Kludge by Lev Danilkin

 

Kludge (programmers’ jargon): a programme which theoretically shouldn’t work, but for some reason does.

 

Granted, you don’t always reap what you sow; but the Noughties have turned out completely different to how they were supposed to be.

 

It’s unlikely that anyone in 1999 could have predicted the emergence of a literary landscape which, ten years on, seems self-evident and natural. New homegrown novels—“real novels of ideas”—hit our bookshelves every week; writers can, theoretically at least, secure million-dollar advances for as yet unwritten novels; book charts are dominated by the latest Russian releases, while demand for writing in translation stagnates or even falls. The success of the absolute outsider Prokhanov; the extraordinary two-decade-long interest in Pelevin; the absolute ‘mainstreamisation’ of the staunch heretic Sorokin; the novels of Olga Slavnikova on bestseller lists; literature’s obsession with the ideas of government, empire, dictatorship; the total disappearance from the public eye of Anton Utkin, a young writer predicted to have a very big future after the publication of his Round-Dance [Khorovod]  and The Autodidacts [Samouchki]; a “top ten” of contemporary Russian authors consisting, with a couple of exceptions, of names no one had even heard of in the 90s: in other words, a complete changing of the guard. Finally, who could have guessed that the parade of curiosities that was Russian literature right up until the middle of the Noughties would metamorphose, for the most part, into collaboraionism with communist ideology and into a sort of realism that clearly had no future but was nevertheless brought back from the dead? Or that a novel which secured its author the most meteoric literary career of the decade would be compared to Gorky’s Mother [Mat’], and it would be a compliment?

 

In the ‘90s it seemed that the defining feature of the period, one which would continue to exert a decisive influence on literature, was the “freedom” that had already been tasted during perestroika: drink the air of freedom, experience freedom—and write freely. Emancipation from the ideologically-imposed obligation to portray reality tendentiously was celebrated with great pomp by leading proponents of the literary process for near enough the whole decade—and yet in the Noughties you didn’t have to be a Prokhanov or a Maxim Kantor to realise that the “freedom” inflicted on society in place of Soviet ideology was, first of all, a very well marketed product and, secondly, a no less ideological one. Never before the early twenty-first century had literature so frequently reproduced the argument that there was no freedom but the freedom to be a petty bourgeois and espouse petty-bourgeois values. True enough, many did just that, yet the triteness of such hymns to consumption was sooner or later noticed even by those who were most adamant in their delusions. The primary conflict in Noughties’ literature was predicated on the experience of the rejection of freedom, an awareness of the danger of freedom and the advantages of “non-freedom”. “External revolt,” for that matter, “will achieve nothing. Revolt must be internal, must be directed inwards with gut-splitting force. It is only when we resolve to become different that we shall stand a chance of becoming our own progeny, children of our own thought,” as one novel, to which we shall return later, puts it.

 

As for 1999’s forecasts of the future, they too diverged radically from reality. Many earnestly believed (though the situation in the world of prose differed from that in the poetic sphere, where the value of any text was automatically measured on the “Brodsky Scale”) that all future literature would be “literature after Sorokin”: that in the wake of coercive measures taken to eliminate messianic complexes and ambitions no one would write bulky traditionalist novels “about life”, while readers would never again be taken in by the illusion that those “little black letters” have the least connection to reality. It was imagined that the tone of Russian literature would be set by Akunin and the Belletrist Club that was flourishing under his patronage: in other words, by professional writers pandering to the leisure-time needs of the bourgeois in an ever more enlightened European country. Meanwhile, having learned to imitate the “British style”, those authors less given to playing with genre would concoct refined psychological ‘Euronovels’, divested of all ideology and driven by imported plot types, whereas the novels of authors lacking in imagination, in the manner of Limonov, would demonstrate to the reader the consciousness of the fresh-baked Russian citoyen du monde, the ironic nature of existence, the allure of westernisation, of a flat world, of permeable borders.

 

The possibility that precisely such a scenario would come to pass lingered for quite a considerable time: as late as 2002 it was entirely unclear where the bases of power would reside, what would be in/ and what would be out, and what would be typically mainstream: Vladimir Kozlov’s Gopniks,  a naturalistic eye-witness account of the drabness of everyday life in provincial ghettoes, or Oleg Postnov’s The Harlequin’s Kiss [Potselui Arlekina], an ornate literary fantasy,and simultaneously a wonderfully precise stylisation, with aspirations to become an alternative history of Russian letters? Only now, in 2009, is it clear that the outlook for “Postnovian” (Otroshenkovian, Cherchesovian) ornamental prose is far from rosy, that any “literature about literature” will very soon be marginalised, that the “Villa Belle-Lettre” (the setting of Alan Cherchesov’s novel of the same name, in which several writers “investigate” the murder of an anagrammed “literature”) will be found only in the remote outskirts of town; yet even in the first half of the Noughties the appearance of any “character outside the realms of believability” (the title of Otroshenko’s novel [Persona vne dostovernosti] was applauded and toasted.

 

At that same time—exactly ten years ago—a character’s assertion in Mikhail Shishkin’s The Taking of Izmail [Vzyatiye Izmaila] that “we are merely ‘forms of the existence of words’” and that “language is simultaneously the creator and the body of all that is” seemed as natural as saying “the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea”; yet the more time passes, the more outrageous these sentiments appear. How’s that, then? He’s replaced living people with language? He believes in the supremacy of language over life? Ivan Bezdomny reacted in an similar manner to the assertion of the existence of God in The Master and Margarita. Such prostration before “language” as something supreme, vital and inherently valuable came to be regarded as a type of escapism, a means of screening oneself from the conflicts, lies and antagonism of real life; undeserving of punishment, but nonetheless somewhat odd.

 

Now, what about that wonderfully precise stylisation? Testament to the gulf between the two epochs on this question is the differing reception of, say, Anton Uktin’s Round-Dance in 1996 and Stanislav Burkin’s Fawn on the Bank of the Tom [Favn na beregu Tomi] in 2008. Both texts are wonderful stylisations, the point of which... But there is no point, other than to take a ride in a stylistic time machine. Round-Dance caused a big stir in the thick literary journals, made the shortlist for the Russian Booker Prize and triggered an avalanche of interpretations, while Burkin’s Fawn elicits nothing other than bewilderment and respect for the author’s undoubted wit. How should we react to fantasies of this kind? What did the author want to say? It might be palatable if it were a genre novel—in the mould of, say, the retro-detective fiction of Boris Akunin, Anton Chizh or Leonid Yuzefovich, which reproduces the linguistic colouring of the period—but it’s a different story when it’s done for its own sake, when it’s just an unabashed imitation of “old-fashioned discourse”.

 

Nevertheless there’s probably little sense in climbing up onto your soapbox and solemnly proclaiming the “death of the postmodernist project”, “the total marginalisation of the Nabokovian-Sokolovian strand of Russian literature” and so forth. Though theoretical assertions of this kind are supported by concrete examples (especially Andrei Bitov’s The Teacher of Symmetry [Prepodavatel’ simmetrii]) , it is also impossible to deny, if we approach the issue honestly, that the Noughties have given us several highly significant specimens of modernist and postmodernist prose, cornerstones of the literary history of the last decade: Mikhail Shishkin’s The Taking of Izmail, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, and Sergei Samsonov’s The Kamlayev Anomaly [Anomaliya Kamlayeva]. The Taking of Izmail remains particularly intriguing, even with the passage of many years. Shishkin managed to isolate stylistic patterns deposited in written literature and folklore over the entire history of the language, but did not remain content with merely compiling an encyclopaedia of literary styles. Like some geneticist from a science-fiction novel, he set about, so to speak, injecting events from his own biography with stylistic bacteria; the author’s stylistico-narrative doubles then emerged from the test tube and populated the novel, the impact of which has been truly unprecedented (it was, incidentally, the Booker Prize winner in 2000).

 

Yet if in the 90s “stylists of the highest order” constituted the undisputed vanguard of literature, a pantheon of sorts, what we have now is rather a club of eccentric aristocrats; not even a literary “movement”.

