching from the blasts.
His suspicious nature turned into insanity. He saw an old
woman holding the hand of an awkward little girl dressed in striped
stockings and a sweet little hat, and he imagined them minutes
away from being destroyed by the blasts. He glanced at the face of
an attractive young woman, whose blonde hair was whipped by the
breeze from the river, and he pictured her in a grave, in a cemetery
filled with other victims from the explosions. A smug, obese man
with a carelessly knotted tie pushed passed him, small, fashionable
briefcase in hand, and Beloseltsev thought about how the man
would soon be lying among the debris, bloody bones sticking out
through his torn dress pants.
Everyone he saw was a suspect. The dark-haired teenager with
a dyed blue streak could well turn out to be a Chechen terrorist,
wiring a dark corner with explosives and waiting for the right
moment to push the button. The bald driver with a sweaty, red face
behind the wheel of a speeding van could be zig-zagging through
yellow lights to deliver the explosives hidden in a package under
a pile of potatoes. The arrogant chauffeur in a foreign-built stretch
limousine with violet blinkers could be a conspirator, rushing to
deliver secret orders to set off explosions in Moscow within the
hour.
Beloseltsev rushed about the city, lost in the maze of boulevards,
riverwalks, bustling avenues, and quiet alleys. Anticipating disaster,
he prayed silently, “Dear God, save Moscow!”
[…]
“The Swahili Project, of which you have only a superficial
understanding, is a huge labyrinth that grinds away at the rot and
decay of society from the inside. It is set up in such a way that if one
branch of the project is destroyed, the others become stronger. If one

part is damaged, the other parts only flourish. The Project cannot be
destroyed, simply because it demands that it be destroyed, and this
only strengthens it. The Project is set up to draw all of humanity
into itself; there is neither executioner nor victim, neither criminal
nor judge. All are united in apocalyptic fear, and then they will beg
for salvation. Only then will the Deliverer appear. The Chosen One
will arrive. He will find the guilty, and even if they are not guilty,
the people will rush to tear them to pieces.”
“What do you want? To rule the world? You’re an old man, your
death is not far off….”
“Perhaps I will not die. And, as always, you are right. It is
power that I want, power over the entire world. Power over
a village or a farmstead, or a province or Moscow, or over New
York, or so-called Eurasia, or Europe or the NATO countries, or
over a hemisphere, be it the Western or Eastern hemisphere—this
is not real power. True power must be universal, and only then
does it become an instrument that can create history. Petty satraps,
half-witted policemen, and their pitiful minions think you need
power to get money and women and build imperial theaters or
a cosmic army. The true rulers, from Genghis Khan to Alexander
the Great, from Julius Caesar to Charlemagne, from Napoleon
to Stalin, sought power in order to make history. To unite all of
humanity, all the Earth’s land and resources, and to obtain the
long-sought chance to control time. To put an end to humanity’s
fragmentation, the senseless squandering of resources and minds,
to put an end to wars and heresy and the absurd discordance of
people who know nothing of each other. This is why the great
empires of the past are superior to the great republics of today.
They were founded upon a unified humanity, able to hear and
embody the will of God. This is why the Russia of today, liberal
and repulsive, is an abomination inferior to the Soviet Union, that
great empire we so senselessly lost. What you will see today from
this roof are not hexogen explosions, a pretext for a second war
with the Chechens, or even a vehicle for ushering the Chosen One
into the Kremlin. No, this is the Swahili Project being carried out
as it was designed to be. This is the start of a new period in history,
a New World Order, the end of the Babylonian tragedy and the
beginning of a universal empire....”
The cold iron chimney pressed against Beloseltsev’s spine, he felt
a dull pain in his neck and his arms ached in their twisted position
behind him. It seemed to him that this was all a bad drama directed
by a tasteless, brutal director who had turned an execution into
a ritual, dressing the condemned in painted masks and throwing
rope around their necks to the beating of tambourines, drums,
and tom-toms. The man standing before him was a maniac and
a criminal, and if by chance he got carried away with his burning
ravings, he might take one step closer and Beloseltsev would be
able to send him over the edge of the roof with a kick, and he would
fall to the ground howling and would disappear, as if into an abyss,
swallowed up by the black tree crowns.
“People are always trying to guess the design and will of God.
Is it to bow down one hundred times a day? To build a temple on
every mountain? To raise the Pope above Caesar, and Nikon, the
Patriarch of Moscow, above Tsar Alexis of Russia? To keep away
from another’s wife, to love your enemy, to turn the left cheek when
you are struck on the right? The will of God is nothing of the sort.
It is to end the division in the church, among the people, to do
away with the multitude of gods and languages, with the never-
ending strife and wars over territories and land and trade routes,
over uranium deposits and Kimberlitic pipes. The will of God is to
unify mankind, and in that unity, to reflect the image of a single,
universal God. Why must mankind be united? Why must we do
all this thankless work? Why should we not simply leave the black
man in Africa, the yellow man in the Gobi desert, the white man
along the Dnieper or the Rhine? Why has mankind roamed from
place to place throughout history, like multicolored putty in the
hot hand of God? It is because God wills what humanity can only
accomplish when united. His will is greater than one country or
people. It is greater than a single race. It is greater even than half
or two-thirds of humanity. The divided world in which America
and the Soviet Union wasted enormous resources on overpowering
each other could not realize God’s will. While disunited they were
not able to build the Tokomak thermonuclear fusion device. They
couldn’t develop a vaccine against cancer or AIDS, or a way to

control Earth’s climate. And all of these are merely preliminary goals,
secondary to the principal, sacred goal, to which God is leading us,
through all disasters and confusion, past Sodom’s sin and religious
phobias, in order to present mankind with the gift of immortality.
To conquer death, to trample down death by the death of Babylon.
These purifying apocalyptic explosions will fuse mankind together,
and up from the ashes, diamonds will appear in the crucible of the
Day of Judgment. The Swahili Project, at its deepest, hidden core, is
a religious project, bound up in eschatology and the realization of
God’s will.”
Beloseltsev listened as Grechishnikov spoke in a singsong voice,
almost swaying, preaching, reading from an invisible theological
book. His voice blended with the wind and the sound of the rain
striking iron, and it seemed detached from his body, imbued with an
agonizing passion, invincible faith, and apostolic zeal. Beloseltsev
felt his head swimming and his eyesight clouding over, as if he were
slipping into a dream.
“A bipolar world is superior to a multipolar world. A unipolar
world is superior to a bipolar world. The liberals are hyenas who
feed on the corpses of great empires, they are cemetery worms that
gorge themselves on the bipolar world and assume that the grave
from which they slithered would swallow up all of humanity. They
depend on America as a stronghold in the liberal world, but just like
the Soviet Union, it will melt in the burning crucible of a unified
human race. The Swahili Project is humanity united, organized
for a universal purpose: so that man might achieve immortality.
The power of technology, the magnitude of bioengineering,
mathematical analyses, anthropological discoveries, and the
insight of religious thinkers will all be focused on this resurrection.
We will resurrect all who have died the silent death of old age or
who were killed in the womb, those who fell by the sword or an
atomic bomb, who died from disease or in torture chambers, we
will resurrect the entire human race. Nero and the Christians he
tortured, the Inquisitors and the heretics they burned, Hitler and
all the Holocaust victims, we will resurrect Blumkin, Yagoda,
and Yezhov and the archbishops they shot, the Cossack chieftains
and Russian aristocrats. We will resurrect the German soldiers

of World War II and Stalin’s Red Army, who fought each other in
battlefields around Moscow, Stalingrad, and Berlin. Their enmity,
insurmountable while mankind was splintering and warring,
will be discarded in the universal empire. We will resurrect those
who barricaded the House of Soviets and the Colonel from Alpha
Group, who was killed by a sniper. The martyr Yevgeny Rodionov,
whose head was removed by a Chechen blade, and the Chechen
warlord who was killed in the Russian trip-wire mine. We will
resurrect Grammofonchik, who sipped from the wrong glass, and
the little girl who was raped to death in St. Petersburg back when
Grammofonchik was mayor. We will resurrect the armed Afghan
caravan drivers, who were shot before your very eyes in Kandahar.
And that beautiful Italian intelligence agent, your one-night stand
in Siam Reap who was blown to pieces in a landmine explosion
in Vietnam. We will resurrect Peter’s Namibian teacher, whom you
sent to die in the “Mirage” bombing, and that dark beauty, Maria,
whom you long for in the night. And, make no mistake, we will
resurrect that glorious little boy, Sergei, who inadvertently fell by
a Chechen blade because of your oversight. To resurrect them, we
first had to kill them. Maybe all those killed on earth were destroyed
in order to be resurrected in the future. The Swahili Project is the
innermost essence of history. It has always existed, even before the
creation of the world. It was hidden in the plasma during the Big
Bang. It was always hidden deep within God’s will.”
It seemed to Beloseltsev that he had been given a cup filled with
a powerful drug. Everything that had previously horrified him now
seemed logical, unavoidable, immersed in the knowledge of all
mankind, and in complete accordance with God’s will.
“Every generation preserved the priestly elite of the Swahili
Project, who kept the covenant of resurrection. The covenant was
transferred from age to age, from people to people, from religion
to religion. We were always everywhere. Sometimes pieces of the
Project were uncovered and we were destroyed, under various
names, either burned or beheaded; they stood us against brick
walls and shot us by firing squad, we were crushed in open fields
under the rims of war chariots. Today we are everywhere. We
are in Japan, China, Germany, and Russia. The Swahili elite have
formed an intelligence core that began converging while Andropov
and Reagan were in power. In orchestrating disarmament and
détente, we created a secret intelligence society, to which our
mentor, General Avdeev, belonged, as well as your American rival,
Lee, and your Angolan adversary, Richard MacVillen, all of whom
we spared from death and who also spared you. All around us,
the greatest minds of the human race are joining together, often
unknowingly: big-name politicians who preach globalism, the
brilliant scholars who unraveled the secrets of the human genome,
famous gerontologists who have lengthened our lives, the virtuoso
surgeons and biochemists who created artificial organs, mystics,
magicians, and psychics, keepers of the ancient cults, noosphere6
philosophers and Fedorov’s “Common Cause”7 that linked nature
and humanity into a unified entity. The Doctor of the Dead, who
guards Lenin’s mummy and to whom you paid a visit in search
of the “Red Purpose,” is a part of our society. We have adversaries
who do not want unity: European anarchists who outrageously and
senselessly fight against globalization, the ‘Red Confucians’ in China
who oppose the entire world, creating a second pole at the core of the
Chinese billion, the Islamic fundamentalists who perceive a united
world as the Devil’s scheme, Russian nationalists who talk about
Russia’s special destiny. We have friends in the Jews, who took on
the terrible, backbreaking burden of unifying our scattered galaxy, of
bringing the pagan polytheists unto the hand of God, of joining the
wasteful and motley human race into a unified team of craftsmen.
They never fail to bring their offerings. They are persecuted, put
to death, and hated. They are smothered in gas chambers and
driven from their homes. But they keep the commandments, they
wait for the Messiah, they bind humanity together with their
6
Noosphere—a concept introduced by Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-
1945) and developed by Edouard Le Roy (1870-1954) and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(1881-1955)—stands for a mystical sphere accumulating intellectual and cultural
phenomena.—Eds.
7
According to Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), the “common
cause” of humanity is the resurrection of all dead.—Eds.
universal religion, universal money, universal culture, science, and

