RUSSIAN.

Rollberg, Peter ; Terras, Victor ; Mozur, Joseph P., Jr. 等

Miscellaneous

Viktor Erofeev. Muzhchiny. Moscow. Podkova. 1997. 152 pages. ISBN 5-8951-7003-X.

Everybody in Russia seems to hate Viktor Erofeev.

His colleagues hate him for the enormous profits his books earned him in the early 1990s; critics hate him for shamelessly posing as an heir to the tradition of Great Russian Literature, to which they think he does not belong; liberal dissidents hate him for his personal background as the son of a high-ranking career diplomat and a pampered offspring of the Soviet establishment; conservative nationalists hate his esthetic and sexual libertarianism. Likewise, few Western Slavists found merit in Erofeev's persona, his disturbing short stories, or his stylish best-selling novel Russian Beauty (1993; see WLT 68:2, p. 392). In the cauldron of Russia's public opinion and in its Western reflections, he remains a most popular target of the intelligentsia's self- righteous outrage.

As Erofeev's new volume, Muzhchiny (Men), proves, some of the outrage is justified. Here, as in the past, the author publicly demonstrates the typical cynicism and icy arrogance of the Soviet and post-Soviet jeunesse doree to which he, judging by the juvenile back-cover photo, longs to belong even at age fifty. He endorsed Nabokov when it was both risque and fashionable to do so (and he, belonging to the privileged few, had access to all the books withheld from rank- and-file Soviet citizens), then mercilessly trashed Nabokov when the tides of literary fashion were turning in other directions. Yet, even in such a sleazy outfit, Erofeev, somewhat similar to the star director Nikita Mikhalkov (whom he bashes fancifully in the present volume), narrates with enviable wit. When, under the blasphemous title "The Good Stalin," he describes his childhood in Moscow and relations with his nomenklatura father, he does so with a laconic precision and elegance rarely found in contemporary Russia's literary journals. And all of a sudden, amid this devil's sabbath of polished cynicism, an unexpected tone of authentic pain and compassion appears, even though applied to unlikely objects such as Semyon Babayevsky, a formerly famous literary hack to whom a paradox-loving fate granted biblical age.

To his ongoing public rejection Erofeev responds with caustic coolness and ever- surprising texts, fictional and nonfictional. This latest collection is a smashing response to all skeptics; it shows Erofeev in splendid artistic shape. No doubt, it will generate even more hatred. But we may safely assume that he couldn't care less, since one of his most appealing traits is his fearlessness. At times just boyishly bold, at times truly courageous, Erofeev is not afraid to cross swords with saints both orthodox and secular-Solzhenitsyn being but one example. Perhaps the only fear he harbors is that he might be out of touch with his time, the fear of becoming a ridiculous anachronism. So far, he seems to have avoided that danger successfully.

"Men" consists of very small texts, few longer than three pages, some of which have previously been published in fashionable periodicals. Their smallness proves an impressive quality: departing from traditional Soviet verbosity, these mini-essays feature an epigrammatic brevity reminiscent more of French than of Russian traditions. In one way or the other, all the pieces revolve around the title theme: male identity vis-a-vis changing societal structures and role requirements. Since such a general theme allows for a variety of topics, literary portraits of Francis Bacon, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, or the Marquis de Sade are entertainingly complemented by reflections on modern Russian women and tendencies in post-Soviet sex life. Despite their heterogeneity, together these pieces form a body of remarkable inner consistency. Public outrage notwithstanding, Erofeev's essays with their stylistic stringency and brilliance are unsurpassed in contemporary Russian letters.

Indeed, style is a key term for the enjoyment of Erofeev's artistry, and although he is unique in his stylistic sensitivity among his contemporaries, he does have at least two predecessors in the pantheon of Russian thought, who, like him, were outsiders in their time: Erofeev's sharp perceptiveness for the pathetic lack of style in Russian life-to which he sardonically ascribes the Russian army's defeat in Chechnya-links him with the nineteenth-century philosopher Konstantin Leontiev; and his impatient search for a spirituality beyond the Orthodox Church, one that is not antisexual, resembles the iconoclastic Vasily Rozanov, another one of Erofeev's literary godfathers. Politically, he is doubtless anticommunist and always has been. Esthetically, however, he refused to condemn the civilization which let him and others grow and which gave him a whole array of cultural and sensual pleasures. The phenomenon which Erofeev despises most-and certainly more than communism- transgresses all political formations: the intellectual philistine, both individually and as a mass phenomenon. In his texts, he dissects this creature splendidly.

At long last, it seems, Erofeev has discovered the genre most fitting to his temperament: not the novel (for which he lacks steadiness) and not the lengthy philosophical essay, but the provocative miniature in which the spirit of contemporaneity is marvelously condensed. Indeed, the miniature may be the proper genre for a decade of feverish change in which time has become a precious commodity, like it never was before in Russian history. Apparently such small texts are more appropriate for a new type of Russian reader who has little patience for verbose sermons and who demands the gratifying artistic essence immediately. Erofeev's appreciative reader is one who has gained from the breakup of communism and is not ashamed of it; he is moderately patriotic and optimistic about Russia's political-economic future; he is not bothered by his country's moral and material degradation. Erofeev's language and style of argumentation reflect the peculiarities of this new reading public: his texts feature erudition (sometimes substantial, sometimes superficial or mere bluff), effortless incorporation of obscenities (without indulging in them), and acceptance of both the gains and the losses of the transition toward Western values without welcoming the former too enthusiastically or mourning the latter too melancholically.