 

But here’s what’s strange: though the invisible hand of the market demanded “genre” and only genre, things took a different turn. The deficit in crime fiction should theoretically have been turned into a surplus. This didn’t happen—Akunin aside, good Russian crime novelists are nowhere to be found; and for many years now even Akunin himself hasn’t exactly been what you could justifiably call a literary point of reference. The conflict between “high” and mass literature, which had smouldered away throughout the 90s, should seemingly have resulted in the victory of the latter and the dissolution of the traditional hierarchy—but nothing of the kind occurred. Over the course of the last decade numerous works written within the framework of mass literature have stood out in their own way: the historical novels of Leonid Yuzefovich (Casarosa, The Harlequin’s Costume [Kostyum Arlekina], The Meeting House [Dom svidanii], Prince of the Wind [Kniaz’ vetra]) and Alexei Ivanov (The Heart of Parma [Serdtse Parmy] and Gold of Revolt [Zoloto bunta]), the “women’s” novels of Akulina Parfenova (Mochalkin Blues, The Club of Bitches on Diets [Klub khudeiushikh sterv]) , the fantasy novels of Oleg Kurylev, Marina and Sergei Dyachenko, Oleg Divov, Svyatoslav Loginov, Vyacheslav Rybakov and Anna Starobinets, the fairy-tale epics of Veronica Kungurtseva and Dalia Truskinovskaya, the spy novels of Sergei Kostin, the retro-crime novels of Anton Chizh, the adventure novels of Alexander Bushkov, the thrillers of Arsen Revazov (Loneliness-12 [Odinochestvo-12]). Yet literature as a whole has not changed from “reflexive” to “plot-driven”, and generally speaking the most piffling plotless realism—traditionally the strong suit of Russian writers—still enjoys a more exalted position in the implicit hierarchy of values than the most sophisticated belletrism, in terms of critical acclaim and potential for prizes. The openness of the market should have exposed non-competitive authors, whose place should as a matter of course have been taken by higher-quality foreign competitors; ultimately, however, we ended up with a book market where one of the highest selling books is Zakhar Prilepin’s collection of topical essays. Fancy that—and yet everyone was just longing for us finally to “get some decent fiction”; but it’s as if Negoro’s axe lay under the compass.

 

Observers of the literary process often resort to the metaphor of the mosaic: individual texts of literary significance are like pieces of cobalt-coloured glass which can be juxtaposed in such a way so that, when observed from a distance, they appear to form a meaningful picture. For a long time this method was unfailingly effective—with sufficient intellectual dexterity you could even generate two pictures: either a “liberal” one (formed from the works of Georgiy Vladimov and Vladimir Makanin), or a “patriotic” one (from Aleksandr Prokhanov’s and Vladimir Lichutin’s); but at some point the number of “pieces” resisting incorporation into the general picture began to cause doubt about the adequacy of the method.

 

Effective literary prizes (the Russian Booker, the National Bestseller, the Big Book) are a mechanism designed to accumulate a majority of text-events; and even if it is assumed that this mechanism work (some years are worse, some are better, but on the whole you can form a general impression of the process on the basis of three long-lists), the result is ultimately still only a list, and not a hierarchy that would generate a ranking of Vladimir Lichutin and Oleg Divov, Maxim Kantor and Svyatoslav Loginov, Vladislav Krapivin and Roman Senchin, Vladimir Mikushevich and Alexander Prokhanov, Eduard Limonov and Oleg Zaionchkovsky, Pavel Krusanov and Veronica Kungurtseva. It’s only for the sheer fun of the thing that you’d ever attempt to work out the lowest common denominator for all of them. What would it look like, this “mosaic” consisting simultaneously of Pavel

 Pepperstein’s The Mythogenic Love of Castes [Mifogennaya lyubov’ kast], Roman Senchin’s The Yeltyshevs, Maxim Kantor’s Drawing Manual [Uchebnik risovaniya], Mikhail Shishkin’s The Taking of Izmail and Dmitri Bykov’s Orthography? It is difficult to imagine how much time would have to pass before all these texts coalesced into a homogenous mass which could be considered as typifying early twenty-first century letters; diffusion in metals does exist, of course, but it would be difficult to present any testimonial evidence for the phenomenon.

 

And since there’s no common denominator, there can be no “middle”, no centre. There can be no rivalry between schools, movements, trends; everything’s competing with everything else—and every text resides in its own little niche. Even the so-called mainstream, currently associated with realism in the broadest sense, is, in actual fact, extremely heterogeneous. Given a situation in which neither the state nor the “invisible hand of the market” wields a controlling interest, we end up with a literature left to its own devices and, accordingly, a conflict-free literary process—a peaceful coexistence of radical postmodernism and moth-eaten realism, of Oleg Zhuravlev’s The Dummy [Soska] and Zakhar Prilepin’s “Vein” [Zhilki], of the older and younger generations. This literature has no “United Russia”, no canon, not even a universally accepted middle-of-the-road. In Soviet times our literature resembled a French formal garden, and should theoretically have been transformed into an English-style landscape park after liberalisation. But forget gardens and parks—what we have now is a veritable jungle. Heedless of which species they belong to, all the plants are suffocating each other, and the undergrowth is in deep shadow; to ensure survival you have to climb higher and higher, and grow with unnatural speed.

 

No longer are technically divergent works representative of opposing ideologies. Not only ideological but also aesthetic yardsticks have disappeared. Is a conservative strategy—a predominance of dialogues, complex scenes, three-dimensional, lifelike characters—an “in thing” at the moment? Should the absence of formal experiment be regarded as progressive, or not particularly? Is the “solid quality” of a writer’s prose testament to his lack of ambition, to his philistinism—or does it simply tell us about the level of his technique? The absence of an Ultimate Arbitrator and, accordingly, of a canonical centre, is an important contributing factor to the literary landscape of the Noughties. A straightforward example of the consequences of this is Pavel Pepperstein’s The Mythogenic Love of Castes (the first volume of which was co-authored by Sergei Anufriev).  How, it must be asked, are we to integrate it into the overall picture of the Noughties? Do we categorise it as the continuation of conceptualistic experiments with literary and historical discourse? As the continued expurgation of the “trauma of Soviet experience”? Or as the apogee of the Russian version of postmodernism, which then began to decline naturally? Is it a surrealist book about love for Russia? An experiment in pushing the boundaries of the epic genre? An original means of deciphering Soviet history—with the folk-tale “Kolobok” playing the role of the Rosetta stone? Or an investigation of the archaic layers—and foundations—of the collective Soviet unconscious? What has Pepperstein demonstrated: a capacity to imitate delirium, or a brilliant grasp of the two principal Russian literary practices of the twentieth century—modernism and socialist realism—as well as of the conceptualistic (“Sorokin-esque”) method of switching between them? Who is Pepperstein? A joker who didn’t know when to stop, the clown of postmodernism, or a kind of Russian Tolkien, the creator of an authorial epos who has mythologised the historical conflicts of the beginning of the twentieth century and invented an original parallel world founded on the folklore of his nation? Is The Mythogenic Love of Castes a novelty that has diversified the literary process, or is it the turn-of-the-century magnum opus of Russian literature, an accomplished synthetic literary product offering convincing proof that “Soviet literature”, with all its novels, epics, front-line poetry and war veterans’ memoirs, is not a black hole, a gaping void in the empire of world letters, but a fully-fledged dominion?

 

As yet there are no conclusive answers to these questions—and they are important ones. As you see, our picture of the decade depends on them. And the “with Pepperstein/without Pepperstein” problem is far from the only one.

 

The following might seem an observation that says more about the incompetence of the observer, who has lost his ability to classify the torrent of texts, than it does about the object of observation itself, yet the fact remains: literature has become too big and too multifarious, more so, it could be claimed, than ever before—incredible though that might seem. A simple calculation shows that two or three novels worthy of discussion were produced per year in Belinsky’s age, seven or eight in Chukovsky’s, and fifty to sixty in ours. A variety of extra-literary factors have conspired to give literature a so-called “long tail” (described by the American journalist Chris Anderson, this is a phenomenon of the functioning of contemporary cultural markets, and one that manifests itself in many different forms). Whether we like it or not, we’re going to have to recognise that Noughties’ literature can be adequately envisioned in only one way—not as a mosaic that comes in just a couple of varieties, but as a list whose items may have nothing in common with one another save for being produced within the same period of time.

 

The notorious “long tail” that Russian literature can boast about at the end of the Noughties developed largely owing to extra-literary factors.