information. Atros and Zaretsky were destroyed, not because they
were Jews, but because they were liberals gone astray, their material
and information assets were better put to use for the Swahili Project.
I tell you this as the son of peasants, born in the village of Kostroma,
a fellow FSB officer. Many people do not realize they are working
for the Project, they do not know of the Chosen One. They should
not know. We created him in our laboratory. He is synthetic. It is
entirely possible that he is not made of proteins at all, but of silica
and germanium. It is possible that he was fabricated, a figment of the
imagination, a bundle of light rays. At the presidential inauguration
ceremony you will see—not a human being—but a bright dot of
light descending on the Kremlin.”
Through the wisps of fog that pressed against his eyes like
the translucent wings of an African butterfly, something began to
agitate Beloseltsev. Memories. Lingering torment. He had been here
before, whether recently or in ancient times. This had happened in
this life or in a previous life. Someone had stood on a roof while in
the distance glowed the temple of Angkor, the green minarets of
Herat, the chiseled white and pink cathedral in Toledo, the snow-
white Church of St. Basil on a Hill in Pskov and the Kotelnicheskaya
Embankment Building.8 The same rain and wind, the same pain in
the back of his broken head, the rusty chimney that was ice against
his back. And a second someone reached out his hand to the first,
offering the first a tempting chance at life without suffering or death,
offering eternal paradise and bliss, and demanding only one small
sacrifice in return— to renounce the sacred shrines of old.
“We have a special mission, here in Russia. We are the Russian
branch of the Swahili Project. We have been called upon to end
the folly of Russian history and the arrogant ‘Russian Idea.’ This
myth of Russia’s uniqueness, of God’s choosing her, of her special
destiny, comes at a high price for the world. It is even more costly
for Russia herself. The great reformers tried to return Russia to the
8
The famous House on the Embankment for Soviet elite, described in Yury Trifonov’s
eponymous novella (1976)—Eds.
world, as if she had fallen from her nest. They tried to draw her
out of her religious twilight, away from her delirious theories, to
protect her from the Russian messianism preached by its suffering
writers and philosophers who gorge on psychedelic mushrooms.
Any attempt to pull Russia away from the world, like the moon
was ripped from the earth and pushed into orbit, will only turn this
prosperous country into a lifeless satellite with vast craters and dry
seabeds, and on the earth where Russia once was, there will be only
a huge chasm filled with salty water. Everyone looks for Atlantis
on the ocean floor, but Atlantis is actually the moon, which was
torn from its mother planet and cast into the dead of Space. The
‘Russian Victory,’ ‘Russian Century,’ and ‘Russian Paradise,’ are all
a miserable utopia that must be overcome, just as Ivan the Terrible,
Peter the Great, Alexander I’s freemasons, and Lenin’s commissars
tried to overcome them before us. Your deranged buddy, Nikolai
Nikolaevich, was God’s fool, an Old Believer and a kamikaze. He
was the embodiment of the stubborn and feeble Russian mind,
which would sooner blow itself up or burn to death on a pile of sticks
than join with the rest of humanity. We will save Russia, we will not
allow her to turn into a kamikaze country. The explosions you will
see today are therapeutic explosions that will cleanse Russia of this
‘Russian Idea.’ We must set off these explosions to prevent more
in the future. And we will succeed. Our adversaries are the men in
the Main Intelligence Directorate, united, like us, in a secret order.
With their military narrow-mindedness and barrack-like simplicity,
they preach the Russian Revival. They plan for a Superior Russia.
We will contend with them and we will be victorious. They are too
late. We have cut them off. The explosions you will see will destroy
them. We will bring our Chosen One into the Kremlin before they
can bring theirs. But if you think that the Chosen One is the crown of
the Swahili Project, you are mistaken. He is not the one at the top of
our magical world pyramid. He is not the one waiting in the bowels
of our crystal mystical circle. The one about whom I am speaking
will come forth in the proper hour. You might even see him....”
The wind raged against Beloseltsev’s face. The rain slapped
against his cheeks. The image of Nicholas Nikolaevich appeared
before him like an ethereal spirit, swaying against the backdrop of
the foggy city. And with that his delusion ended. He was sober once
again. He was tied to an iron chimney on the roof of a building in
Pechatniki.
“Better to kill me now,” he told Grechishnikov, “or else I will
kill you later, and there will be no force strong enough to raise you
from the dead.”
Grechishnikov merely laughed.
“I am going to leave you here. You will live because you are
too valuable to us. Seducing the Prosecutor, paying a visit to Ismail
Khodzhaev, or delivering a suitcase full of counterfeit dollar bills,
this is all below you, utterly insignificant. This was merely a trial,
a test. Your spiritual experience is unique. We will need it in the
future stages of the Project. What you will see today will enrich
your soul as never before. We will meet later and I will give you
your principal assignment. Who else can say they have watched the
end of the world from such a convenient and safe vantage point?
Many would pay millions for this opportunity. I brought you here as
a free gift, I placed you in the most advantageous lookout point.
From this moment on, you are no longer Viktor Andreevich
Beloseltsev in Pechatniki, you are John the Baptist on the island
of Patmos. Until we meet again. Amen.” He continued laughing,
turned and disappeared into the dormer window. Beloseltsev was
left to stand in the rain amid the noisy black heights.
He stood tied to the chimney, waiting for the execution to begin,
not only his own, but of the entire world. The world was also tied to
the chimney, an enormous black chimney that was slipping up into
the skies, but it knew nothing of this.
The world looked calm and ordinary in its final moments. It
wasn’t shivering with fear. It wasn’t praying. It wasn’t begging God
for forgiveness. It wasn’t engaged in a reckless orgy to squeeze the
last bits pleasure out of these moments. From time to time on the
opposite bank, commuter trains made their way through the heavy
curtain of rain. On the river nearby a midnight tugboat blinked
through the blurry curtain, the river again faded from view, and
gusts of black wind were the only signs of its presence. The light
in one window of the neighboring building went out and another
window lit up. Inside another apartment someone woke up
from a heart attack or from poetic inspiration or simply from in-

somnia.
Beloseltsev didn’t know what he should do during the universe’s
final minutes. He tried to free himself. He wiggled his fingers and
strained his wrists, but the rope was tied too tightly around his
hands and the chimney. He pulled at the chimney, leaning forward
and hanging by his hands. It trembled and shook from where it
was fixed to the roof. He pulled harder, jerking at it, kicking it with
his heels. The chimney rattled and a metallic shiver shot through
his strained spine. Hoping to break the iron, he began beating and
shaking it. He wore himself out. He stood there, wheezing, his
wrists and shoulders ached.
He tried shouting for help. His voice was immediately lost over
the rooftops. The sound did not reach the earth below, but melted in
the drizzling heavens. He shouted louder, his mouth gaping open,
and the sharp, cold wind drove his voice straight back into his
throat and plugged his mouth with a wet gag. No one heard him,
and what good would it do if they did, if both rescuer and rescuee
were doomed. He tried to attract God’s attention. Before he cried
out to God, he wanted to make God notice him, tied to a chimney, to
turn his severe face downward and take a good look. He hoped that
God would take into account the good deeds and acts of kindness
that he had performed throughout his life, he began recalling them,
offering them to the Savior. He screamed them out silently, raising
his eyes to the clouds.
He felt the rusty iron chimney passing through his body; his
flesh was pierced by the iron stake. And, staring into the deaf,
unresponsive sky, he began to yell at the God who had turned his
back on him.
“Kill me now, Lord! Take my life if you must, but save the
world! Hold me responsible for this great evil, but spare this city,
spare the world!”
But God did not hear his cry. He did not accept Beloseltsev’s
remorse. It had come too late. The End of the World was not to be
diverted, the point of no return had already passed, and nothing
could stop the universe’s sullen gravitation toward its own
destruction.
The wind howled, blowing not fog and rain, but hastening
the End of the World. Beloseltsev was worn down by the mighty
black torrent, and an ancient, instinctive horror overcame him, and
he knew that this horror also filled the mountains and continents,
the whales swimming in the ocean and the seabed beneath them,
the cities with their bustling inhabitants and the countless graves
with bones quivering inside. All living and non-living matter was
waiting in horror for its own destruction, listening to the dark,
whirling vortex.
Beloseltsev saw the neighboring building begin to tremble
and fade out of focus. A section of the facade with windows and
doors broke off from the foundation and bits of wood went flying,
breaking into hundreds of rugged fragments and shards. A red-hot,
stinging tornado swept away rooftops. He choked in the vacuum
it created, scalded by the heat. The chimney broke away from the
roof and shot into the sky, carrying Beloseltsev with it. It lingered in
the air for a moment, his eyes rolled wildly and he saw a dreadful,
gaping hole where the building had just been, then he dropped
from the sky and lost consciousness.
An hour or two passed while he lay there unconscious. His
eyelids were glued together and he pried them open. His head hung
over the side of the roof, and his arms, twisted behind him, brushed
against broken fragments of the chimney. Below, through the
splintered trees, he could see a building with a gaping hole in the
middle, lit up by a crimson glow, violet flashes and blades of roaming
light. The hole was full of flickering toxic dust, billowing smoke and
flowing mustard-colored fog, like a scene from an exploding nuclear
reactor. It was as if a knife had cut open the building and removed
a section, as it would a slice of cake. Naked rooms without walls
were cruelly revealed through the cross-section of boxy exposed
floors. The rugs on the walls, the swaying lampshades, and
identical white toilets were all clearly visible. Water was pouring
and gushing from every story. The yard was heaped with debris,
and firemen bustled over the mounds, shooting up streams of water
that disappeared and vaporized into the flames. Violet flares were
everywhere, sirens blared, someone was shouting into a mega-
phone, and through the smoke, the boom of a crane stretched
slowly upward. The noise of the crackling fire, the howling sirens,
and the shouts of the rescuers blended together with an irregular,
undulating howling and groaning, which filled the air around the
buildings and trees, as if thousands of mourners were wailing in an
endless, wordless chorus.
His neck hurt and he tried to turn his head. Directly in front
of his eyes lay a bodiless arm on the roof, its pale fingers tightly
clutching a teaspoon. Beloseltsev fainted again.
Translated by Michelle Olson with Alexei Pavlenko

Excerpts from
“The Legitimization of Ultra-Right Discourse
in Contemporary Russian Literature”
Ilya Kukulin 1
1
In the summer of 2002 Aleksandr Prokhanov was awarded the
National Bestseller prize for his novel Mr. Hexogen, which had been
recently issued by the Ad Marginem publishing house. Immediately
after this major national award had been conferred on Mr. Hexogen,
literary critics of the liberal persuasion published trenchant attacks,
arguing that the attempt to legitimize this Soviet, radically imperial,
and singularly poor writer as if he were one of the most significant
authors in Russia today reflected a crisis in literary criticism and the
intellectual community in general.
It would seem that the above facts have been well known for
a long time now. But though the legitimization of Hexogen and its
author were harshly judged by critics (“An outrage!”), its story
has not yet received thorough analysis. We have not examined
the preconditions that made Prokhanov’s integration into “high
literature” possible, nor have we grasped the consequences of the
hype surrounding the book’s promotion. People tended to see the
legitimization of this ultra-right author as a devious PR scheme,
as a postmodern game, or as the result of some behind-the-scenes
1
Translated from Ilya Kukulin, “Reaktsiia dissotsiatsii: legitimatsia ul’trapravogo
diskursa v sovremennoi rossiiskoi literature,” in Russkii natsionalizm: Sotsial’nyi
i kul’turnyi kontekst, ed. Marlen Laruel (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie,
2008), 257-338 (257-263, 265-74).
manipulations.2 However, personal conversations convinced me

that in 2002 Prokhanov’s novel really did appeal, or at any rate,
seemed interesting, to a relatively significant number of young
readers, who on other occasions share “Western” aesthetic views
and are immune to Prokhanov’s nostalgia for KGB omnipotence.
Here I base my argument on the premise that a PR campaign alone
cannot explain “the Hexogen phenomenon.”3 Rather, it is the result
of profound changes in our social consciousness—changes that
occurred in the second half of the 1990s and at the beginning of the
2000s.
There is no question that by the beginning of the 2000s the
legitimization of ultra-right discourses in the Russian social
consciousness had occurred. An integral component of the cultural
arena—literature, philosophy, and journalism—consisted of
pronouncements by those who were not ashamed of their extreme
nationalism and fundamentalism or their fondness for fascism and
Stalinism. By then, Prokhanov’s novels had been reviewed in the
glossy magazines (Afisha, TimeOut-Peterburg, Russian Playboy, etc.)
as trendy and topical reads. Prokhanov hosts a political talk show at
the radio station Echo of Moscow, whose target audience consists of
intellectuals and liberals (the other hosts anchoring shows at Echo
2
In his 2002 article “After the fight” (Peremena uchasti [Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe
obozrenie, 2003]) Sergei Chuprinin observes that the theory that the FSB organized
the 1999 bombings of apartment blocks in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk and
blamed them on Chechen separatists in itself became a political event. But when
that story became integrated into the plot of Prokhanov’s novel and the novel
became a literary sensation, the hypothesis about the FSB’s involvement in the
bombing was moved from the arena of political discussion to the realm of artistic
fantasy. Any discussion of the real causes for the bombings thus dissipated. Later
yet another metamorphosis took place: the film The Assassination of Russia, about
the possible complicity of Russia’s federal structures in the apartment bombings,
was sponsored by the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Since then, pro-government
journalists have interpreted any support of the government complicity theory as
“work for Berezovsky.”
3
It is likely that generating controversy was in fact one of the motives that compelled
Ad Marginem to reissue Mr. Hexogen in book form (the novel came out the previous
year as a supplement to the newspaper Tomorrow). Both publications were
accompanied by extensive publicity campaigns.
Ilya Kukulin. The Legitimizationof Ultra-Right Discourse 339
of Moscow are liberal writers and journalists). At the end of the

1990s and the beginning of the 2000s Prokhanov became completely
integrated into the cultural and political mainstream: he was
a constant presence on TV talk shows, and from 2003-2005 he was
one of the favorite debaters on Vladimir Solovyov’s popular talk
show “Fight the Duel!” Prokhanov’s novels are printed by those
publishing houses—Ad Marginem, Ultra.Kultura, Amphora—that
position themselves on the market as “contemporary,” “intellectual,”
and “youth-oriented.” At the 2003 Frankfurt book fair, Prokhanov
was introduced to the German audience by the well-known cultural
theorist Boris Groys.
Prokhanov was not the only ultra-right nationalist who was
allowed into “decent” society. Also allowed was the ultra-right
political theorist Aleksandr Dugin, who writes for the most widely
circulated national papers (Izvestiya and Komsomolskaya pravda)
and the Russian edition of Rolling Stone magazine. Significantly,
Rolling Stone has only two columnists—the other is Sergei Shnurov,
a popular rock vocalist who in his songs and articles expresses
views typical of the liberal left and libertarians.4 At the end of 2005,
the journal Critical Mass, known for publishing sophisticated poetry
and reviews of innovative works in the humanities, carried an article
supportive of Dugin’s views on pop music.5
In 2004, the first complete Russian-language editionof
Nietzsche’s collection of aphorisms The Will to Power went on sale in
book stores. Vladimir Mironov, professor of history at the Moscow
State Institute of International Relations and the book’s editor,
wrote, without a trace of irony, in the afterword, “The ideologues
of fascism saw Nietzsche as their forerunner […]. Guided by his
recipes, Mussolini and Hitler restored, as it were, a powerful and
warrior-like spirit in decrepit, moribund, vulgar and philistine
4
Shnurov can also be seen in the 2005 film “4,” written by the author Vladimir Sorokin.
Prokhanov no longer writes for Rolling Stone, which now employs a roster of
primarily liberal columnists.
5
For an example of Dugin’s views on pop music, note that in a review of a performance
on “Star Factory” (Russia’s version of “American Idol”) Dugin wrote that “it is well
known that only Satanists and perverts work in show business.”—Eds.
Europe. They reawakened manly instincts, and filled the towns

with resounding battle cries for war and valor.”6
In February of 2006 the Moscow club Hardcore hosted a poetry
night organized by the poets representing the “For the Motherland!”
faction of the ultra-right party “Motherland.” The party was recently
banned from elections for its use of xenophobic slogans during
pre-election campaigns. On most other nights, Hardcore serves as
a venue for ethnic music concerts, reggae festivals, etc.
In the fall of 2005, Russian television’s Channel One aired an
entire concert by the rock band Alisa. Most of the songs on its
recent albums (“It’s later than you think,” 2003; “The outcast,” 2005)
written by the band’s leader Konstantin Kinchev, feature, at their
core, nationalistic and fundamentalist religious ideology:
So many jackals and dogs

Come at us, baring their teeth,
Coveting the gold of our grain,
And the gold of icons.
(“The Monk, the Warrior, and the Jester”)
We are preyed upon by the horde,

We bear the infidels’ yoke,
But in our veins seethes
The heaven of the Slavs.
(“The Heaven of the Slavs”)
The Kommersant journalist Boris Barabanov responded to

this concert by observing that “airing a rock-band’s concert in
its entirety during prime-time is considered a failure for ratings,
no less because Alisa’s music is heavy and aggressive, not at all
a ‘weekend-lite’ style. This sacrifice (i.e., the airing of the concert —
I.K.) is conclusive evidence that among all Russian rock bands Alisa
is the one that most accurately expresses state ideology.” While in
fact Yury Shevchuk and his band DDT enjoyed greater popularity
than Kinchev on television in the 2000s, Barabanov’s argument is
6
Nietzsche F. Volia k vlasti (Will to power). Trans. E. Gertsyk et al., ed. and afterword
by V. Mironov (Moscow: Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia, 2005), 634.
basically correct: Kinchev, who on several occasions has expressed

his solidarity with extreme nationalists,7 in no way contradicts the
ideology of contemporary political elites. Moreover, Kinchev
continues to enjoy full recognition among the Russian rock musicians
of the “Storm and Stress” generation (i.e., those who became well-
known in the second half of the 1980s), who were perceived as the
heralds of democratization and socially critical spokesmen. Also,
Kinchev enjoys the respect of rock critics: his views and chauvinistic
lyrics are seen as elements of his poetics. Barabanov seems to be the
only one who dared to challenge Kinchev in a public forum.
2
Both Prokhanov and Dugin present themselves as writers of the
opposition, regardless of their integration into the establishment.
Over the course of the 2000s, Prokhanov grew increasingly critical
of the existing political regime and state ideology, while Dugin
fashions himself as a kind of a metaphysical oppositionist who
rejects the contemporary world order as a whole.8 Both authors first
declared their opposition at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of
the 1990s, when they categorically disagreed with the then-ongoing
democratization and the liberalization movements. Over the 1990s,
they went on denouncing democracy and liberalism. They carried
the aura of the opposition even into the 2000s, when the ideological
7
Interviewer: “Just now in Moscow there was the ‘March of the Right’ against illegal
immigration. Would you support it?” Kinchev: “Of course. It is a colossal threat. […]
Look at France. Perhaps now the Europeans will wake up from their sweet slumber
and grasp that it was not by accident that the [tower of ]Babylon was destroyed.
Nationalities should not intermingle. Every man should live where the Lord willed
him to be born, instead of migrating here and there. (Konstantin Kinchev, “I am the
power of the nation,” Izvestiia, November 11, 2005).
8
Since the publication of this article in 2008, Dugin has become professor and chair
in Moscow State University’s Department of Sociology. Moreover, in 2011 and
2012, years marked by public protests in favor of social justice and democracy in
response to Vladimir Putin’s election to an unprecedented third term as president,
both Prokhanov and Dugin presented themselves as energetic defenders of the
regime.
programs of the ruling elites and the social mood shifted sharply
toward the right, toward isolationism, nationalism, and nostalgia
for imperial grandeur. In his novels Into the Night and Mr. Hexogen,
Prokhanov expressed his clear support for Vladimir Putin and an
extremely negative attitude toward the democratizing Russia of the
1990s. Dugin, too, approved of Putin’s ascension to power. Soon after
this, Prokhanov launched a series of sharp attacks against Putin and
Putin’s party, “United Russia,” and published his support for the
writer Vladimir Sorokin, who was then the target of the pro-Putin
youth movement Marching Together. Today Prokhanov, together
with his like-minded friend, apologist, and literary critic Vladimir
Bondarenko, contend that the present rule remains liberal, just as
it had been in the 1990s, and that therein lies the reason for the
leadership’s authoritarianism. For example, Bondarenko’s critique
of the Marching Together movement, published in the newspaper
Tomorrow, was titled “UFO—Ultraliberal False Objective.”9
After 2002, critics of liberal persuasion ceased pondering the
reasons behind Prokhanov’s legitimization: some of them decided
that Prokhanov’s writing was so bad that his popularity was
exclusively a phenomenon of popular culture and therefore did
not warrant serious examination. Other critics viewed Prokhanov
as an example of the radicalization of public taste, as well as of the
political views of the younger literati and journalists, a generation
that—they argued—could be viewed as one entity.
During the 2000s, Prokhanov’s work was legitimized as not only
oppositional, but culturally innovative, and the publication of Mr.
Hexogen by Ad Marginem was a crucial step in that legitimization.
The publishing house positioned itself on the book market in the
1990s and early 2000s as a publisher of “non-classical” Western and
Russian philosophy (from Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida and Merab
Mamardashvili), as well as fiction and non-fiction that violated
familiar aesthetic conventions and broke various taboos (most
notable in the works of Vladimir Sorokin). However, if Sorokin, Ad
9
This is also a coded attack on the influential journal Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie
(New Literary Observer), founded in 1992 at the peak of the early democratic
reform movements. (IK)
Marginem’s favorite writer, had no chance of ever being published

in the USSR, Prokhanov’s work had been published regularly since
the end of the 1960s, both in literary journals and as books. Since
the end of the 1980s, Prokhanov has had an established relationship
with extreme right and nationalistic publishers, such as the journal
Our Contemporary and the newspaper Tomorrow, where he serves as
editor-in-chief to this day.
Prokhanov’s new novel, The Political Scientist, has been described
by Aleksandr Panov, one of the literary critics for the oppositional
paper United Citizens’ Front, as “a kind of a mystery play whose
characters […] traverse all the circles of the contemporary political
inferno, which is described with the Dante-like sweep. The same
goes for his power of imagination: at one time during the collapse
of the empire this orthodox Soviet artist—the socialist-realist,
the battle painter, and the singer of the Red Army Command
Staff— […] turned into a flagrant surrealist.” Generally, the idea
of Prokhanov’s transformation from socialist realist to communist
surrealist, which supposedly took place in Prokhanov’s output in
the 1990s, has become a commonplace in criticism, though this
notion is not textually grounded. Prokhanov’s “innovations” can be
attributed to his collaborations with avant-garde artists. The launch
of his novel The Cruiser’s Sonata took place at the trendy A-3 gallery,
which also showcased the novel’s illustrations by the experimental
artists Alexander Savko and Vladimir Anzelm. The launch of The
Political Scientist took place at the club Home, known primarily
for showcasing new music, with accompaniment by the famous
avant-garde artist and musician German Vinogradov. Anton Drel,
a lawyer for the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky,10 also
took part in the launch of The Political Scientist, which features
a positive character clearly based on the oligarch. Thus, the publicity
10
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former head of the Yukos oil company, was arrested
on charges of fraud in 2003. While many, including Amnesty International and
the European Court of Human Rights, have argued that the Russian authorities
committed multiple violations in their arrest and subsequent treatment of
Khodorkovsky, Khodorkovsky remains in prison as of this writing. (IK) Khodorkovsky
was pardoned and released from prison in December 2013.—Eds.
events for the book were calculated to function as hot art scene
and political act at once; it suggested a framework within which
Prokhanov’s “opposition” and Khodorkovsky’s political position
were intended to be seen as comparable.
Back in 2003, the journalists Fyodor Romer and Galina
Yuzefovich commented on the shift that legitimized Prokhanov and
his strategic association with the liberal opposition:
[…]Prokhanov […] is advantageous for the postmodernists in the

current literary and arts scene. They crave to be radically non-
conformist and slide up and down along the blade of the political
razor; yet their good taste and sybaritic manners prevent them
from brandishing red banners at protest rallies. How convenient
for them to have a real opposition figure who shares their common
language of conceptualism and is a playful aesthete....
In a bizarre turn, the authors of the article go along with

Prokhanov’s self-manufactured image as a left radical; they do
not notice his ideological position, consistently articulated in
his novels, that has little in common with left radicalism. His
position combines the celebration of imperial might, enthusiasm
for technological advancement (special attention is paid to the
construction of various spy gadgets), xenophobia (note the
expression that Stalin “was martyred by kikes,” uttered by
a positive character in Mr. Hexogen), and energetically fomented
nostalgia for icons of Stalin-era ideology. The protagonist in
Mr. Hexogen is outraged that Moscow’s Georgy Dimitrov Street
was renamed into the “incomprehensible” Yakimanka Street—the
fact that “Yakimanka” derives from the names of the parents of
the Mother of God, Saints Joachim and Anna, is irrelevant to both
Prokhanov and his hero. The protagonists of The Cruiser’s Sonata get
into secret Soviet archives, where they find Semyon Babayevsky’s
novels (!!),11 carefully preserved but frayed from multiple uses by
the common folk. There is also a brochure against Solzhenitsyn with
11
Semyon Babayevsky (1909-2000), a writer of Socialist Realist novels whose works
provide illustrative examples of totalitarian literary aesthetics. Awarded the Stalin
Prize in 1949, 1950, 1951. (IK)
a “clever” (Prokhanov’s term) title “So-Lzhets” (Solzhenitsyn,

the liar). Clearly, joining imperial nostalgia with technological
advancement and xenophobia does not add up any kind of
left radicalism; rather, this ideology is genetically linked to the
ideological precepts of late Stalinism of the 1940s and early 1950s.
The aesthetics of Prokhanov’s novels are also rooted in the
literature of late Stalinism. Having preserved the genres and motifs
of late Stalinist literature, he was able to graft them onto new styles.
In the 1970s, he adapted them to the surrealistic and dream-like
metaphors of his contemporaries Vladimir Makanin and Anatoly
Kim; in the 1990s, to the style of Solzhenitsyn’s historical epic The
Red Wheel; in the 2000s, to the postmodern style of Yury Mamleev,
Victor Pelevin, and Vladimir Sorokin.
Ideologically, Prokhanov is no oppositionist—in spite of his
anti-Putin pronouncements, he is in sync with the defining trends
of Putin’s period. One of these trends is a quest for a historically
synthetic identity, that is, a desire to represent either a discrete
phenomenon or the entire social and political system of the country
as the heir to several different traditions simultaneously: to Soviet
Russia; to imperial Russia “before 1913”; to ancient Rus (note Putin’s
interest in ancient history, his media-covered trips to archeological
digs, etc.); and in some cases to Western European civilization.
An analogous construction of synthetic identity is described in
Prokhanov’s new novels The Inscription and The Political Scientist. In
the latter, the half-Jewish protagonist Strizhailo sides with the forces
of good when at a decisive moment he remembers his Pskovian
roots. In The Inscription, the process of constructing identity in the
consciousness of a protagonist who is descending into a trance is
described as follows:
… As his brain was becoming smaller and smaller, the hazy

intoxicating mists began to float around under the vaults of his
now vacant skull. Along with the penetrating of the thin sharp
tube, he too was sinking deep into himself, traversing through the
layers which made up his consciousness. These were the layers of
the “Soviet,” of the red, like a tightly packed banner; the layers of
the “Russian Orthodox” characterized by the gold and the white
like the Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin; the “peasant” layers,
whitish like dry haystacks and deep-brown like the wreathes

on a wall in a peasant’s hut. And underneath these penetrated
layers there opened something primordial, vital and succulent,
greenishly blue and shaggy, like moss and lichen, seaweed and
river pools—the “pagan” was reached by the liberated “I.”
Sometime after the above episode, the protagonist makes a dra-

matic decision, choosing for himself the Soviet layer as the most
important one. On the whole, this motif of “conflating identities”
is not an invention of Russia’s ruling elites or of some writers: it
evolved spontaneously as the 1990s turned into the 2000s, when
society conceived a desire for making history into an object of
aesthetics, a wish to view history merely as a colorful drama, and
a refusal to reflect on the traumatic episodes of the Soviet past. This
desire became the psychological and aesthetic basis for various
“mainstreaming discourses” prevalent in literature, the arts,
journalism, and other media. It represented the country’s history
in continuous and successive links, connecting imperial Russia, the
Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet epoch.
In Prokhanov’s novel Into the Night (2000), a member of one of
the ruling elites makes a clear-cut, though extremely biased,
prediction regarding the trend of events in contemporary Russia.
The main hero, a retired KGB colonel, gets into a mysterious
underground center where he finds an enormous, electric map
of Russia. His senior comrade explains that the map indicates the
penetration of the former KGB agents into state institutions and
private companies of the new Russia. They are everywhere: they are
the heads of the security departments in banks and companies (it’s
hard to disagree with this assertion); they are also the deputy CEOs
in the major corporations. They are all sleeper agents—at a secret
hour they will come out of the shadows and take the governing of
the state into their hands. This hour will come after a fair-haired
man of medium height assumes power. This man, whom the Jewish
oligarch Astros is preparing to replace Yeltsin, and who resembles
Andrei Bolkonsky of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, will soon escape
Astros’s control and will lead Russia in its true direction, that is, he
will not allow the country to be transformed into an international
Jewish center. This episode, of course, cannot be considered an

accurate description of the FSB’s infiltration into state structures and
the management of the resource-based industries which occurred
in the 2000s. Nonetheless, Prokhanov’s prognosis undoubtedly
reflects the view of the elite that came to power in Russia during
this period.
Translated by Alexei Pavlenko