 

Few will remember this now, but the situation at the end of the 90s differed dramatically from today’s: at the time a single publishing house (Vagrius) enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the publication—in book form—of new Russian prose. (Naturally, there were also thick literary journals, filled not so much with powerful contemporary writing as with the work of powerful lobbyists who had good connections within the Booker Prize committee; yet before open-access online versions of the journals became widespread, they also had the reputation of being “mass graves”, and not always without good reason. The irritation which the thick journals aroused in the public during the ‘90s, and which resulted in plummeting print runs, was linked not only to a general loss of interest in culture, but also to the fact that at the end of the ‘80s the journals took it upon themselves to publish the forbidden books of the twentieth century. On one hand, they stuffed the reader full of a veritable glut of texts that did nothing to answer specifically current questions; on the other, they acted as the unwitting killers of contemporary literature, which they effectively injected with an inferiority complex: those modern authors sure do have a long way to go till they’re in the same league as Platonov, Bulgakov and Pasternak!) It’s not that Vagrius was the only publishing house specialising in contemporary Russian literature; there were others, but they were effusively proud of their Mission (“while everyone else is publishing trash, we’re publishing Literature—at a loss to ourselves”) and had only a vague notion of how to deal with this capital-lettered phenomenon, how to send their authors into orbit, how to package them. But market saturation and competition for readers necessitated the capacity to function as more than a mere publisher. There was Tekst (a wonderful publishing house, but one which inexplicably kept Evgeny Voiskunsky’s Rumyantsev Square [Rumyantsevski skver] in its portfolio for nigh on ten years), there was Shatalov’s idiosyncratic Glagol, and the curiosity-hunting Agraf; then there was Grant, which didn’t so much publish Anton Utkin as bury him alive—due to an unfortunate choice of publishing house Utkin was effectively barred entry into literature for a whole decade. There was Limbus-press, which published Vladimir Sharov, Marina Palei and Dmitri Bakin, though the number of copies released was rather nominal; even the samizdat era had greater circulation. There was Zakharov, which for three years didn’t have a clue what to do with the goldmine that was “Boris Akunin”; only by 1999 had it come up with the “literary project” formula and the publicity strategy associated with it. Publishing houses were struggling with their roles as intermediaries between authors and readers. Calling things by their proper names, it was not at all the “market”, but the publishers’ incompetence which was long responsible, if not for destroying Russian literature, at least for keeping its head underwater.

 

It’s a good thing that Pelevin, Alexei Slapovsky, Lyudmilla Ulitskaya, Shishkin, Slavnikova and Bykov ended up at Vagrius and not somewhere else; yet no matter how immaculate editor Elena Shubina’s taste might be, 99% of writers, especially newcomers, found themselves ”outside of network coverage” (a characteristic example: members of the Petersburg cohort of writers, without mention of whom any discussion of contemporary literary would be woefully incomplete—Krusanov, Ilya Boyashov, Aleksandr Sekatsky, Ilya Stogov and others—were all ignored by Vagrius, thereby condemning them to de-facto non-existence). With its Black and Grey Series (and Woman’s Handwriting), Vagrius was an important artery for authors’ communication with readers; but it was also a sort of Checkpoint Charlie, with all the accompanying disadvantages, such as being very dependent on the tastes, knowledge and connections of a limited circle of people.

 

But starting in 2000-2001 more writers gradually began to be published in book form. Simultaneously, several small and medium-sized publishing houses—Zakharov, Ad Marginem, Amphora, Azbuka, OGI, Enigma, Inostranka, Vremya and so forth—started printing contemporary Russian prose. The emergence of such publishing houses was a very important factor in the literary boom which followed in the second half of the Noughties. Inspired by an idea of Victor Toporov’s, Limbus inaugurated the National Bestseller Prize. Its deliberately democratic mechanism attracted the interest not only of literature’s high priests, but also of outsiders, to the current literary scene; a good thing both for the publishing house and for literature as a whole. Very soon publishers and public alike stopped running away from Russian authors and began running after them.

 

In the latter third of the Noughties, when it became clear that homegrown authors might have even greater cash-cow potential that foreign ones, the smaller publishing houses were joined by large concerns, such as Eksmo, AST and OLMA, which initially set about launching specific book lines with guest editors (notably, “Neformat” and “Original”), and then, switching from one market to another (from the “Black Cat” series, say, to Ulitskaya), opened their own contemporary prose divisions. Now they bully the market and throttle minor rivals, outbidding them for author’s signatures. That, though, has more to do with the publishing business than with literature.

 

The difficulties of getting published notwithstanding, in a certain sense being a writer in the ‘90s was easier than it is ten years on: the conflict in society was a clearly defined one (old versus new), while widespread havoc (chaos, war, a permanent transition period—something you just have to wait out) provided ample literary fodder. In the 2000s the arrival of “stability” was proclaimed: not that the old conflicts and disagreements had gone anywhere, of course, but profits from ever-more expensive oil froze their development; suddenly it became clear that a radically different future was no longer in the works; in the words of Dmitry Bykov, author of The List [Spiasannye], “it’s a whole new genre we’ve got now—the ‘might-have-been’. They promised us terror—none came, liberalisation—none came, war—things have stalled, and everyone’s caught in aspic, unable to arrive at any decision”. And if the situation had previously repulsed only writers fundamentally unable to tolerate any manifestation of the petit bourgeois (famous names include Limonov, Pelevin, Prokhanov), now the official consumer-oriented ideology of the era began to cause consternation amongst a majority of people. There was an acute feeling that the “heroic epoch”—a time when things could have really been changed—had been missed for good; there was now a dearth of projects, of utopias of all kinds.

 

Unable to actually change reality, writers set about painting it blacker than it was, portraying the Noughties as an era of revolution, an era of terror, an era of social cataclysms, an era of the inception of the neo-imperial project, an era of terrible crisis. In the absence of any real Event—an era-defining event like the fall of the Berlin Wall, or Chernobyl, or 9/11—they tried to invent one; a kind of compensatory Project.

 

It’s difficult to say whether an eschatological mood really did exist in society, and whether literature served merely as a societal mirror; but for a certain period of time catastrophe was the number one theme in literature itself. The years between 2004 and 2006 saw the publication of a whole series of novels virtually proclaiming the apocalypse: Mikhail Veller’s B. Vavilonskaya, Andrei Dmitriev’s Phantom of the Theatre [Prizrak teatra], Bykov’s The Evacuator, Prokhanov’s The Cruiser Sonata [Kreiserova Sonata], Sergei Dorenko’s 2008, Yulia Latynina’s Jahannam, Slavnikova’s 2017,  and so forth. It became commonplace to project an essentially novelistic plot focused on the personal history of the protagonist against the background of a (fictional) social cataclysm—war, revolution, a colossal terrorist atrocity. The flooding of the mainstream by social science fiction—a phenomenon frequently remarked upon by observers—is related precisely to the absence of any Event or Conflict: the writer-with-ideas is simply compelled to devise alternative historical or near-future scenarios, to pre-empt the present situation.

 

A second means of finding the key to modernity was to unearth rhymes with analogous eras. With hindsight it is interesting to note that, despite the smartest attempts to do so, our age couldn’t truly be made to rhyme with any other: not with the post-Pugachev era (Aleksei Ivanov’s The Gold of Revolt [Zoloto bunta]), not with the crisis of 1917 (Alexander Kabakov’s Fugitive [Beglets]), not with 1918 (Bykov’s Orthography [Orfografiia], also concerned with those dark days that made the intelligentsia surplus to requirements), not with the political terror of the late nineteenth century (Akunin), not with the stifling period of the Brezhnev Stagnation (Maria Galina’s Malaya Glusha). Novels based on this kind of material were occasionally impressive, but the parallels they drew—if indeed they really amounted to anything—tended to be contrived, clumsy and laboured.

 

Instead of a “post-9/11 world”, a world of “us” and “them”, Russia was in the midst of the amorphous “Putin era”, the era of the abortive Event, abortive terror, abortive ideal capitalism, abortive War, abortive neo-imperial projects, abortive restoration of things Soviet, abortive catastrophe, abortive Crisis; the era of “stifling stability” and absurd prosperity; the era of constant deferment of payment; a window of time that in banking terminology is known as a grace period. ”It’s a specific kind of genre, a purely local one. We’ve learned to live cosily inside Kafka, that’s the thing. Everyone’s trying to understand, but it’s really very simple. All that its so-called specificity amounts to is a cosy existence inside something you can’t possibly live in. Mankind cannot bear it, but certain individuals can—and they’re happy” (The List again; Bykov really is a first-class “black box recorder”).

 

One of the synonyms for the “Noughties” is “the Putin era”; and it is not for nothing that “Generation P”, which had the natural, primary meaning of “Pelevin generation”, later came to acquire another generally accepted signification, albeit one eliciting less enthusiasm: Generation Putin (though the author’s version, where P = Pizdets, didn’t disappear either; later precisely this P/P dialectic became one of the themes of the Sacred Book of the Werewolf [Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia], in which the Grey Wolf, a projection of Putin, at some point turns into the Pizdets Hound). No less telling is the title of the collection of topical plays, Putin.doc (2005).