Sergei Lukyanenko
(b. 1968, Karatau, Kazakhstan)
Sergei Lukyanenko graduated from the Alma-Ata State Medical

Institute with a degree in psychiatry. He started publishing fantasy
stories and novels in the late 1980s. His most famous work is
a cycle of mystical novels: Night Watch, Day Watch, Twilight Watch,
Last Watch, and Petty Watch—that depicts the Manichean struggle
of the forces of dark and light allegorically projected onto the
Soviet and post-Soviet mafia, corrupt officials, the media, and
the KGB/FSB respectively. Timur Bekmambetov’s films Night
Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006) brought Lukyanenko’s novels
to international fame. Lukyanenko runs a popular blog on
LiveJournal. He lives in Moscow.
For discussion:
Night Watch (2004), Day Watch (2006), dir. Timur Bekmambetov.
Also available:
Lukyanenko, Sergei. Night Watch, translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York:
Miramax Books/Hyperion, 2006.
------. Day Watch, translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: Arrow Books, 2008.
------. Twilight Watch, translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: Arrow Books,
2008.
------. The Last Watch, translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: Hyperion, 2009.
Sergei Lukyanenko 349
T he A nti -M atr i x (T a k e the B lue P ill )

Aleksandr Tarasov1
The culture industry does not sublimate: it

represses…. Films … hammer into every brain
the old lesson that continuous attrition, the
breaking of all individual resistance, is the
condition of life in this society.
—Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,
The Dialectic of Enlightenment
Almost everyone who has written anything about the “Watch”

films—Night Watch and Day Watch—has mentioned the Wachowskis’
film The Matrix. Why they were reminded of The Matrix—that they
cannot explain. This, in itself, speaks to the cognitive deterioration
of the writing community in contemporary Russia. The Matrix
spontaneously appeared in writers’ minds, and they reflexively
responded to its “appearance.” And yet this was no accident:
there is, in fact, a direct connection between The Matrix and the
“Watches.”
The “Watches” are modeled after The Matrix as works of cinematic
mass culture. But at the same time the “Watches” are made as a con-
tradiction and counterweight to The Matrix. They are the anti-Matrix.
1
Translated from Aleksandr Tarasov, “Anti-‘Matritsa’: Vyberi siniuiu tabletku,” in Dozor
kak simptom. ed. B. Kupriianov and M. Surkov (Moscow: Falanster, 2006). 324-36.
Of course, the Wachowskis’ film is of much higher quality than

the “Watches.” After all, even in mass culture there is a hierarchy
of quality, which defines each work as closer to or further from the
standard of true art. The Matrix is at the highest level of “mass culture,”
while the “Watches” are mediocre (if we measure according to
international criteria, not through the blinders of Russian mass
culture, which is derivative and provincial). But the difference in
quality should not prevent us from drawing a comparison between
the “Watches” and The Matrix.
What exactly is The Matrix? It is an attempt, using cinematic
mass culture, elements of fantasy, mythological allusions, and
heavy borrowing of images from high art and fundamental cultural
symbols, to instill a certain ideology in the audience. One could
venture to say that the entire film functions as propaganda for Jean-
Paul Sartre’s social and political philosophy—adapted, naturally,
for the consumer of mass culture. The Matrix reflects both of Sartre’s
“hypostases”: existentialist and Marxist.
In precise accordance with Sartre’s existentialism, The Matrix
teaches us that the familiar world surrounding us is unreal, and,
just as Sartre demonstrates in Nausea, reality does not in any way
resemble what bourgeois-controlled “civil society” (religious,
educational, cultural institutions, mass media) offers to us. And
just as in Sartre’s explication of Marxism, it presents the true face
of reality: a world of cynical, merciless exploitation, where people
are harvested for energy, while their minds are poisoned with lies and
illusions to prevent them from realizing the truth and rebelling.
You can say that the world of the Matrix is capitalism taken to its
logical conclusion: after all, even in “normal” capitalism people are
harvested for their energy (their lifeblood), their minds simultaneously
poisoned with lies and illusions.
Really, who are the protagonists in The Matrix? The members
of the Resistance. What are their goals? To free from slavery those
who have been subjected to the Matrix’s merciless exploitation.
What do they need to do to achieve that? Get as many people as
possible to see the true state of affairs, make them stop being a part
of the System. In the film, Morpheus directly tells Neo that they are
battling for people’s minds, which are still “a part of the system.”
Sergei Lukyanenko. The Anti-Matrix 351
Why does the Resistance need more fighters? To carry out

a Revolution, destroy the System, and put an end to the era of
exploitation.
You have to admit: this is not mass culture’s usual ideology.
And who are the antagonists in The Matrix? First, the Matrix
itself (meaning the System, both as an economic mechanism and as
a system of illusions imposed on humanity), and second, the Matrix’s
agents, meaning agents of the secret service, or, in Marxist terms, the
government’s regulating institutions. After all, the Matrix is law and
order; it may be an illusion, but it is normal modern bourgeois society,
while reality is the ruinous aftermath of a civil war!
This is a classic assertion in Marxism: behind the “proper” and
even attractive façade of “prosperous” bourgeois society, there is
a hidden world of merciless exploitation, deception, oppression,
and death. Only Marxists speak of the exploitation of the proletariat,
of the pillaging of “Third World” populations, of the prosperity of
some at the expense of others, while the world of the Matrix, as
we may recall, is capitalism taken to its logical conclusion, where
practically everyone is among the exploited.
The specialist has no trouble recognizing that The Matrix is
a cinematic representation of the infamous Experience Machine
described by Robert Nozick in his well-known book Anarchy, State,
and Utopia. Nozick asked whether a person would agree to be
hooked up to a machine that replaced real life and real experience
with an image of this life and experience by stimulating certain areas
of the brain. The image would be a pleasant one, where the person
would be rich, healthy, good-looking, loved, respected, and so on—
in short, he would be happy. Nozick famously claimed that if the
person really thought this through, he would not agree, but would
instead prefer reality (with all its discomforts) to a beautiful illusion.
Like any liberal, Nozick simplifies the problem. In particular,
he proposes that this is merely a thought experiment and that while
existence in reality is not as perfect as in his illusion, it is not
a complete nightmare (he’s a liberal professor from Harvard, what
do you expect?).
According to Sartre, this kind of experiment is not an experiment
at all, but an existential choice that every person must make, and not
nearly everyone finds the strength to “take the red pill,” to choose
unbearable, torturous reality over a beautiful and comforting
illusion, to choose true existence (being). Furthermore, Sartre claims,
the majority tries not to notice even the possibility of an existential
choice. In The Matrix this is confirmed by Morpheus, who says that
“most people are not ready to be unplugged” from the Matrix.
According to Sartre, there are social reasons underpinning the
psychological reasons for our fear of existential choices: bourgeois
society imposes certain social presets (“behavioral codes”!), which
prevent spiritual rebellion, the escape from illusionary being into
real existence.
The Wachowskis illustrate this through the character of Cypher,
who cannot bear the weight of truth and a life of hiding, and chooses
“blissful ignorance” in the form of a new life as a wealthy film star
(on the condition that he is unable to remember anything of his life
in reality). To put it a different way, Cypher acts as a consumerist:
he refuses his human essence in favor of a commodity. Marx called
this commodity fetishism and showed (in the first chapter of Volume
One of Capital, in the section titled “The Fetishism of Commodity
and Its Secret”) that in bourgeois society products are presented to
each participant in the capitalist economic mechanism in the guise
of commodities, the monetary cost makes the cost of consumption
appear prohibitive to the average mind, the essence of objects is
clouded by their monetary equivalent, people begin to perceive not
only material objects but even themselves as commodities, and they
perceive the image of social reality as its true nature.
Since the world of the Matrix is the ultima Thule of capitalist
economy, in which it has reached reductio ad absurdum, then
naturally commodity fetishism in it has also reached its ultima Thule
and borders on reductio ad absurdum: the real product (nourishment
provided to each human “battery” under exploitation) is replaced
by its commodity form (the image of a steak, imposed on the mind from
outside). The world of the Matrix is a world wherein mass media,
PR, and commercials have completely defeated human reason
and individual human experience, a world where fetish and form
have replaced content. This is exactly what Marshall McLuhan was
talking about in Understanding Media: “the ‘content’ of a medium
is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the
watchdog of the mind.”
The Matrix is that burglar. The kind of burglar who steals
a person’s life and covers up the theft with images of commodity
fetishism.
According to Sartre and Marx, humans, as creatures endowed
with reason, have full responsibility for themselves, for the meaning of
their lives, and for the surrounding world. Someone who has freed
himself from the fetters of illusion can no longer play a social role,
because such a role presupposes no freedom of choice (or freedom
at all). Responsibility for oneself, the meaning of one’s life, and the
surrounding world, is the basis for conscious revolutionary action
directed at changing social reality, because that reality is so horrific.
The Wachowskis insist on the unconditional value of reality (no
matter what kind of reality it is) and on the fact that only reality
has historical potential; this echoes Jean Baudrillard, who stated
(in Simulacra and Science Fiction) that only reality can become
a true utopia, an alternative project to modern society. They
also unreservedly praise the revolutionary as one who, in Sartre’s
words, “wants each person to realize his fate fully and freely”
(Situations III).
Let us now turn to the “Watches.”
We’ll begin with a detail that illustrates their differences: the
names. In the “Watches,” like in The Matrix, the characters have
symbolic names. But not the main characters, just the highest-ranking
ones. This means that The Matrix takes a revolutionary/democratic
approach (the one who matters is the one who demonstrates why he
is the hero), while the “Watches” take a secret service/bureaucratic
approach (the one who matters is the one who has more stars on
his uniform). And in The Matrix the names actually speak to the
characters’ essences: Neo (i.e. Homo novus, or, as an anagram, One,
i.e. the Chosen One); Trinity (i.e. the Holy Trinity); Morpheus (i.e.
the Roman god, the only one who is capable of reaching the minds
of human batteries put to sleep by the Matrix). In the “Watches,”
on the other hand, the names simulate essence. Geser in theory
fights demons, the forces of Evil, but in reality he is a trickster,
a hunter of souls, Lord of the North, who is only required to battle
with demons; Zavulon is one of the founders of the twelve Israelite

Tribes (Zebulun), who was known to have been born of Leah, not
Rachel, and he (and his tribe) “offered his life to death.” So these
are pseudosymbolic, not symbolic names, corresponding to the
authors’ view that the battle between the Light and the Dark is not
the battle between Good and Evil, but something entirely different.
And that is how it is with everything else. While The Matrix
claims that there is reality and pseudoreality, true existence and
illusion, the “Watches” say something completely different: the
reality perceived by average minds is, of course, reality, but it’s not all
of reality, not a complete reality. In addition to this first level of reality
accessible to the masses (meaning us average movie-goers), there is
supposedly another, higher level—a level exclusively for internal
use, a level of constant behind-the-scenes action by the agents of
Light and Dark, the “Gloom,” the “second level.” It’s not hard to
guess with whom (or what) the Light and Dark are associated: the
secret service.
It is thus perfectly logical that The Matrix’s role model is the
conscious activity of average citizens resisting a soulless machine,
battling with it in the name of their own (and humanity’s) future,
while the “Watches,” on the contrary, spread civil apathy and
support faith in the omnipotence of government and governmental
secret services, which apparently are supposed to decide the fate of
citizens in place of the citizens themselves.
The Matrix claims that anyone can see reality. The “Watches” say
no, to see a higher level of reality you have to have been endowed with
that ability at birth (the Others). This is social Darwinism, plain and
simple, propaganda for social exclusivity. That is, we have the right
to command and control because we are the superior race.
The Matrix promotes existential choice, while the “Watches”
deny it in favor of middle-class values, to the extent that the “happy
ending” of Day Watch depicts how Anton Gorodetsky loses his
essence as an Other and becomes a typical, average person. The
Matrix praises the political (revolutionary) action of average citizens.
That makes it revolutionary/democratic. The “Watches,” on the other
hand, praise the actions of official institutions (the secret service).
That makes them governmental/bureaucratic.
The protagonists of The Matrix are no philistines. They’re rebels,

revolutionaries. They lead an underground life, in danger every
second, thrown down to the lowest levels (literally) of society—
they chose this life themselves, when they could probably have sat out
the fight in Zion. Instead, they infiltrate the enemy, risk their lives,
continue the fight, suffer constant hardship—in short, they live for
an idea. The heroes of Night Watch and Day Watch (the agents of
Light) are on the job. In terms of psychology and lifestyle, these are
typical middle class citizens who work for the government. They are the
next step up from the guys in beer commercials: they watch hockey
and soccer nonstop (and to catch the soccer match on TV they might
forget their work altogether), they drink heavily, and so on.
As Goblin2 appropriately says, they’re just “operatives.” Or as
Valeria Novodvorskaya3 would have it, “bloody KGBists” (in this
case, by the way, literally bloody!).
As strange as it may sound, The Matrix affirms the cult of Reason:
the main force in the film is reason itself, reason that has freed itself
from illusion and rejected the pseudoreality imposed by the Matrix.
The fights and shootouts are secondary, since they don’t happen in
the real world. Strength and weapons turn out to be useless if you
can dodge bullets or stop them mid-flight. Reason triumphs over
irrationality, over illusion. The “Watches,” on the other hand, affirm
the cult of strength and magic. In fact, magic turns out to be more
important than conventional, material strength. In the “Watches,”
the irrational triumphs over reason; irrationality and mysticism are
championed.
It is worth noting that The Matrix really does show the battle
between Good and Evil: Evil is the Matrix, the machine of oppression,
2
Goblin is the nickname of the film and video game translator Dmitrii Puchkov,
who was propelled to fame for dubbing Western films with alternative, and highly
profane, versions of their dialogue. He also created an alternative voice-over
soundtrack for the Russian blockbuster film Bumer, in effect creating a postmodern
re-make.
3
Valeriia Novodvorskaya, dissident, political activist, and journalist. A founder of the
oldest liberal party, The Democratic Union, an outspoken critic of the KGB/FSB as
the foundation of both the communist and Putin regimes.
capitalism taken to the extreme, while the forces of the Resistance

are Good. The “Watches,” though, have neither Good nor Evil:
what is shown is the struggle between two forces of essentially the
same type—the Light (our secret service) and the Dark (i.e. whoever
the secret service is out to get). The Matrix assumes the existence
of morality (social ethics); the “Watches” assume immorality. To be
honest, if the Light and the Dark have an agreement about their
respective spheres of influence, if the agents of Light are the ones
who give the agents of Dark licenses to kill, what kind of morality
can there be? Only class morality, which bases itself on the premise
that you only have responsibilities to your own kind (in this case,
the Others); moral responsibilities do not apply to the masses, that
“inferior race.”
This is why in The Matrix your average Agent Smith and
your average revolutionary are fighting to the death, while in the
“Watches” we observe, to borrow Ladislas Farago’s expression,
a classic “game of the foxes”: the juxtaposition of two secret services,
with mutual agreements, “double dealing,” and complicated
plots.
Even the challenges thrown down by the “opposition,” like
the destruction of the Ostankino teletower, can’t fool anyone. Let
us concede for a moment that television really is an “Empire of
Deception.” But what does the tower have to do with it? It’s just
equipment. Simple logic suggests that the leaders of this empire
are the ones who deserve to be punished, not the equipment—
equipment should instead be handed over into the right hands. This
episode faithfully duplicates the long-running political debate in
which one side confronts those who control the mass media about
why they serve the public such utter crap, while those in control
respond in the words of Minister Shvydkoy,4 “It’s not our fault,
it just happens, you know, naturally.” The Matrix protests against
constant surveillance and total control, advocating struggle against
the system. The “Watches,” instead, praise constant surveillance and
total control of the population, saying, “Calm down, get used to it,
4
Russia’s Minister of Culture from 2000-2004.
don’t get upset, otherwise the Light won’t be able to protect you
from the Dark.”
Back in 1971 one of the first theorists of “mass culture,” Ernest
van den Haag, wrote in A Dissent from the Consensual Society that
products of mass culture must follow two principles: everything
is clear, and everything can be fixed. The Matrix is an improper
mass culture product, because neither principle is followed: not
everything is clear to the average audience, and not everything can
be fixed. Imitating The Matrix, the “Watches” deviate from the first
principle: not everything in these films is clear. This (as in The Matrix)
is intentional. Another founding father of mass culture, Barbey
d’Aurevilly, wrote, “What influences the human imagination more
powerfully than mystery?” The creators of Night Watch and Day
Watch, relying on the effects of mystery, catch their audience with
the same bait that self-proclaimed “gurus” or “yogis” do.
But everything is fixable in the “Watches”! A global catastrophe is
underway: look, Anton and Geser have messed everything up. And
then everything is okay again, no catastrophe after all. If The Matrix
aims toward the example set by true art, the “Watches,” by contrast,
essentially rehash one of the most unsuccessful, unabashedly
mass-cultural films, Fritz Lang’s Spies, which came out back in
1928! There, too, spies and secret service agents are presented as
equals, two identical forms of organized crime, battling each other
in a world of chaos. There, too, is the suggestion that in addition
to normal life there is a higher level hidden from the masses. There,
too, spies operate under the guise of certain “higher powers” and
“unknown truths.” There, too, a massive catastrophe seems to be in
the making.
So while The Matrix tells the viewer, “Open your eyes and rebel!”
the “Watches” say, “Sit tight and have faith in your government.”
While The Matrix extols revolution, the “Watches” extol conformity
and submission to one’s fate. While The Matrix asserts that “knowl-
edge is power,” the “Watches” counter that “ignorance is bliss.”
Both films openly (even too openly) impress an ideology upon
their viewers. But their ideologies are different.
Translated by Eugenia Sokolskaya

Boris Akunin
(Grigorii Chkhartishvili, b. 1956, Zestafoni, Georgia)
Grigorii Chkhartishvili has lived in Moscow since 1958. He

graduated from a Moscow English-language high school and
the School of History and Philology at the Institute of Asian
and African Studies in Moscow. He has worked as a translator
from Japanese and English, served as the deputy editor-in-chief
of the journal Foreign Literature, and served as editor-in-chief of
the twenty-volume Anthology of Japanese Literature. He is also the
author of the book The Writer and Suicide (1999). Since 1998 he
has written detective fiction under the pseudonym Boris Akunin.
His detective novels have been translated into many languages
and attract vast international audiences. They are organized into
several series, among which The Adventures of Erast Fandorin is the
most popular. Covering the period from 1876 to 1914, the novels
of this series focus on the detective Erast Fandorin, who fuses
intelligentsia ethics with service to the Russian state. Akunin’s
other mystery series include The Adventures of Sister Pelagia,
The Adventures of the Master (about Nicholas Fandorin, Erast’s
grandson), Genres, and The Novel-Film. Many of his works have
been adapted to film, including Azazel, The Turkish Gambit, The
State Councilor, and The Spy.
Boris Akunin 359
Suggested for discussion:

Akunin, Boris. The Winter Queen, translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York:
Random House, 2003.
------. The Death of Achilles, translated by Andrew Bromfield. New York: Random
House, 2006.
------. The Counselor of State, translated by Andrew Bromfield. London: Phoenix,
2009.
------. The Coronation, translated by Andrew Bromfield. (London: Orion, 2010).
E xcer pts from

“A C ou ntry R esembling Russi a”: T he U se of H istory
in B or is A ku nin ’ s D etecti v e N ov el s
Elena V. Baraban1
[…] Among post-Soviet detective writers,2 Akunin seemingly is the

one least interested in Russia’s present. Furthermore, he is the first
among contemporary Russian detective authors to combine the genre
of the historical detective novel with Postmodernist aesthetics. The
author claims that by borrowing from classic literature and creating
a postmodern mystery, he pursues the purpose of entertaining the
reader with quality belles-lettres. Akunin asserts that Russians’ most
precious possession is their great literature, and that by saturating
his works with allusions to this literature, he caters to the tastes of
sophisticated readers.3 Some critics agree that deciphering Akunin’s
allusions to literature, film, and historical events constitutes
the primary source of pleasure in reading his mysteries.4 Other
1
Reprinted from: Elena V. Baraban. “A Country Resembling Russia: The Use of History
in Boris Akunin’s Detective Novels,” The Slavic and East European Journal 48, no. 3,
Special Forum Issue: Innovation through Iteration: Russian Popular Culture Today
(Autumn, 2004): 396-420.
2
Such as Aleksandra Marinina, Andrei Konstantinov, Daria Dontsova, Viktoriia
Platova, Andrei Kivinov, Friedrikh Neznansky, and many others.
3
See Alena Solntseva, “Massovaia literatura mozhet byt’ vozvyshennoi.” Vremia
novostei, no. 121, December 6, 2000; Anna Verbieva, “Boris Akunin: Tak veselee
mne i interesnee vzyskatel’nomu chitateliu....” Exlibris. Nezavisimaia gazeta,
December 23, 1999.
4
Lev Danilkin celebrates Akunin’s Postmodern style and the absence of ideology in
Boris Akunin. “A Country Resembling Russia” 361
reviewers are less supportive of what they view as Akunin’s over-

emphasis on allusion. In addition, many critics question Akunin’s
interpretation of history and his stylizations of nineteenth-century
Russian language. While some praise Akunin for his treatment of
Russian history, others accuse him of purposefully distorting the
country’s past. Of those who argue that Akunin’s texts are historically
inaccurate, some accuse Akunin of xenophobia (Arbitman 218);
others charge him with Russophobia and with creating a caricature
of Russian imperial history; and another critic argues that Akunin
articulates “various opinions on the Russian past without giving
clear priority to anyone’s view.”5 […]
Akunin’s nineteenth century is not a “golden age” that can
be emulated by contemporary statesmen. It is a time of misery,
corruption, and social inequality. In his interview with Elle
(Shulpiakov), Akunin says that he is far from idealizing the Silver
Age. According to Akunin, the nineteenth century was far from
rosy, as it is now often presented; “the charming time of Fandorin”
was also marked by appalling poverty, ignorance, and infringement
on the rights of the majority of Russians. Many details in Akunin’s
novels illustrate this position. Indeed, rundown districts with their
mass graves for the poor, as described in The Lover of Death and “The
Decorator,” are no paradise to which contemporary Russians would
his novels. Danilkin argues that in spite of the absence of a clear “message” in the
Erast Fandorin novels, their active and highly positive protagonist may serve as
a role model for present-day Russians. The latter have reflected on the fate of
Russia instead of acting on improving it (Danilkin, Lev. “Danilkin v Izvestiiakh
o Koronatsii.” Sovremennaia russkaia literatura s Viacheslavom Kuritsynym [n.d.].
http://www.guelman.ru/slava/akunin/danilkinl.html). Vasily Prigodich and
Vladimir Berezin admire Akunin’s use of pastiche and his parody of Dostoevsky,
Leskov, Chekhov, and other Russian writers. […] (see Vladimir Berezin,
“Obshchestvo dokhlykh poetov: Geroi Akunina vyiasniaiut svoi otnosheniia
s samoubiistvom.” Nezavisimaia gazeta, July 5, 2001; Vasilii Prigodich,
“Razvlechenie dlia vzyskatel’nogo chitatelia, ili novaia kniga B. Akunina
o prashchure i vnuke velikogo syshchika.” Londonskii kurier, 136, December 15,
2000: 29).
5
Konstantine Klioutchkine, “Boris Akunin (Grigorii Shalvovich Chkhartishvili).”
In The Dictionary of Literary Biography-Russian Writers since 1980, edited by Marina
Balina and Mark Lipovetsky (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 7.
aspire. In The Lover of Death—marketed as a Dickensian mystery—

one of the main characters is Sen’ka Skorik. The details of his life
are reminiscent not only of Dickens’s Adventures of Oliver Twist and
David Copperfield but also of the short story “Van’ka” by Anton
Chekhov. Like Van’ka, Akunin’s hero is an orphan. The master
beats Van’ka “with anything that comes to hand” and Sen’ka is
also beaten regularly by his cousin. For Van’ka, “there is nothing to
eat”; in the morning and in the evening, he gets bread; “for dinner,
porridge”; “but as for tea, or soup, the master and mistress gobble
it all up themselves.”6 (Chekhov 479). Sen’ka is hungry too: even
during Shrovetide, when the house is full of food, the “orphan is
given only two torn pancakes and a tiny bit of oil.”7 Chekhov’s
protagonist writes a letter to his grandfather “imploring” him “to
come and take [him] away” from the evil people who just beat him
and who have made his life “worse than the dog’s” (ibid., 481). In
Akunin’s novel, Sen’ka receives a letter from his little brother who
implores Sen’ka “to come and take [him] away” from the evil people.
Significantly, the way Sen’ka’s brother writes the address on the
letter—“to brother Senia who lives with Uncle Zot in Sukharevka,
Moscow” —is similar to the way Chekhov’s Van’ka addresses
his letter: “To Grandpa, in the village” (ibid., 481). Neither these
allusions to Chekhov nor Akunin’s allusions to Dickens conform
to the vision of a Postmodernist text as meaninglessly reshuffling
fragments of renowned literary works. Akunin evokes Chekhov
and Dickens, the masters of psychological realism who exposed the
social problems of the nineteenth century, in order to support his
own criticism of capitalist society, in which children are mistreated
and opportunities for their personal and social growth are limited.
Akunin’s critique appears to be particularly relevant in light of the
challenges that face the post-Soviet education system. The fate of
children from the lower classes is certainly one of the problems
6
Anton Chekhov, “Van’ka.” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh,
vol. 5 (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 479.
7
Boris Akunin, Liubovnik smerti (Moscow: Zakharov, 2001), 13.
that, in Akunin’s opinion, are typical of both post-Soviet Russia and