 

In actual fact the synonym is not entirely precise: “literature under Putin” is far from being the same as “literature of the Noughties”; rather, it is a subset of the latter (but a highly representative and exemplary one all the same, which is why we shall examine it in detail), a space with its own particular overtones of meaning that in no way comprises all of the works produced in this period. For example, Alexander Ilichevsky’s Matisse, Alexei Ivanov’s Cheap Porn [Bluda i MUDO] and Bykov’s Orthography have nothing whatsoever to do with Putin. Yet, interestingly, there’s a whole swathe of works embellished with the presence of this political figure. Firstly, these works reflect, in one way or another, the principal trends of the “Putin era”: centralisation, oil and gas profits and isolationist tendencies; secondly, they are suffused with the image of Putin as the “face of a brand”. Literature was quick to see a novelistic hero in Putin and set about exploiting him exactly in this capacity. He becomes the Chosen/Lucky One in Prokhanov’s Mr. Hexagon [Gospodin Geksagen] and Cruiser Sonata, and the Grey Wolf/werewolf in uniform in Pelevin’s Sacred Book of the Werewolf. We see him in Andrei Kurkov’s The Presiden’t Last Love [Posledniaia liubov’ prezidenta] (he takes a dip in an ice-hole), in Prokhanov’s The Politologist [Politolog] (he’s King Herod) and Virtuoso (he’s the national leader Dolgoletov/Romulus), in Bykov’s short stories (he becomes President of the United States), in Victor Teterin’s play Putin.doc (he graciously receives two bureaucrats arguing over who loves him most; when all means of determining this are exhausted, they come out into the town square, where one prays to his portrait, and the other masturbates over it), in Yuli Dubov’s Lesser Evil [Men’shee zlo], in Vladimir Soloviev’s The Gospel according to Soloviev [Evangel’ Solovieva], finally, in Dorenko’s 2008, a novel wholly dedicated to him (it is, in essence, a psychoportrait of Putin, who also functions as Berezovsky’s double). Looking back, we can conclude that in actual fact literature wasn’t so much even “exploiting” the persona of “Putin” as trying to figure it out. Putin holds appeal first and foremost as an enigmatic, semi-taboo quantity—and it’s not just his unfathomable political activities, it’s also the extraordinary similarity he bears to the most unexpected cultural objects: to the groom in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, to Dobby the House-Elf in Harry Potter, to Daniel Craig as James Bond. And Sergei Nosov’s novel The Rooks Have Flown [Grachi uleteli] alludes to a painting by one of the minor Dutch masters in which “the spitting image of Putin” nestles amongst other secondary characters. Putin himself, it has to be said, makes relatively few appearances in literature—but his avatars, whether explicit or oblique, appear with impressive frequency. His phantasmagorical persona has undoubtedly made a massive impression on litterateurs—its very presence hypnotises them. This is certainly not an issue today’s literary pop stars pussyfoot around: thus, one of Oxana Robski’s heroines contemplates “sleeping with Putin. I’d definitely do it. With pleasure. Power is very sexy”. The protagonist of Sergei Minaev’s Media Sapiens is so preoccupied with the problem of the “third term” it might as well be his own. An observation made by the publisher Alexander Ivanov (Ad Marginem) concerning Vladimir Sorokin, a former author of his, is also worthy of note: “Recently Volodya turned fifty. I rang him up to say happy birthday, we’d not talked for ages. He was pleased and evidently touched, and we had a great chat, but I had the persistent feeling that he was tense with anticipation of another, more important phone call. I won’t say he was waiting for Putin to ring, but who knows?” (interview with Chastnyi Korrespondent).

 

One of the most striking idiosyncrasies of Noughties literature consists of the fact that it, too, was evidently “waiting for Putin to ring”: instead of ignoring the socio-political context and adjusting to market realities, literature signalled that it was different from standard show-business, that it was ready to “stop on request” and even, in a certain sense, to mobilise itself. As concerns the Putin administration, it, at least, has never publicly refuted the claims of individual authors to the effect that “they read me in the Kremlin”; moreover, the Kremlin itself occasionally signals its openness to the possibility of embarking upon certain collaborative projects (the most explicit of these signals being Mikhail Shidkoy’s article, “Novels to Order?”). And Putin is the first leader of the post-Stalin era to make it clear that he can be approached directly—and, in so doing, he is effectively encouraging the famous trope of “the Artist and the Tsar” to be played out. This, it would seem, goes some way to explaining his almost-regular “meetings with writers”, the last of which, incidentally, took place on his own birthday; all these ambiguous details feed the illusion that literature is something that concerns Putin personally.

 

Putin’s presence registers on the literary radar not only as a discrete point, but also as a whole cloud of meanings. We shall now briefly consider a number of works relevant to this phenomenon; some insight into these works will, we believe, afford us an adequate understanding not only of the “Putin era”, but also of Noughties’ literature as a whole.

 

One of the cornerstones of the period (undeservedly confined to the shadows) is Oleg Divov’s Culling [Vybrakovka] (1999),  a highly successful synthesis of mass and high literature, of science fiction and mainstream tropes. An (anti)utopia, the novel concocts a scenario where, after the chaos of the ‘90s, the “January putsch” ushers in the strong-arm rule of the security agencies. “Decree 102” is issued, whereby enemies of the people can be “culled”, that is, subjected to psychotropic interrogation and shot on the spot without trial or inquest. This “self-consciously cruel motherland”—an ideal state that has culled over 15 million people—is called the Slavic Union. The black economy and street crime have ceased to exist, while the privileged status of the Slavic majority is enshrined in law (and furthermore, the government officially endorses the “We don’t buy from non-Russians” campaign). The year is 2007. Cullers Gusev and Valyushok—a sheriff and his assistant—are operatives of the Social Security Agency. Interestingly, Gusev, as hard-boiled a culler as they come, hails from the intelligentsia; hard as steel on the outside, vulnerable on the inside, he is not an out-and-out killing machine, but a suffering, thinking, doubt-ridden individual. The theme of ”might is right” which sets one type of evil against another is explored in every possible direction (for example, in the scene where the largely sympathetic Gusev and Valyushok cull a mentally disabled child, snatching him from his mother as she tries to protect him and taking him away to be put down.) This is a very strong novel: intelligent, politically incorrect, provocative, taboo-testing. In Culling Divov has said everything that could possibly be said, has expressed all the subconscious collective aspirations of his time. Culling is precisely what the phrase “the restoring of order” presupposes, and it is precisely what was expected of Putin in 1999—the same kind of oprichnina (police state), the same termination of the social experiments of the 1990s, the clever realisation of Nazi ideas in a modern Russian context. The enticing thing about Divov’s scenario is how very practicable it is: he has created a Russia that we can step into at any moment, whether in 1999 or 2009. The principal—and remarkable—idiosyncrasy of Culling consists of the fact that what Divov encourages you to seek out are not the arguments “for” such a scenario—they are too obvious—but the arguments “against”; you have to find them or cease to be human.

 

With hindsight it’s clear that Pavel Krusanov’s The Angel’s Bite [Ukus angela] (2000), one of the first successful Russian novels not written by Pelevin or Sorokin, is also in some way a work about Putin, expressing as it does a hope for the coming of a dictator, an anti-liberal, anti-Western, revanchist imperialist. Not unlike Culling, but in a different genre—a fantastical alternative history in which the Russian Empire stretches from Sakhalin to what is now the Czech Republic, from Spitzbergen to Tsargrad (the semi-mythical, Pan-Slavic name for Istanbul); the throne is taken by Ivan Nekitaev, the son of a Chinese girl and a Russian officer, who has been bitten/kissed by an angel. Nicknamed The Plague, Nekitaev has been discovered by the “mogs”, supernatural, chthonic creatures also concerned about the fate of Russia. In a sense, he too is the projection of an ideal Putin, embodying the compensatory myth of the revanchist ruler capable of restoring Russia to the status of a superpower. A savage, grotesque fantasy, The Angel’s Bite exists on the fringes of good taste—what with the Nibelungs doing battle with the Kuban Cossacks in Stuttgart, Saratov besieged by a horde of bloodsucking bats, and Hecate’s infernal dogs being unleashed on Europe—yet it is very much typical of its age.

 

Prokhanov’s Mr. Hexagon (2002), a novel about the secret life of Russia in 1999 (apartment bombings conspiracy theories, Putin’s rise, the beginning of the Second Chechen War), describes the chaos, bloodshed and Boschian horror of the end of the ‘90s which laid the foundations for the now infamous “stability”. No other novel conveys with such clarity the birth trauma of the age—and the deep-seated discrepancy between its façade and its foundations; precisely for this reason Mr. Hexagon gave the outsider Prokhanov entry into the club of writers whose opinions are of constant interest to the public, and subsequently played a decisive role in ending the mass media’s policy of apartheid against pochvenniks (Slavophile nationalists). It is after the publication of Mr Hexagon, which served to reset public opinion on the matter, that the conflict between literary “liberals” and “patriots”, so fundamental in the 90s era, lost its intensity. In the novel Putin is the ideal embodiment of the strange, endlessly deceitful period associated with his name: famously compared to a “carved ivory bishop in a game of chess”, he appears as himself, though not for the purpose of interfering in events, like a deus ex machina, but as the realisation of a metaphor. The novel’s finale demonstrates his chimerical essence: he disperses into all the colours of the spectrum and turns into an optical illusion. Into a rainbow. Literally.