Russia’s late imperial period.8
The gloomy atmosphere of nineteenth-century Moscow is
highlighted in chapters discussing Sen’ka’s experiences in the
Khitrovka district, the most dangerous quarter in old Moscow.
A number of episodes in these chapters are a pastiche from Vladimir
Giliarovsky’s depiction of the world of thieves in Moscow and the
Muscovites. In particular, Akunin’s portrayal of Ivan Fedotych
Budnikov, a police officer who managed to keep Khitrovka in some
semblance of order, is a pastiche from Giliarovsky’s description
of the policeman Fedot Ivanovich Rudnikov from the sketch
“Khitrovka.”9 In Giliarovsky’s story, Rudnikov explains why,
though he knows every criminal living in Khitrovka, he does not
report them: if he did, he wouldn’t have worked in Khitrovka “for
twenty years”; he “wouldn’t survive even a single day.”10 Even
fugitives from Siberian hard labor camps considered Ivan Fedotych
“fair.” He had been “beaten and wounded many times. Yet they
would hurt him, not because they wanted to, but simply in the
course of saving their own lives. Each was doing his business: one
was catching […], the other was fleeing” (ibid.). Akunin’s Khitrovka
is similar to the one depicted by Giliarovsky.11 Prom Akunin’s
description, the reader learns that “if [Ivan Fedotych] had worked
by written laws instead of working by Khitrovka laws, they would
8
In his interview with BBC, Akunin asserts that many problems he describes in his
novels about Russia in the nineteenth century are also typical of post-Soviet Russia
(Romadova).
9
Vladimir Berezin observes that Akunin merely switches the first name and
the patronymic of Giliarovsky’s character. See: Vladimir Berezin, “Obshchestvo
dokhlykh poetov: Geroi Akunina vyiasniaiut svoi otnosheniia s samoubiistvom.”
Nezavisimaia gazeta, July 5, 2001.
10
Vladimir Giliarovskii, Moskva i moskvichi (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1960), 26.
11
Another example of Akunin’s pastiche from Moscow and the Muscovites is the
novella “The Jack of Spades.” Giliarovsky’s sketch “Pod kalanchoi” depicts a famous
Moscow swindler Speier and the Jack of Hearts gangster group. Akunin retells an
episode in which Speier deceived the Governor of Moscow Prince Dolgorukov in
a way similar to Giliarovsky’s depiction of the swindler. […]
have slain him dead long ago. But as it is, if he takes someone to
a police station, everyone understands: he can’t do otherwise; he
also needs to prove to his bosses he’s working.”12 Such instances
of pastiche are an example of intertextuality whose function is not
simply to entertain the informed reader but also to create a powerful
subtext that triggers the reader’s associations of the present with
the past. Rather than being an expression of Akunin’s Russophobia
and a proof of his parasitism on the classics, passages reminiscent
of Chekhov and Giliarovsky counter post-Soviet depictions of the
end of the nineteenth century as a period of abundance and social
stability.
For his depictions, Akunin relies on the reader’s cultural memory
of the Russian classics. In a society in which the education system
has devoted a great deal of attention to the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the Postmodern strategy of using nineteenth-century
Critical Realism as a source of historical evidence becomes an
effective supplement to more traditional strategies of reconstructing
the past through documents. Typically, Akunin refers to those
passages in the nineteenth-century classics that expose social
inequality, poverty, and poshlost’ (banality) in the Russian empire.
Moreover, at times he presents a more pessimistic version of a story
that had been told before him by a nineteenth-century writer. In
Coronation, for instance, Tsar Nicholas II and his family are depicted
as negative characters, with Nicholas as a figure of little authority
and his wife as more concerned about the disappearance of her
jewelry than about the kidnapping of Nicholas’s cousin. Akunin’s
depiction of the Khodynka tragedy on May 18, 1896, during which
hundreds of people who had come to celebrate the coronation of
Nicholas II died in a stampede, has allusions to Leo Tolstoy’s short
story “Khodynka.” Tolstoy writes about a man who saves a little
boy from being trampled in the crowd. The man sends the boy
above and over the crowd to a safe place (375).13 Tolstoy leaves the
12
Akunin, Liubovnik smerti, 26.
13
Lev Tolstoi, “Khodynka.” In Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh, vol. 14, edited
by N. Akopova (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1964), 375.
story of the little boy open-ended. Despite telling about a horrible

tragedy, the whole story inspires optimism, because the main
characters prove their humanity; they prove themselves to be above
the circumstances in which they were made to lose their human
dignity. In Akunin’s Coronation the Khodynka chapter tells about
people in the crowd passing a small boy out to where the crowd
ends. Then the narrator looks at the bodies of those who have died
in the stampede: “Only once did I stop next to that very boy whom
they had tried to carry out of the stampede; it obviously didn’t work.
In dumb curiosity, I looked at how transparent his blue eyes were
and stumbled on.”14 By producing a gloomier version of Khodynka
than the one by Tolstoy, Akunin illustrates his point regarding the
responsibility of the Russian upper classes for the tragic events of
1917.15
Through allusions and pastiche, Akunin highlights darker
pages in the Russian social history of the nineteenth century
and creates a contrast between these facts and the post-Soviet
glorification of imperial Russia. Though the works of Mikhalkov,
Panfilov, Govorukhin, and Radzinsky emphasize the country’s
prosperity and stability under the tsars, Akunin argues the opposite
by reactivating the reader’s memory of works by Dostoevsky,
Giliarovsky, Chekhov, Korolenko, and Tolstoy. Akunin uses the
classics’ “testimonies” to question the myth of Russia’s golden age.
The multiplicity of historical pasts in Akunin’s works, then, is not
just a characteristic that accords with Postmodernist principles.
Rather, the philosophical principles of Postmodernism are used to
create a pertinent critique of the idealization of tsarist Russia and
to depict “the Russia we have never lost.”16 Akunin’s criticism of
attempts to idealize the nineteenth century and his fascination with
14
Boris Akunin, Koronatsiia (Moscow: Zakharov, 2001), 335.
15
See Gleb Shul’piakov, “Pisatel’-prizrak, ili Put’ samuraia. Interv’iu s Akuninym.”
Elle (July 2000). http://www.fandorin.ru/akunin/articles/elle.html
16
In his interview with Segodnia, Akunin claims that the Fandorin project is an
attempt to create a new epic, which could be titled The Russia We Have Never
Lost (Makarkin, Aleksei. “Rossiia, kotoroi my ne teriali: Boris Akunin sozdaet epos
novogo tipa.” Segodnia, no. 164, July 28, 2000).
Russian literary classics determine his use of the Postmodernist

techniques of allusion and pastiche. Rather than being a random
reshuffling of fragments of preexistent texts, Akunin’s allusions and
pastiche become historical details that help produce a nuanced and
often ambivalent depiction of Russia.
In a 1999 interview with Ogonek magazine, Akunin maintains
that the Russia of his novels is “not quite real historical Russia”
but rather “a country that resembles Russia.”17 Akunin’s pre-
revolutionary Russia is a projection of Russia’s present. He brings
past and present closer to each other on the pages of his texts by
highlighting nineteenth-century themes and issues that resonate
with important topics in 1990s Russia. According to Trofimenkov,
many details in Akunin’s books refer to present-day Russia. In
particular, Akunin writes about corruption, prostitution, misery,
anti-Semitism, class differences, the “Chechen factor,” […] and
deviations from the accepted norms of sexual behavior.18 All of these
were the topics of numerous publications and debates in the 1990s,
as well as a century ago in Russia. By introducing allusions from
the “past” to the present, Akunin creates an intertext that allows
for a historical perspective on familiar problems. As a result, these
problems are perceived not as something unique to today’s Russia
but as something that has complicated social life in the country
throughout the centuries. […]
In The Death of Achilles, Fandorin, a secret agent of the Governor
General of Moscow, Vladimir Dolgorukov, investigates the death
17
See Kuzmenko, Elena. “Pisatel’ No. 065779.” Ogonek 34 (4621), November 1999.
18
The depiction of the nineteenth-century gay scene in The Coronation resonates
with the issues of homosexuality and homophobia in the 1990s. At the gay ball
thrown by Grand Prince Simeon (his prototype is Prince Sergei, brother of Nicholas
II), homosexuals intend to kill two “guardians” (bliustiteli), “members of a secret
society of homophobes whose mission is to protect the honor of the Romanov
dynasty, and of old Russian aristocratic families” (241-42). The analogy is with
the present-day Russian “repairmen” (remontniki), whose mission is to convert
homosexuals into “proper men” who can marry Russian women and participate
in the reproduction of the country’s population. Akunin’s depiction reminds the
reader of Pavel Lungin’s film Luna Park (1992), which portrays a brigade of young
skinheads who try to “straighten” two homosexuals.
of a prominent Russian statesman, General Sobolev. The prototype

of Sobolev is General Mikhail Skobelev (1843-1882).19 The historical
figure is still recognizable, but defamiliarization makes the reader
aware of the fact that Sobolev is after all a literary character, not
a historical figure. […] The character of Dolgorukov is based on the
real historical figure, Prince Vladimir Andreevich Dolgorukov (1810-
1891) […], who was the Governor General of Moscow from 1864
until 1891. He was a descendant of the old noble family of princes
Dolgorukoi, the most prominent of whom was Yury Dolgoruky
(1095/7-1157), the founder of Moscow. In the novella “The Jack of
Spades,” Akunin’s narrator explains that the “almighty” Vladimir
Andreevich Dolgorukov was called, among other things, “the Grand
Duke of Moscow” and Yury Dolgoruky, that is, by the name of his
great ancestor. Besides referring to a real governor of Moscow in the
second half of the nineteenth century, The Death of Achilles suggests
two other historical figures: the current mayor20 of Moscow, Yury
Luzhkov, and Prince Yury Dolgoruky. These three historical figures
give the novel its depth—creating a multilayered Postmodern
text in which irony is a major trope. Akunin’s character Vladimir
Dolgorukov is a social commentary on contemporary Russian
historicism. In 1996-1997, in the course of preparation for and then
the celebration of the 850th anniversary of Moscow, the monument of
the founder of Moscow Prince Yury Dolgoruky was “half-jokingly
and half-seriously” referred to as “Yury Mikhailovich,” which is
the first name and the patronymic of Luzhkov, the popular mayor
of Moscow in the 1990s. […] Prince Yury Dolgoruky was the son
of Vladimir, not Mikhail. However, the popular imagination aptly
reacted to Luzhkov’s aspirations to view Moscow as his city and
sacrificed historical accuracy to psychological effect.
The Dolgorukov of the novel is not simply a depiction of the real
Vladimir Andreevich Dolgorukov, but also “a nineteenth-century”
19
General Skobelev took part in Russian military campaigns in Central Asia. Skobelev
was a hero of the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878).
20
Luzhkov held the office of Moscow mayor for 18 years (1992-2010) and was
replaced by Sergei Sobianin in 2010.
version of Yury Luzhkov. Like Luzhkov in the present, Dolgorukov

has ruled Moscow for many years as if it were his fiefdom. Like
Luzhkov in the 1990s, Dolgorukov supports expensive projects,
such as the erection of “the Temple.” One of Dolgorukov’s clerks
complains about the project: “And the notorious Temple! It has
taken all life from the city. […] How many shelters and hospitals
could have been built with this money? But our new Cheops desires
to leave no less than a pyramid after himself.”21 The subject of this
remark is the famous Church of Christ the Savior, built in 1812-1883
in commemoration of Russia’s victory over Napoleon, destroyed in
1931 on Stalin’s orders and built anew under Luzhkov (1990-2000).
Thus, the connection of Akunin’s character with Luzhkov and
Prince Vladimir Dolgorukov is not only through the comparison of
Yury Luzhkov and Vladimir Dolgorukov to Prince Yury Dolgoruky
of the twelfth century, but also through the projects they have
both accomplished. The Church of Christ the Savior, the biggest
Orthodox church in the world, involved an aesthetic controversy
among Muscovites both in the 1870s-80s and in the 1990s. The idea
of restoring the church was criticized in Russian newspapers in the
1990s because the project was so costly. Muscovites argued that
instead of rebuilding one more Christian temple in the capital, the
money could be used to help hundreds of small parishes around
Russia.22 The Luzhkov implication is reinforced by another allusion:
the painting of the Temple is commissioned to a Georgian artist
Gegechkori, a “well-known scoundrel.”23 Dolgorukov’s councilors
believe that it is both “cheaper” and fairer to commission the painting
to Moscow artists who can paint “as well as, or better than, the
21
Boris Akunin, Smert’ Akhillesa [The Death of Achilles] (Moscow: Zakharov,
2001), 76.
22
In Altyn-Tolobas Akunin once again captures the controversy surrounding the
Church of Christ the Savior. The protagonist’s father used to say that the “giant,”
“non-proportionate” dome of the church spoiled Moscow and the only good
that the Bolsheviks did was to destroy this church. But Nicholas, the protagonist
of Altyn-Tolobas, finds the church quite agreeable (Boris Akunin, Altyn-Tolobas,
Moscow: OLMA-Press, 2001, 44).
23
Akunin, Smert’ Akhillesa, 66.
Georgian.”24 In this depiction, Akunin is attacking the contemporary

Georgian artist Zurab Tsereteli, who was commissioned by Luzhkov
to paint the restored Church of Christ the Savior in the 1990s.25 The
ironic attitude of Akunin’s narrator to Dolgorukov’s megalomania
is a projection of Russians’ irony about Luzhkov’s megalomania,
which, in turn, is a manifestation of the neo-imperial attitude in
Russia, the desire to reinstate Russia’s greatness through pursuing
grandiose projects such as the erection of the WWII memorial on
Poklonnaia Hill, the celebration of the 850th anniversary of Moscow,
and Pushkin’s bicentennial in 1999.
Allusions from the past to the present make the past
“recognizable”26 and help shift the narrative focus from a past that is
no longer there to a past that is characterized by violations of social,
political, sexual, and moral norms similar to those in the present.
In Akunin’s works, allusions and pastiche cannot be reduced to
a meaningless bricolage of signs; these Postmodern devices are
a means of creating a comparison of past and present and thus of
substantiating Akunin’s critique of the position that the past was
24
Ibid.
25
Tsereteli’s other projects, such as statues of Marshal Zhukov and Peter the Great,
enraged patriots of Moscow and earned him a reputation similar to that of
Gegechkori in The Death of Achilles.
26
There are other examples of Akunin’s collage of times in The Death of Achilles. For
instance, Fandorin learns about corruption in Moscow from an old servant: “Say,
a seller-man wants to open a shop to sell, say, […] pants. What can be simpler? Pay
a city tax of fifteen rubles and do your business. But that’s not the case! He has
to pay a policeman, a tax officer, a medical inspector! And all that misses the city
budget! And now those pants—their top price can’t be more than 1.5 rubles—
are sold for three rubles. It is not Moscow but a pure jungle […]” (Akunin, Smert’
Akhillesa, 71).
Every Russian who read newspapers in the 1990s is familiar with similar
expressions of indignation about corruption among the tax police and regular
police. The prices quoted in The Death of Achilles come from the nineteenth century,
but the whole situation refers to present-day Russia indirectly.
Another example of Akunin’s collage of times is the vodka trade in Moscow.
Fandorin learns that sellers buy official stamps from tax officers, glue them onto
bottles filled with moonshine, and sell it as a brand-name product (ibid., 71). The
illegal vodka trade was the focus of numerous discussions throughout the 1990s.
more wholesome than the present. Whereas the historical novel of

the Realist canon is “the poetic awakening of the people who figured
in [historical] events” and its reader “should re-experience the
social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just
as they did in historical reality.”27 Akunin’s novel, while providing
a vivid depiction of the past, makes the reader experience the co-
presence of past and present. Such a shift in narrative focus leads
to an affirmation of the position that there can be no idealization of
either past or present, that idealizing the nineteenth century harbors
the same problems as Soviet idealizations of the communist future.
In this sense, Akunin’s works are a way out of the pessimism of the
1990s and of the Russian nostalgia for the past.
[…] A closer look at Akunin’s other novels, however, reveals
a similar co-presence of past and present. Of course, one can
support this argument by pointing out that Akunin is turning his
novels into computer games (e.g., Turkish Gambit). Moreover, as the
author admits, writing detective novels for him is similar to playing
computer games.28 This explanation aside, the co-existence of the
present and the past in Akunin’s novels is manifested on the level
of style. Even novels with no parallel plots, such as the books about
Sister Pelageia and Erast Fandorin, have the qualities of a virtual
space. […] One may argue that although parallelism, the central
organizing device in Recommended Reading and Altyn-Tolobas, is not
as explicit in the series about Erast Fandorin and the nun Pelageia,
it is still important for making these novels a social commentary on
contemporary Russia’s search for its past. Akunin’s virtual Russia
reconciles the conflicting images of Russia. This reconciliation of
different perceptions of the country is reminiscent of reflective
nostalgia as it is described by Svetlana Boym. In The Future of
Nostalgia, Boym argues that for reflective nostalgics
27
Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin, 1962), 42.
28
“I love games. When I was younger, I used to play cards. Then I began playing
computer games. Then it turned out that composing detective novels is even more
engaging than computer games” (Kuzmenko, Elena. “Pisatel’ No. 065779.” Ogonek
34 (4621), November 1999.
the past is not made in the images of the present or seen as

foreboding of some present disaster; rather, the past opens up
a multitude of potentialities, non-teleological possibilities of
historic development. We don’t need a computer to get access
to the virtualities of our imagination: reflective nostalgia has
a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness.29
In the sense that many of Akunin’s heroes consciously choose

to absorb fragments of different cultures and open up their
consciousnesses “to the virtualities of imagination,” they are
reflective nostalgics. Such characters are decidedly different from
“restorative nostalgics” who, according to Boym, are “focused on
recovery and preservation of what is perceived to be an absolute
truth” (ibid., 49). […]
An analysis of Akunin’s style confirms the argument by
Hutcheon that the constant “complaint that postmodernism is
either ahistorical or, if it uses history, that it does so in a naïve and
nostalgic way, just will not stand up in the light of actual novels.”30
In Akunin’s mysteries, the strategies and images we associate
with Postmodernism are not merely matters of style, fashionable
cliches, or intellectual fashion; rather, they are expressions of a shift
in the way we think about Russia. Examined in light of the post-
Soviet identity crisis and the debate on Russian history, Akunin’s
Postmodern historical mysteries show an awakening from the past,
from a nostalgia for the golden age in Russian history. Although
many details in his depictions of pre-revolutionary Russia may be
viewed as expressions of admiration and nostalgia for the imperial
past, Akunin is also critical of such nostalgia. By saturating his
mysteries with allusions to literary classics, Akunin creates an
intertext which is not simply a means of entertaining the informed
reader but serves as a subtext that triggers the reader’s association
of the present with the past. Far from merely reshuffling fragments
of preexistent texts, Akunin uses allusions to the classics of
29
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 50.
30
Linda. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. (New York:
Routledge, 1988), 19.
Psychological Realism as historical details and produces a nuanced

and often ambivalent depiction of Russia. Instead of depicting the
end of the nineteenth century as a period of abundance and social
stability, favorably different from the economic and social chaos of
post-Soviet Russia, Akunin frequently discusses problems relevant
to both post- and pre-Soviet Russia. […]
Akunin’s historical mysteries emphasize the co-presence of past
and present. In his third detective series, this co-presence is further
highlighted by the novels’ parallel plots and by a protagonist for
whom history becomes a virtual playground. Akunin’s Postmodern
protagonists do not worry about the impossibility of discovering
a true Russia. For them there can be no idealization of either past
or present. Instead of overcoming the multiplicity of positions
that became a source of worry for the Russian intelligentsia of the
1990s, they advocate life with diversity, cultural eclecticism, and
individualized meditation on history. In applying these strategies
to their life, Akunin’s heroes find a way of overcoming pessimism
and their own nostalgia for the past.
Dmitrii Bykov
(b. 1967, Moscow)
Dmitrii Bykov graduated from the Department of Literary

Criticism at the School of Journalism at Moscow State University.
He has worked as a journalist at many Moscow magazines and
newspapers, hosted radio and television shows, and written
online columns. Since 1992 he has published ten books of poetry.
In the late 1980s-early 1990s he participated in the poetic group
Courteous Mannerists. Since 2001 Bykov has published novels,
among which the most prominent were The Justification (2001),
Orthography (2002), and ZhD (translated as Living Souls, 2006).
The story included in this volume was first published in Bykov’s
collection of short stories How Putin Became President of the USA
(2005). In 2011-12, Bykov became one of intellectual leaders of the
anti-Putin protest movement. His popularity was also supported
by his weekly poetic political satires in Novaia Gazeta and
especially by the series Citizen Poet, which he has posted online
and widely performed across Russia to packed concert halls.
T he Fa ll 1
The fifteenth quatrain of Nostradamus’s sixth century includes

a prediction, which, after some mental exertion, can be translated
verbatim into Russian as follows:
On the Scythian land at the close of the Stone Age

An old man, devoted to Bacchus, will hand over power.
A young friend of Mercury, Mars
and the northern chief will take his seat.
He will have martial success, a fall in March, a sharp turn.
One usually has no difficulty interpreting this stanza,

particularly after December 31, 1999. The friend of Mercury, Mars,
and the northern chief triumphantly came to power and achieved
a string of military victories.2 Like Kutuzov, he heroically yielded
at Borodino and contributed to the ruin of Moscow, which then
became all-powerful. Like Suvorov, he mastered skiing, and like
Potemkin, he captivated the women, the most renowned of which
happened to be Anna Politkovskaya.3
1
Translated from Dmitrii Bykov, Kak Putin stal prezidentom SShA (Novye russkie skazki)
(St. Petersburg: Red Fish Publ., 2005), 386-94.
2
The “friend,” of course, is Vladimir Putin. The “Northern chief” is Anatoly Sobchak
(1937-2000), the first post-Soviet mayor of St. Petersburg. Putin was one of Sobchak’s
key deputies and responsible for much of the city’s day-to-day operations.
3
Mikhail Kutuzov (1745-1813) commanded the Russian forces against Napoleon,
most notably at Austerlitz and Borodino, and forced Napoleon’s long retreat from
Dmitrii Bykov. The Fall 375
Because Nostradamus’s prophecies only become clear in

hindsight, discrepancies in interpretation arose exclusively around
the fourth line: what of the mysterious fall in March and the sharp
turn in its wake? The country’s political analysts, who in their
prognoses had long been guided solely by Nostradamus with
periodic reading of tea leaves (other methods of prognostication do
not work in Russia), gathered for a secret meeting.
“I believe this line predicts the fall of Putin’s bloody regime,”
Evgeny Kiselev declared from the threshold.4
“Cool it, you’re not on the air,” said Svanidze, gently taking him
down a notch.5 “I think it’s about the national currency.”
“In my view, much snow has fallen,” unconvincingly offered
Migranyan, who, as a southerner, could not tolerate winter.
In sum, no consensus was reached, and each abandoned the
secret conference with the firm intention of inculcating the masses
with his own interpretation.
Three days later it was announced that in the last days of
March the Mir space station was going to fall. Despite multiple
and passionate assurances to the effect that it would fall in the
uninhabited part of the Pacific Ocean between Australia and
Antarctica, panic reigned.
Moscow back to France. Aleksandr Suvorov (1730-1800) was a general esteemed

in Russian military history for having never lost a battle. Grigorii Potemkin (1739-
1791) was a military commander and statesman under Catherine the Great,
primarily remembered today for being her most conspicuous grandee and
lover. Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006) was a Russian journalist, political activist,
and critic of Putin’s administration and the war in Chechnya. Here the narrator
suggests that the order for her assassination came from the upper circles of
Putin’s government, perhaps even the president himself, in retaliation for her
reportage.
4
Evgeny Kiselev (b. 1956) is a television reporter and news anchor who came
to prominence during perestroika. A critic of the Russian military campaign in
Chechnya, Kiselev resigned from the independent television station NTV after it
was taken over by state-owned Gazprom in 2001.
5
Nikolai Svanidze (b. 1955) is best known for his work as a television and radio show
host. He has, by and large, used his position as a journalist to stand as an advocate
and sometime apologist for the political establishment.
“If it falls, then without fail it will fall on us!” protested the
representatives of the Maritime Provinces. “Everything is falling on
us these days….”
“You fools, you don’t understand the strategic agenda. It will
fall on Chechnya so that nothing is left….”
(To be on the safe side, the one-legged Basaev and the one-
armed Khattab moved to Jordan.6)
“It will fall on Moscow to spite Mayor Luzhkov!”7
“But isn’t the Kremlin in Moscow too?”
“Don’t worry about the administration, they have a bunker,”
rumbled through the lines.
The frightened population gathered their money and valuables
and packed their suitcases with wretched goods, but they didn’t
go anywhere, as it was unfathomable where the station would
crash.
“It’s said that it won’t fall on the people,” puzzled some of the
elderly and the children.
“Yeah, in August three years ago Yeltsin was claiming that
nothing would fall, and then everything fell here.”
In the restaurants and casinos they didn’t know what to do with
their winnings. The New Russians hurriedly burned through what
was left of their lives.
While the population panicked, the Duma, as usual, went about
looking for new forms of entertainment:
“Guys, maybe this isn’t entirely about Mir. Maybe it’s something
political?”
“But what can befall us politically? What is there of any value
in our political system?
“Vertical power….”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
6
For Shamil Basaev, see above. Emir Khattab (1969-2002) was a Saudi guerilla fighter
who fought with the Chechens and helped finance the two separatist wars against
the Russian Federation.
7
Yury Luzhkov (b. 1936) is co-founder of Putin’s political party United Russia and
was mayor of Moscow from 1992 until 2010, when President Dmitrii Medvedev
removed him from the position.
“Dear people,” waded in the judicious Zyuganov outside the