 

Victor Pelevin’s Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2004)  is a novel about the relationship between a prostitute and a werewolf in uniform, between the Fox and the Grey Wolf, and—let’s not beat about the bush here—between the two P’s, Pelevin and Putin. The fact of the matter is that Werewolf clearly evokes that famous trope of Russian literary life, the encounter between the Artist and the Tsar, which has been the subject of thorough investigation, for example, in Solomon Volkov’s Stalin and Shostakovich. The fact that Pelevin thematises that same imaginary “Putin phone call” testifies to the fact that “Putin” is not only a political showcase, a brand concocted by spin doctors, but also, in some sense, a Gesamtkunstwerk, the synthetic embodiment of literature.

 

Bykov’s alarmist The Evacuator (2004) echoes the eschatological sentiments of the middle of the period: the realisation that the “great hope” of the 90s would not only go unfulfilled but, quite conversely, that it would turn into a catastrophe, an apocalypse. Bykov himself believed that The Evacuator was a marginal work, dashed off quickly and with no long-term appeal; yet with the passage of time it seems ever more representative of its age, capturing very precisely both the prevailing mood of the mid-Noughties and the dismayed realisation that there was no Project behind Putin. And the cascade of finales which smother Bykov’s cry of “Help! Danger!“ seems ever more justified. After all, it is not for nothing that his protagonists return to a Moscow ravaged by catastrophe. “Nothing shall be”—this formulation, to be found in Day of the Oprichnik (2006), epitomises the age. Sorokin’s Russia of the future is the fully-realised version of the nation dreamt up by the authors of the Fortress Russia project and by Alexander Dugin, with his idea of the “new oprichnina” (the reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible’s secret police). This nation is based upon medieval principles: the monarchy has been restored and there is social stratification, corporal punishment and an established church. The country is walled off from the West, its citizens having voluntarily burned all their external passports. This isn’t so much an anti-utopia and cautionary tale, as a grotesque portrayal of the Putin administration, a thinly veiled satire on existing power structures.

 

This oppressive situation (the “depressive novel about contemporary life” has almost become a genre in its own right—examples include Slapovsky’s They [Oni] and Gossip [Peresud], Krapivin’s Daggi-Tits, Senchin’s Ice Underfoot [Led pod nogami] and The Yeltyshevs, all later Pelevin) was at the same time also an auspicious one. Capitalism, the new template for living, was the gauntlet thrown down by the age, and literature picked it up by introducing characters who tackle the problem of self-identity in new circumstances, and by presenting a certain standpoint (which may manifest itself in the form of non-participation in government projects, open non-conformism, escape from reality, alienation, or minimisation of social relationships). But here’s the strange thing. For many years it seemed that the Heroes of our Time lauded in literature could be any of the following: managers, owners of small independent firms, bankers, oilmen, oligarchs, society gigolos, rebel clerks, downshifters, professional revolutionaries, political technologists, spin doctors; that’s the general ballpark, at least. Yet, taking a rear-view mirror look at the literature of the decade, you find that this wasn’t the case. There were novels about managers, of course—but not too many with any hope of securing a place in the annals of literature.

 

If not managers, then who? In fact, there were two types of Main Hero in the Noughties, both surprising to say the least. Type number one was the Artist, in the broadest sense of the word: the composer Kamlaev from Samsonov’s Anomaly, the artist Pavel Richter from Kantor’s Drawing Manual, the artist Morzhov from Ivanov’s Cheap Porn, the artists from Nosov’s The Rooks Have Flown,, the gem-cutter Krylov from 

Slavnikova’s 2017, the physicist Korolev from Ilichevsky’s Matisse, the writer Geran from Slapovsky’s They, the writer from Zaionchovsky’s Happiness is Possible [Schastye vozmozhno], the writer in the works of Senchin, the rogue from Yuzefovich’s Cranes and Dwarfs, the bohemian types from Krusanov’s Bom-Bom, The American Hole [Amerikanskaia dyrka] and Dead Language [Mertvyi iazyk]], the student who became a Part of Speech from Dyachenko’s Vita Nostra, the gangsters from Adolfych’s Alien and Fire burial, the whore (Pelevin’s A Hu-Li and Kozlova’s Cry-Baby [Plaksa]).

 

Type number two was the Fighter—a conscientious collaborator, often a member of the intelligentsia, who is so disgusted at the triteness of the world around him (a world which offers a rather scant ideological menu: bourgeois consumption, abstract football-fan patriotism, rebellion/revolution in the spirit of Ché Guevara, and American Psycho—all essentially products from the ideological supermarket) that he becomes the sovereign’s servant—also in a very broad sense. Gusev from Divov’s Culling, Akunin’s Fandorin, Daniil from Natalia Kurchatova and Ksenia Venglinskaya’s The Summer According to Daniil Andreyevich, Captain Svinets from Andrei Rubanov’s Life Has Been A Success [Zhizn’ udalas’], Latynina’s Vodrov, Komyaga from Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, the primary protagonist from Terekhov’s Stone Bridge, Gromov and Volokhov from ZhD, Prokhanov’s retired General Beloseltsev, and even Major Zhilin from Makanin’s Asan. Particulars aside, it can be said that all these characters decided that, since life had offered them managerial status, they would at least serve the state in a different fashion from everyone else—not for the sake of money and privileges, but for the sake of an idea. This idea cannot be called Art, but it is an idea all the same.

 

Why is it that precisely these protagonists, rather than the “managers”, became literary staples? No doubt it’s to do with the fact that a literature which seeks above all to overcome its own time can only be a kind of utopia, a project counteracting the triteness of life and the “McTwilight of the Soul” [konsumerki dushi], as Pelevin puts it. And life in the Noughties was indeed trite—especially because the official/generally accepted ideology of the era was suburban and small-minded. This ideology engendered a plethora of character types (all these managers, ranging from “walking, talking office appliances” to oligarchs and rebels), but there was now a distinct lack of those able either to counteract this ideology with Art (the Artist type), or to enforce, intently and harshly, their own, non-fraudulent ideology, their own (utopian) project, a project designed to transform everyday routine (the Fighter type).

 

Both types are atypical precisely because they do not merely coexist with reality, but strive to remake it—in the Fighter’s case by mangling it, by forcefully, violently subordinating it to his own Project; and in the Artist’s by elevating it to the level of Art, by increasing the amount of beauty in the world, by endowing life, meaningless and vegetative, with Significance.

 

In other words, being a Hero of the Noughties entailed neither resonating with the period nor serving as its ideal reflection, but somehow overcoming this trite and facile age controlled by technologies of manipulation that necessitate going down particular channels of consumption (and not just of things—of ideas, too); it entailed producing utopias, ideas, meanings, and not simply “designing” or decorating—which translates, in essence, to serving the needs of the elite. Or, in the case of the Fighter, voluntarily serving the degraded state that is possessed of no ideology; personally providing the state with ideology; regarding that service as an art, as the creation of meaning; serving in such a transgressive way that absolute conformism turns into the utmost non-conformism.

 

And novels with “calculated” characters—even the best ones—ultimately turned out to be short-lived.

 

In consequence it is precisely the conflict between the “artist” and the “state” (or “intelligentsia” and “empire”), and not between “office worker” and “boss”, that has emerged as one of the most painful subjects of Noughties’ literature. It has been depicted in a vast number of works, from Elizarov’s ponderous The Librarian [Bibliotekar’] to the sophisticated Orthography, a vastly ambitious novel aspiring to become a programmatic opus about the reassessment of values evident not only in literature but in society as well. In his story about intellectuals of 1918 Bykov realises the metaphor of the path of the intellectual compelled to accept certain restrictions on his liberty in the empire so as not to perish in the chaos of freedom, which in any case will be brought to an end by the restoration of the empire, now even more inflexibly organised.

 

The same conflict is also to be found in Makanin’s Asan, in which the Chechen war is not just the Chechen war, but a more general metaphor for the situation faced by the intelligentsia, who have found themselves in an overly free, absurdly marketised (even while at war) society where every honest man, if he truly wants to save someone and not just remain untarnished, must choose between two evils, collaborate with malevolent forces, water down his conceptions of honour—in other words, accept new limitations. And no matter how much disdain the strategy adopted by Zhilin—a corruption double-dealer—might arouse in moralists on both sides, the fact remains that he saves more lives than anyone else; and saving lives is, in effect, the chief duty of the protagonist of any chivalric novel. Any attempt to rethink maximalist perceptions of the intelligentsia’s morality has an inevitable air of treachery about it, and a great deal of bravery is required even to bring up the subject. It is hardly surprising, then, that Asan earned Makanin severe criticism as well as the Big Book Prize.

 

Another, no less striking feature in the landscape of Noughties’ literature is the lack of success of Alexei Ivanov’s Cheap Porn, which essentially deals with the same subject—the behavioural strategy of the intelligentsia in modern society. Ivanov’s protagonist, the artist Morzhov, chooses an extremely strange way of fulfilling his chivalric role in a situation where adherence to traditional conceptions of honour automatically renders you ineffective. Rejecting both purely market-based models of behaviour and those typical of the intelligentsia, he invents his own. Understanding the social crisis first and foremost as a crisis of the traditional family, he surrounds himself with a “familion”—a new societal unit in which a leader looks after a group of specific individuals who, for various reasons, are unable to live and think independently (their consciousnesses are formatted by someone else using simple technology); the members of a “familion” are by no means necessarily relatives, but are organised according to the familial model.

 

This alternative to the traditional family (which has nothing in common with the liberal or statist models, and which does not sit well either with the Orthodox paradigm of communality or with the Protestant notion of individual responsibility) facilitates the protection of a greater number of people than any other.

 

Rounding off this brief overview of the subject, it must be noted that all these attempts by intelligent, thoughtful writers to present original behavioural models for the intelligentsia—and to promote the thought that under certain circumstances an a member of the intelligentsia can behave “unethically” provided that, on the whole, this will leave everyone better off—have not enjoyed any particular success.

 

Since neither the state nor any “rent-a-Fukuyamas”—that is, “public intellectuals” of various kinds— were able to explain what all this “stylistics of a victorious something or other“ (Bykov again) actually meant, interpretations offered by writers became sought after in the absence of other “explanations”. Not unrelated to this, it would seem, is the supremacy of the “realists” over the “postmodernists” apparent at the end of the Noughties. Although it is considered by the high-priests of literature to be a pathetic relapse into a long-since vanquished disease, in the Noughties realism has turned out to be the most suitable system for reasoning through the situation at hand. Literature encodes a Common Meaning, seeking it out in the (historical) past and future, and provides society with a project, a utopia and a Great Hope—rather than simply designing and decorating the cattle yard of capitalism. When the state is unable to endorse anything other than abstract patriotism and the cult of consumption, literature becomes a medium for the emergence and testing of the “national idea” (we only have to mention Prokhanov’s Hill, the protagonist of which attempts to synthesise a common meaning by gathering up handfuls of earth from various memorable locations in the Pskov region and forming them into one symbolic hill).

 

The “wake for Soviet literature” suggested the possibility of unmitigated indulgence in linguistic experiment and intertextual play, of existence in the surface world of phenomena; it suggested too, a repudiation of any attempts to imitate reality; and yet at some point the disappearance of reality from literary texts became a problem. It could be said that it is precisely the “deficit in reality” in late Nineties’ literature, artificially created over the course of that decade, that brought about, by way of compensation, a spasmodic growth in demand for “realism”. It turned out that the most effective strategy for a writer seeking to be heard is not to send up reality, but to take it very seriously.

 

“In actual fact, postmodernism hasn’t been in for a good while now.” “And what is postmodernism?” asked Styopa suspiciously. “It’s when you make a doll of a doll. All the while being a doll yourself.” “Oh? So what’s in, then?” “In is when a doll makes money.” (Pelevin, The Dialectics of the Transition Period (From Nowhere to Nowhere) [DPP (NN)])

 

And realism is making a big, Hollywood-style return: “Realism Strikes Back”. Realism, that is, in the broadest sense of the word—realism as “anything goes”. The issue of society, the theme of the little man, autobiographism. The recreation in the book of Real Life of psychologically full-blooded characters in naturally-extreme circumstances. Witness Pelevin’s transformation from a writer of grotesque phantasmagorias, such as Omon-Ra and Chapaev in the ‘90s, into a writer of what must essentially be regarded as satirical editorials, fictionalised “political briefings“. Witness, too, Sorokin’s Ice, his first “honest”, not-completely-conceptualistic novel, in which you can distinguish a handful of words that could almost definitely be attributed to the author himself. Then there’s Slapovsky’s graduation from ironically-absurdist fictionalised parables (Money Day [Den’ deneg] and Questionnaire [Anketa]) to brutal critiques of contemporary society (They, Gossip) There’s a whole host of novels-about-life: Alexei Ivanov’s The Geographer Who Drank Away His Globe [Geograf globus propil], Senchin’s Ice Underfoot and The Yeltyshevs, Alexander Kuznetsov-Tulyanin’s The Heathen [Yazychnik], Mikhail Gigolashvili’s The Devil’s Wheel [Chertovo koleso], Ilya Stogov’s Machos Don’t Cry [Macho ne plachut], Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Happiness is Possible, Igor Sakhnovsky’s The Vital Needs of the Dead [Nasushniye nuzhdy umershykh]. And a torrent of generation manifestos—as well as “metaphors for modernity”—ranging from Garros-Evdokimov’s Grey Goo [Seraya sliz’] to Vasily Avchenko’s Right-Hand Wheel [Pravii rul’]. What's more, we have the younger authors sidestepping their “fathers”—the post-modernists of the 90s—and swearing allegiance to their “grandfathers” of the 60s and 70s—though not at all to Sasha Sokolov or Bitov. Finally, we can talk about the productive symbiosis of literature and journalism (Limonov, Stogov, Prokhanov, Alexei Tsvetkov fils, Alexander Terekhov, Andrei Rubanov)—literature’s ongoing mutation in the direction of documents, chronicles and essays. And though no Tom Wolfe-style “new journalism” school materialised in the end, literature has learned how to take hold of the day-to-day material of life and assimilate it on the fly. Novels are jotted down, hewn out of raw, topical material (though it’s possible that they may form the basis of something more substantial in future). A good example of this responsiveness is the financial crisis of autumn 2008. The first novel to integrate the crisis into its plot appeared in October of that year—Oxana Robski’s This Theta [Eta teta],  a novel about the misadventures of a group of aliens unlucky enough to land on Rublevka during the stock market collapse. A year later Maxim Kantor’s In That Direction [V tu storonu] was published, in which the crisis was not merely “reflected” but explained and shown to be a historical event that has its own place in the history of the last one hundred years. It may seem self-evident now, but even ten years ago, in the 90s, this kind of raw material was exploited only by pulp fiction writers and definite outsiders like Prokhanov. “Real writers” were either busy trying to create a “mega-masterpiece”, like Shishkin, or were preoccupied solely with bygone eras. Broadly speaking, in the ‘90s literature (the literary scene) was doing its own thing, independent of life and society. Then everything changed. For example, to change the world in the 90s, Limonov found it easier to position himself as a politician. Curiously enough, as of the second half of the Noughties, anyone wanting to become a successful politician has to join United Russia—which means that if you want change the world, it’s now handier to be a writer. The upshot being that Pelevin the writer is far more influential than Limonov the politician.

 

All these events and circumstances constitute realism, Noughties realism. Besides the fact that the “realist” paradigm turned out to be more conducive to investigations of meaning, and not of design, here’s what else is important. The prevailing type of writing is associated with the real-time resolution of that same dilemma: what takes greater precedence—the private individual or the state, personal or collective history? While the answer was far from clear to many in the ‘90s, nobody has any doubts on the matter in the Noughties. Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that the “conversion” is stuttering, that games with genre are being left by the wayside: literature is trying to become commensurate to life. It’s obvious what course has been taken in recent years. At the end of the ‘90s literature was a coffee-table accessory, a means of screening yourself from reality by entering a world of veils, illusions, hallucinations, parodies, lost manuscripts, texts-within-texts, computer mazes and so forth. But every passing year sees the appearance of more and more works which, quite conversely, diminish the distance between the reader and reality, drawing him into it, revealing truths about it designed to make him feel distinctly uncomfortable as he lolls there by his coffee-table, spurring him on to leave behind the shell of the “private individual”, to feel our shared fate, and to prevent—or, perhaps, to hasten—the impending catastrophe. So, on one hand, we have big novels, appraisals of the age (The Drawing Manual, Alexander Arkhangelsky’s The Price of Isolation [Tsena otsecheniya], Cheap Porn), and, on the other, reacting against media lies, subjective reports on personal experiences, considered (especially by young authors) to be the only means of honestly speaking out about the world.

 

Incidentally, it is precisely this that induces young authors to regard Limonov as a symbolic literary “grandfather”, and Edichka as the template for the contemporary novel with a hero. In general, Limonov’s practice (more precisely, his literary strategy) turned out to be extremely relevant for the new generation of writers. The voice of the reliable storyteller, the manifestly non-literary style, the emphasis on direct action, the severe criticism of the bourgeois mindset and consumerist ideology, the patriotism (not of the football-fan variety, but concrete and project-based), the appraisal of contemporary history—all this holds appeal. In truth—but again, who could have supposed such a thing?—the epithet “post-Limonovian” can be far more readily applied to contemporary Russian prose (Stogov, Denis Gutsko, Rubanov, Garros-Evdomikov, Kozlov, Prilepin) than “post-Sorokinian”.