parliamentary hearings, “I believe it is our government that will
fall.”8
The room grew silent. Everyone pondered the prospect.
“So it’ll fall,” Gryzlov said with uncertainty (and he did
everything with certainty).9 “And then what?”
“Well … it would be interesting,” Khakamada said, shrugging
her shoulders.10
“But what if it doesn’t fall? What if we desecrate it, the
government that is, but then Putin takes over and kicks us out?
He would recruit a new cabinet in a snap, with his position in the
polls, and where we would go? I mean, would we have to look for
work? I’m not going along with this,” Boos waved off the thought
dismissively.
“You dolt,” Nemtsov gently teased. “You don’t appreciate your
own worth! He’ll kick us out, but we’ll be voted back in. They’ll
give us money, an election campaign, the works…. What’s wrong?
Didn’t you like getting elected?”
“But what if the second time around they don’t elect us?”
“What do you mean, they don’t elect us? Who would they pick
then?”
“OK,” shrugged Gryzlov. “Let’s do it…. But are you certain the
government will fall?”
“It was written in Nostradamus, stupid,” interjected Seleznev.11
“Everything in Nostradamus comes true.”
The next day the communists launched the idea of a vote of
no-confidence in the government, but the Unity Party, which had
closed its eyes out of fear and retracted its head into its shoulders,
8
Gennady Zyuganov (b. 1944) is First Secretary of the Communist Party of the
Russian Federation. He has run for President in 1996, 2008, and 2012.
9
Boris Gryzlov (b. 1950) is former Speaker of the Russian State Duma (2003-2011)
and a close political ally of Putin.
10
Irina Khakamada (b. 1955), representative in the Duma from 1993-2003, ran against
Putin in the 2004 presidential election.
11
Gennady Seleznev (b. 1947) is associated with the Russian Communist party.
did not support the vote. Gryzlov had nothing against Kasyanov,12
although Nostradamus had recommended getting rid of Kasyanov.
But Gryzlov always obeyed his elders.
Three days passed and Zyuganov flew into the session of the
State Duma like a bullet and took the microphone from Seleznev.
The leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was
even redder than usual.
“Brothers, we are rolling back the vote!” exclaimed Zyuganov
excitedly. “The government stands. There is nothing in Nostradamus
about the government falling!”
“What is it then?” the deputies excitedly asked again.
“The stock index fell!”
“What, what index? Speak sensibly,” the Duma rustled.
“How do I know which! They have three there, and all with
infidel names.”
“Dow Jones!” Lukin prompted from his place.
“Aha!” nodded Zyuganov excitedly. “And even some other,
altogether unpronounceable one.”
The next day the Unity Party, having shut its eyes even more
tightly and retracted its head between its shoulders once and
for all, reported that there would be no vote of no-confidence,
and that everything had been a tactical maneuver with the goal
of demonstrating that “Medved,” that is, “The Bear,” despite
the malignant gossip of his opponents, can listen not only to the
Kremlin, but to the Communists as well. Panic intensified.
But the panic reached its apogee on the day that all the major
publications broke the headline “The Dollar is Falling!” In America
everything came undone: this was no joke. First, George Bush Jr.,
hoping to tweak the previous administration, reported that the
American economy was facing an unprecedented slump. Later,
12
Mikhail Kasyanov (b. 1957) was Prime Minister of Russia (2000-2004) and is an
open critic of the Putin administration. In hindsight, it is recognized that Kasyanov,
one of Yeltsin’s last significant political appointments, contributed much to the
growth and diversification of the Russian economy. That said, like those of virtually
all Russian politicians of his generation, Kasyanov’s reputation is now plagued by
charges of corruption.
Hillary Clinton filed for divorce, having discovered that her grey-
haired playboy was involved in an ongoing romance that made
the intrigue with Monica pale in comparison, a dowager in purple
bowing before the new tsarina. It turned out that Monica was just
a decoy to distract public attention. All that time Clinton loved
some old mare, a girlfriend from his school years. As a going-away
present on the last day of his term Clinton pardoned her husband,
who was the 177th criminal to be pardoned during the Clinton
administration. Kenneth Starr hurriedly collected the biographies
of all those pardoned to determine the president’s connections with
their wives and husbands. The majority of the exonerated, none of
whom would turn down compensation for their name-and-shame
stories, happily admitted to their relationships with the president. In
such a debauched country the dollar, by definition, could not stand.
Gerashchenko, chairman of the Russian Central Bank, poured oil on
the flames, for once announcing in good time that the dollar’s normal
value is fifteen rubles, and let them be grateful that it’s not five.
The population, having stashed its savings in stockings and
mattresses and boxes in the event of Mir’s fall, quickly grabbed their
greenbacks and ran off to buy real estate. True, halfway along the way
they stopped, realizing that even real estate would be a lost cause
after Mir fell, no matter where you bought it. Since no one would
be alive anyhow, and even real estate agents would be unprotected
from the collapse of the market, the people reasonably assumed that
to die on one’s own expanded property would be somewhat more
pleasant. Multimillion-dollar savings were devalued in a single
day. Those New Russians who already had real estate lived fast in
entertainment pleasure palaces. Modeling agencies were unable to
wipe down their concubines and push them back out in time to
meet the demand. The New Russians who put in their orders for
models too late ended up booking designers and claiming that their
stylists wouldn’t mind.
In the midst of this orgy a sober voice communicated the news
from Channel One that cattle in Western Europe were experiencing
a severe drop in number. In recent years, since Mikhail Lesin’s call
for a long overdue reform of public relations in Russia, the media
banged the drum for the Motherland with all their might. But because
it had become increasingly difficult to find any grounds for positive

PR, they elevated the Motherland by undermining the thoroughly
corrupted West. Every news program followed this formula: first,
a brief report about the routine travels of the president (who, beca-
use of his constant flying, heard nothing of the troubles of the
Motherland); then it presented a running report about the opening
in Swinograd of a grand performing arts hall with five hundred seats
for a town of 350 people. After that it ran reports about catastrophes
in the West. Catastrophes there came in running succession, as they
did here at the beginning of perestroika: a hurricane turned into
a snowstorm and led to avalanches, a scandal in government, and
then the loss of cattle, which on Russian television was the triumphant
climax of the report on the day’s unpleasant events. It was claimed
that the cattle, having contracted rabies and bitten farmers, had
almost completely died out. The ultimate goal of this story was to
support domestic production, as rabid western European sausage
had been unequivocally discredited in the eyes of viewers.
“Livestock is dying!” raced across Russia’s great expanses.
“Ours? Theirs?”
“Theirs.”
“It’s the end!” the people decided, and the all-Russian orgy
assumed threatening dimensions. In the afternoon they bought
up real estate, in the evenings they caroused in the clubs, in the
mornings they periodically turned on the news in order to find
out what else had fallen. Everything, in fact, had dropped: in
Kiev, President Kuchma hung by a thread, in China, the price
of construction materials fell, and in Barnaul an unprecedented
amount of precipitation fell. Barry Alibasov’s hat fell off, the price
of Bill Gates’s shares fell, and even the mysterious Pedigree fell
after much resistance. The no less mysterious SECAM fell, as did
Pal Palych Borodin, who ended up in the hospital. “How you’ve
fallen!” screamed the New Gazette at Leontiev. Leontiev responded
by calling the paper a “fallen woman.” Dmitrii Biryukov fell into the
arms of Gazprom,13 and the newspapers Today and Itogi simply fell.
13
Dmitrii Biryukov (1957) is president of the Seven Days Publishing House and first
deputy director of state-owned Gazprom Media.
The seventh-grader Masha Ivanovna gave in to the entreaties of the

eighth-grader Petya Sidorov and fell into his arms with pleasure.
And everything that had brought Bill Clinton down fell too.
“You only live once!” the people rejoiced. “Life as we know it
has fallen to pieces. Go on, dears, go on!”
And in the midst of this out-and-out orgy, when the models
were thoroughly exhausted and the designers had only just come
into fashion, some isolated, sober individuals noticed that March
had ended.
March ended but the dollar, as before, stood at around thirty
rubles and would likely not fall, the Dow Jones straightened itself
out, Mir crashed down unnoticed in the Pacific Ocean, and even
the correspondents at Channel One in Western Europe figured out
for themselves that three cows is not livestock as a whole. Putin’s
bloody regime felt excellent. Kuchma took a vacation in the Crimea,
and Clinton was even seen with some brand new intern—in his case
the fall was not yet complete. The population woke up from the
apocalyptic orgy with a severe hangover, burdened with a terrible
amount of real estate with which it was now unclear what to do,
amid total disorder, but with vivid memories.
“And so we all believed that this was the end?” Russian citizens
asked one another with some amazement.
“Well, we’re accustomed to thinking that it’s always the end
…” the most enthusiastic hedonists rationalized. “What we’re not
accustomed to is simply living. We’re used to ‘oops, that’s it … game
over.’”
The population rummaged through stockings and mattresses,
checked to see that their nest eggs were intact, reluctantly tidied up
the territory entrusted to them, and with a groan got back to work.
“So, Nostradamus was wrong?” Svanidze maliciously inquired
of Kiselev.
“Nostradamus can’t be wrong!” Kiselev cried. “Something fell,
only we did not notice….”
In that prediction, strangely enough, Kiselev was absolutely
right. The fact of the matter is that the president of Russia, Vladimir
Putin, went skiing while on vacation in Khakassia and fell while
fulfilling the sharp turn predicted by Nostradamus, but not very
hard. He went and went, then tumbled with a plop. Surkov, the
minister of emergency services and the head of administration,
rushed to him. Surkov was always rushing to the president whether
with or without cause—power mesmerized him.
“Buzz off!” Putin said, annoyed. “It was a bit of surprise. I’m
not Suvorov after all, just following in his footsteps. Let’s shake it
off and move on.”
From the third time on he skied down quite decently.
Translation and notes by Matthew McGarry

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Late and Post-Soviet Russian Liter ature

The book is supported by Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation

Copyright © 2014 Academic Studies Press

ISBN 978-1-936235-40-7 (hardback)

Book design by Ivan Grave

Published by Academic Studies Press in 2014

Part 1. Rethinking Identities 18

Excerpts from Dehexing Sex,

Excerpts from “In the State of Post-Soviet Aphasia:

Excerpts from “Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied:

Lev Rubinshtein 187

Evgeny Grishkovets 191

Elena Fanailova 207

The Presnyakov Brothers 218

Andrei Rodionov 250

Excerpts from Overkill: Sex and Violence in Russian Popular Culture,

Vladimir Sorokin 276

Special thanks go to Igor and Kira Nemirovsky and Sharona Vedol

Late and Post-Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader documents the

and simultaneous events taking place during any given era, we

methodology, context, and content. Parallel with developments in

Together with the policy of glasnost’, Perestroika empowered public

multiple literary voices and movements were entering the Russian

It is a curious fact that the period of cultural history following

distinctly masculine uses of language had dominated the project of

challenging reigning political ideologies, while emphasizing the

One of the goals of writing and reading literature is to represent

a form of typecasting in which individual identities become lost.

feeling.” “But to be blunt,” he continued, “judging from the quality

catastrophe; “New Family Robinsons” refers to Defoe’s classic,

writings. All three of the women under discussion have worked in

through television shows and advertisements, magazines, and the

To see ourselves as others see us!

So many representations, so many appearances

Messages from Russia:

Women by nature are destined to be weaker…. Men are women’s

which Baranskaia understood only in its secondary meaning, as

Recent Soviet films and prose authored by men or women lack

employed (the highest percentage in the world)11 in areas ranging

suitable for women, they disproportionately clustered on the lowest

women writers and sundry commentators repeatedly lamented

Many of my Soviet male friends tended to be primitive oppressors

Gender disposition in the Soviet Union corroborated Simone de

compliance, and patience.18 In short, they essentialized, by mistaking

attribute to Western influence the influx in the then USSR of

this club drove home the dire need for consciousness-raising in

I respect the emancipation of women, but one perhaps ought to

Items appearing in such publications as Moscow News in the late

feminists (notably Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and

knowledge among Russians then about anything pertaining to sex.

mentioned, likewise enforced hoary gender stereotypes through

It is no disadvantage that I am a woman. I am different because

Liudmilla Petrushevskaya claimed to write in a “male mode,”

and feminine ideals that flourish in Harlequin Romances today.30

of the obligatory participation in collective endeavors and thought

Inscribing the Female Body in Women’s Fiction

In the novel I wanted to compensate for the

bodily part associated with potential sensuality (e.g., breasts, hips,

Unlike her fragile Romantic counterpart, the new Soviet heroine

elicited the distanced aesthetic pleasure of contemplation, current

individuals, whether genred simply as physiological sketches (e.g.,

to endless signification. A source of joy and suffering, the corporeal

takes sensual delight in her own and others’ physical appearance;