 

The reappraisal of history was, without exaggeration, one of the most significant internal impulses for Noughties’ literature; it might turn out that the Big Bang which occurred in the middle of the period in question, was linked precisely to the urgent need felt throughout society for such a reappraisal—and this is exactly why people once again began to read new homegrown novels (to say nothing of the fact that permanent reappraisal of history may well be the very essence of Russian life and Russian literature). Even postmodernism in Russia was predicated more on a historical rather than on a literary discourse—in the sense that it was history, and not other texts, that served as a spring board for new works (and here we would do well to remember Sharov, Krusanov, Yuzefovich, Terekhov, Akunin, Kungurtseva).

 

Literature’s curiosity about history manifests itself in two ways. On one hand, literature inquires into the relationship between today’s reality and earlier times, attempting to find the roots of the current state of affairs in the airbrushed, falsified past distorted by incorrect interpretations. One the other, literature, in contradistinction to historical scholarship, does not simply seek to compile an accurate chronicle of events, but above all to tease out meanings in history, to imagine it as its own project, directed towards the past. It is this—and not the churning out of “historical fiction”—that represents the essence of the work of Alexei Ivanov (and his Heart of Parma, Gold of Revolt and The Era of John [Letoischislenie ot Ioanna]); it is for his concoction of Russian Victoriana—and not as a literary accompanist—that Akunin will most likely be remembered. It is the pursuit of the Project in the history of the twentieth century that underpins the historiosophy expounded in Maxim Kantor’s Drawing Manual.

 

Writers in the Noughties, such as Krusanov, Bykov, A. Ivanov, Stogov, Slavnikova, Yuzefovich, Terekhov and Prokhanov, were particularly captivated by the phenomenon of the successive realisation of imperial projects on Russian soil. Essentially still unresolved, the fundamental—and deadly—clash between Russians’ national interests and their tradition of imperial ambition resonates acutely in literature, where what is taking place is not simply a reappraisal of history, but a reappraisal of a national identity which has been transformed under the influence of various events.

 

Many endeavour to explain literature’s voracious interest in the past with reference to historical trauma—which they find, of course, in the Stalin era or, more broadly, in the Soviet experience as a whole. Strangely enough, in spite of spin doctors’ successful attempts to manipulate social opinion and to substitute today’s problems with discussions of whether Stalin was “a complete ogre or an ‘effective manager’”, literature isn’t having any of it: its energies have not been channelled in this direction. Neither nostalgia for nor affected hatred of the USSR—nor yet the relationship with “things Soviet” in general—was the presiding theme of the Noughties. The notionally Soviet past is perceived as the paradigm of an living for a project, of life endowed with meaning, albeit negative; as a romantic time of war, an epic time when things actually happened, and were not merely imitated, as today. The somewhat comic and even grotesque side of this purely conceptual romanticisation makes itself keenly felt in Pavel Pepperstein’s collection of War Stories, where the attitude to Soviet history adopted by society in the Noughties is conveyed in a surprisingly precise way.

 

Bykov’s Justification [Opravadanie]—  a highly significant work dedicated entirely to the phenomenon of nostalgia for the Empire and, more broadly, to an exploration of attitudes to things Soviet—is rather an exception. Admittedly, even in this novel, the protagonist, Bykov’s alter ego Rogov, does not seriously attempt to ascertain whether there was any sense in Stalin’s actions (though the fact that this search for answers reads like an adventure-tale or a quasi-fantasy turns the novel into a tense, plot-driven quest), so much as experience the identity crisis of a young man left with no ideological roots. He endeavours to solve this crisis by delving into the past in order to explain the events that have been traumatising him—explain them and cleanse himself of them. Terekhov’s The Stone Bridge handles similar themes: it is also an attempt to find meaning in the history of the Stalin era (in this case, through the linkage of different projects: nation-building and the idea of achieving personal immortality), living with such a past being otherwise unbearable. The novel, though, gives the impression of an edifice without foundations because the episode with the mysterious murder of 1943, which the neurotic protagonist investigates, feels more like a “curious case” than the hidden centre of Soviet history that the author makes it out to be.

 

Historical trauma did exist, of course—only not in Soviet history, as is customary to assume for some reason, but more recently, in the 90s. Literature has identified a key moment, the date of the empire’s ultimate demise, the historical point of no return, after which project-dominated history ended and an amorphous present came upon us: 1993. The event which held Russian literature utterly spellbound—October 1993—can confidently be described as its central concern, rather than one of many. That 1993 is a key event for literature, and one which divides history into “before” and “after”, is confirmed by the sheer number of works written in recent years which deal, in one way or another, with the events of that year (Alexander Prokhanov’s Red-Brown [Krasno-korichnevy], Ivan Naumov’s October the Fourth [Chetvertoye oktyabrya] Alexander Ilichevsky’s Matisse, Pavel Pepperstein’s The Mythogenic Love of Castes, Yuri Bondarev’s Bermuda Triangle, Vladimir Lichutin’s Nineteen Ninety-Three, Leonid Yuzefovich’s Cranes and Dwarfs, Vladimir Makanin’s Fear [Ispug], Veronika Kungurtseva’s The Adventures of Vanya Zhitny, or The Magic Chalk [Pokhozhdeniya Vani Zhitnogo, ili Volshebnii mel], Aleksei Tsvetkov’s Barricades in my Life, 1993 [Barrykady v moyei zhizni, 93 god], Victor Pelevin’s Chapaev, and Emptiness [Pustota], Vladimir Mikushevich’s Resurrection in the Third Rome [Voskreseniye v tretyem Rime], Evgeny Chizhov’s The Dark Past of the Man of the Future [Temnoye proshloye cheloveka budushchego], Aleksei Varlamov’s Birth [Rozhdeniye], Sergei Alekseyev’s The Return of Cain [Vozvrashcheniye Kaina], Vladimir “Adolfych” Nesterenko’s Alien [Chuzhaya]). The events of October ’93 stirred into action an entire pleiad of writers—and they all marched their protagonists to the White House. Even Pepperstein’s Kolobok-Dunaev ends up at the House of Soviets; for that is where his era comes to a close, and another begins. October ’93 is a black hole in contemporary history and the womb from which the mythos of the current age sprang. The events of 1993 are inextricably linked to the idée fixe of the Noughties, which appears again and again in the works of writers ranging from Slavnikova to Pepperstein: the “loss of authenticity”, that is, of national identity, originality, veracity; the replacement of existing reality by a global, fraudulent one.

 

It is not only history that must be held “responsible” for the strange (unanticipated) guise Russian literature assumed in the Noughties; economics, too, played a part, and namely the way in which society manages to overcome deficits and make good use of surpluses. The Noughties were the first decade in centuries in which surpluses of a tradable good with high market value appeared in Russia. It wasn’t hemp or timber or grain or even ideology—it was oil (which at one point was going for the comfortable price of $100 a barrel). It is commonplace to criticise economies based on the export of raw materials, and yet, in spite of all the problems associated with the “oil curse”, it must be acknowledged that the constant injection of resources, however indirect, can only be beneficial to the cultural sphere. The circulation of “extra” money in society is not only a sign of “wild capitalism” (the emergence of which was one of the hot topics of the 90s)—it also points to new social relationships, to the crisis of the family, to the energy released during the process of social stratification. The money circulating in society means, among other things, increased leisure time; more opportunity to escape the confines of humdrum, settled working life; and adventures—which, incidentally, do not necessarily have to do with the experience of poverty or national catastrophes. Money is a good lubricant for certain kinds of literature, and especially for the novel. Besides carrying on down the usual routes, people can also make “irregular moves”, and this becomes plot material. These surpluses automatically recruit from the masses a multitude of unprofessional writers who learn how to tell stories and publish things like The Goa Syndrome [Goa-sindrom] (Alexander Sukhochev),  Casual (Robski), and Media Sapiens (Minaev)—reports on the life of the new social class, which has undergone the first stages of natural selection, developed the capacity for self-reflection and is now trying, through literature, to legalise its property and status; authors like Robski and Minaev are essentially rebranding the elite that was compromised by the events of the 90s, and, with good reason, they are targeting readers who either already belong to that elite or are on the verge of joining it. Of course, as of yet, this isn’t so much Literature as “their” internal affair; but theoretically, if the analogy with early eighteenth-century England is correct, at some point the Sukhochevs, Robskis and Minaevs of this world must metamorphose into Defoes, Filedings and Richardsons. The word “must”, indicating a very high degree of probability, is apposite here because even if there are no certainties in literature, economics and statistics have their own laws, and a growing tendency will inevitably be actualised after the tipping point has been passed. Of course, as of yet “these people’s” stories are below the threshold of minimal quality; but “these people” are easily educable. Naturally, it would be far better to acquaint yourself with these authors’ works only when they’ve finally learned the ropes, or, more precisely, when hundreds or even thousands of amateurs have been whittled down to two or three professionals who have gone the distance. So far they are nowhere to be seen; but it is worth taking note of the emergence of this fertile environment, in which, for some reason, the status of author is highly esteemed; no one knows where they will be in ten years.

 

Another curious characteristic of contemporary literature that gives food for thought is the fact that is has got much younger, in the biological sense. If at the end of the 90s the almost forty-year-old Pelevin was regarded as “young”, now the term “young writer” is used to refer to twenty-somethings; for example, Debut Prize contender Sergei Samsonov, author of The Kamlaev Anomaly, the best (or at least that’s how it was talked about) novel of 2008, was 27 at the time of publication—and that novel wasn’t his first. The majority of recent Russian Booker Prize winners—Gutsko, Ilichevsky, Elizarov—have been under forty. And the same generation has produced a number of genuinely important literary figures: Senchin, Anna Starobinets, Kozlov, Evdokimov, Prilepin. What are we to make of the fact that contemporary Russian literature is dominated by youth, as it was in the 20s and 60s, even though no one has artificially excluded the “old guard”—authors of the strong Soviet school—from the literary scene? Is this the consequence or the cause of realism occupying the mainstream? Perhaps realism simply demands a lower level of literary competence—perhaps it lowers the bar for entry into literature?

 

The new, “younger”, literature was catalysed by extra-literary factors as well. In the 90s there was little opportunity for a newcomer’s work to become an “event”—simply owing to lack of funds (even Akunin needed several years to establish himself). A. Ivanov’s The Geographer Who Drank Away His Globe—which would have been a potential bestseller in many decades—attracted public attention only after the artificially generated interest in the publications of The Heart of Parma and The Gold of Revolt. At the end of the Noughties, conversely, a young writer, even a newcomer, can publish a novel-with-ambition more easily than an author with a proven track record. Essentially, literature functions according to the same model as Star Factory. And even if the parallel between publishing and show-business seems tenuous, the established system is, at any rate, quicker to react to new material (there’s a flip side, though: the guaranteed fifteen minutes of fame is followed by a rapid decline in interest). The system is interested in “young stars”—somehow they are easier to market. Prilepin, Ivanov, Ilichevsky (not to mention Minaev and Robski) have gone from “young hopefuls” to superstars in no more than two or three years. If status used to be a product of merit, attained after reaching critical mass, now it is more likely to be secured in advance.

 

All these characteristics can be interpreted in various ways, but the fact remains: contemporary Russian literature is not a gerontocracy and boasts a healthy crop of young up-and-comers. Generally, in contrast to many other spheres of activity, literature experienced no demographic collapse as far as different generations’ participation in the literary process is concerned: complete novices, mature writers and respected veterans are all represented more or less evenly. This indicates that there was no crisis in literature comparable to that in the pure sciences and the army (or else it was quickly resolved; the publishing industry’s reorientation in favour of new homegrown authors, the growth of the Internet and initiatives set up by semi-private foundations to encourage young writers—the Debut and Neformat Prizes and the seminars in Lipki— undoubtedly all played a role in this.)

 

This optimism inspired by this turn to youth and rapid development instead of “death” and crisis is strangely coupled with a depressing sense of failure. We might gloss over this, were it not for one disquieting and unmistakable fact: modern Russian literature is not a tradable product; even veritable seismic shifts in our literary landscape have next to no impact on the world’s major book market—the Anglo-American. The two exceptions—Akunin and Lukyanenko—are genre authors, and therefore don’t really change anything. No one needs Russian authors, full stop. Does this mean the situation should automatically be deemed unacceptable?

 

Today’s state of affairs may justifiably be termed “splendid isolation”. Contemporary Russian literature is an endemic phenomenon, with all the plusses and minuses that entails. It obeys laws different from those that hold sway almost everywhere else. So, instead of concerning itself with the play of reflections and fashioning the “psychologies” of unique personalities, as does decorative drawing-room literature in the West, serious Russian literature concerns itself predominantly with societal analysis, with the encoding of national ideology, with projections of the future—or, to make use of an image from Vladimir Mikushevich’s outstanding (and absolutely non-tradable) Resurrection in the Third Rome (2005), with the preservation of knowledge, of Sophia, the Wisdom of God, of the Holy Grail; and this is despite the fact that there is currently no state demand for such subject-matter, and no encouragement for such a literary direction.

 

And because this time around the barrier separating Russian literature from the rest of the world is not artificial but natural and, in theory, absolutely permeable, there are more advantages to this isolation than drawbacks. Whereas homogenisation is rife elsewhere, Russian literature has retained its originality while gradually developing a natural immunity to global literary fads; we can be sure that if the “barrier” were suddenly to collapse, everyone wouldn’t just start aping Dan Brown and Harry Potter.

 

Things are on the move, yet there are as many sceptics as ever, and the prestige of Russian literature within the country has fallen dramatically compared to the Soviet era. To overcome its (largely unfounded) sense of lack of success and provinciality, of being unwanted, Russian literature is unquestionably in urgent need of a global hit in the mould of Lolita, The Master and Margarita, Doctor Zhivago or The Gulag Archipelago. A global hit, and/or a Nobel Prize for a Russian author. Naturally, breaking into a supersaturated market is exceedingly tough; naturally, the Nobel Prize is a political instrument, and none of today’s Russian authors is likely to be of any use to those wielding it. Yet the more idiosyncratic, the more parochial, the more national (rather than “universal”) literature becomes, the more of a chance it has of achieving global success. All it takes is one black swan; the rest of the flock will be quick to follow. More than enough high-quality works have been produced over the last decade—we have no ground for an inferiority complex.

 

Generally, the Noughties had much to offer to people who were simply on the lookout for decent fiction, rather than for fiction which conformed to their ideas of what makes “good literature”. And you’d need to be very close-minded, tendentious and bullet-headed to have the same “list” at the end of the decade as you did at the beginning. Of course, much of what has been written does not sit easily with the classical canon; but it would make more sense to change the canon rather than simply ignore unusual works.

 

Perhaps the defining feature of Noughties’ literature is that it resists centralisation, resists being grouped. It hasn’t produced a writer whose every new work could simply crush all the texts around it like a juggernaut. Even Kantor’s Drawing Manual—an epic novel of ideas unequalled in contemporary world literature, which we do not discuss here precisely because it is not in any way “typical” or “characteristic” of its time—can by no means be said to have “buried” all other literature. Noughties’ literature had no universally accepted centre. Some might construct the story of the decade around Pelevin, others around Prilepin, still others around Ulitskaya, still yet others around Alexei Ivanov and so on, but this is testament either to personal predilection or else to being insufficiently well informed. What is worth talking about—and literature has given us sufficient cause to do so—is the emergence of several works that can be characterized as “great national novels”.

 

What does this mean? The epithet “great national novel” may be applied to a work which, rather than being constructed around psychological conflicts, anecdotes or character development, deals first and foremost with the country’s immense energy of spaces, with its abnormalities; it applies when the space absorbs character; when what is known as “national spirit” forms the very spine of the novel; when the novel safeguards the “spiritual homeland”, making it clear that life anywhere else would be impossible under any circumstances. One such novel was awarded the Russian Booker Prize in 2007—and, of course, subsequently failed to pass through customs. Any qualified Western literary agent, should he happen to glance at a synopsis of this novel, which is concerned with an exodus from metaphysical bondage, would immediately and unhesitatingly consign it to the wastepaper basket: the hallucinating physicist Korolev, tired of both science and the abominable Nineties/Noughties, throws everything up, gets engaged to a statue, spends weeks wandering the hellish labyrinth of the secret metro, then takes off to roam around with the homeless, and, enraptured by Levitanesque landscapes, dissolves—l

iterally—into the Russian countryside. This is Alexander Ilichevksy’s Mattisse, a novel about “internal revolt”, a novel which bucks prevailing trends and subverts the logic of the market, a novel which, judging by the tendencies of the preceding period, could not under any circumstances have been written in the Noughties, a novel produced in “splendid isolation”, a novel without the slightest chance of becoming tradable, a novel whose synopsis can only appear farcical—and a great national novel all the same.

 

Russian literature should not have produced “great national novels”, it should have carried out a different programme, one corresponding more fully to changed circumstances. If we’re being entirely honest, it should never have worked at all; it shouldn’t have, but—God alone knows why—it did.