Thus, like it or not, on today's literary scene Viktor Erofeev, with all his appealing and repulsive features, stands as a hero of his time-Russia's wonderful, horrible time of transition.

Peter Rollberg

George Washington University

Foreign Criticism

Graham Roberts. The Last Soviet Avant-Garde: OBERIU-Fact, Fiction, Metafiction. New York. Cambridge University Press. 1997. xiv + 274 pages. $59.95. ISBN 0-521- 48283-6.

The first task which Graham Roberts had to face was to determine precisely who belonged to OBERIU, and this by dual criteria: participation in OBERIU activities, few and short-lived as they were; and commitment to a certain world view and esthetic. On the latter count, Nikolai Oleinikov, a mere fellow traveler, seems to qualify, while Nikolai Zabolotsky, a regular, "held a life- long sense of the poet's mission to perfect the world," which went against the grain of the group as a whole. As to their political position, they all suffered equally under Stalin's purges, but then so did their sharpest critics, the proletarian ideologues of RAPP. The author largely discounts biographical detail, taking for granted e.g. that the reader knows that Kharms and Vaginov were pseudonyms.

The author is well aware of the many other, more or less obscure avant-garde groups which coexisted with OBERIU. Special mention is made of the chinari and their leader Yakov Druskin, whose philosophy seems to be of genuine interest. The fact that many of the traits found in the works of the oberiuty also appear in futurist and acmeist writers is duly noted, as are occasional echoes of Russian formalism. Considerable attention is paid to the applicability of the Bakhtinian categories of dialogism and the carnivalesque to OBERIU texts. I feel that the analogy to the Russian folk tradition of iurodstvo (foolishness in Christ) is more productive.

Roberts wisely suspends generalizations until his last chapter and presents the oberiuty by summarizing some of their more important works: Aleksandr Vvedensky's Christmas at the Ivanovs, Konstantin Vaginov's Labours and Days of Svistonov, and The Old Woman and Elizaveta Bam by Daniil Kharms. Zabolotsky, on whom we have a recent monograph by Darra Goldstein in the same series (1993; see WLT 68:3, p. 598), is not so presented. Some lesser figures and many other works are also introduced.

What are the distinctive traits of the oberiuty? The author sees these in the fact that they "all wrote essentially self-conscious fiction, . . . texts which constitute explorations of the nature of fiction in fictional form," which leads on to metafiction. Other shared traits are: the absence of a teleological plot or subversion of the theatrical code, the mixing of genres, and a general disregard for a conventional contract with the reader or viewer (this includes a disregard for temporality and causality, a fusion of the narrator with his characters, and outright violations of common sense). Finally, the use of language to shape reality is recognized as a significant trait of the OBERIU esthetic.

Roberts is well aware that all these traits also occur in Gogol, Zoshchenko, and various futurists and acmeists, as well as all over world literature, old and modern. Perhaps giving some concrete examples would have made this point even more clearly. Osip Mandelstam's novella "The Egyptian Stamp" meets all the criteria listed in the preceding paragraph. If Vaginov's Svistonov "feels 'locked' inside his own text," so does Mayakovsky: "Navek / teper' ia / zakliuchen / v bessmyslennuiu povest'!" (Chelovek). Since the genre of "Dialogues of the Dead" is mentioned, Vvedensky's Minin and Pozharsky does exactly the same thing as Lucian in his Necr[angle quotation mark, right]n dialogoi. And once the Menippean satire is also brought up, the theme of trouble with a dead body (in "The Old Woman" by Kharms) is found in the most famous of the Menippean satires, "The Widow of Ephesus." The dead body in a suitcase may be borrowed from Dostoevsky (von Sohn in The Brothers Karamazov).

Altogether, this well-researched and thoughtful study shows that Russians in the 1920s were well on their way to asking the questions about the relation of language to reality, and of the signifier to the signified in general, which have occupied our civilization ever since and which are again the order of the day in post-Soviet Russia, as Roberts also indicates.

Victor Terras

Brown University

Translations

Boris Chasanow. Vogel uber Moskau. Annelore Nitschke, tr. Stuttgart. DVA. 1998. 319 pages. DM 44. ISBN 3-421-05118-6.

Readers familiar with Soviet literature know the importance socialist-realist writers attached to symbols of renewal and optimism. One of the more frequently used symbols was that of cranes, whose majestic flight invariably caused Soviet heroes to lift their misty eyes upward and forward to a future that promises to be, if not glorious, then at least far better than the present. One recalls Mikhail Kalatozov's popular war movie The Cranes Are Flying (1957), Rasul Gamzatov's poem "White Cranes," which figured prominently in the repertoire of the Red Army Choir in the 1970s and 1980s, or Chingiz Aitmatov's novella Early Cranes, just to mention a few examples. The high graceful flight of the birds in "V" formation was a fitting expression for the most sacred aspirations of Soviet man. Boris Chasanow (b. 1928)-or Khazanov in anglicized form-in his Vogel uber Moskau (Birds Over Moscow), however, subverts the solemn image, transforming it into a Hitchcock-like omen presaging the final days of the Soviet Imperium.

Vogel opens with an aerial bombardment of excrement from thousands of errant cranes darkening the skies over the proud Soviet capital. The sticky, oily precipitation covers the roofs and streets of the metropolis and brings traffic to a standstill; automobile accidents occur at every major intersection, and streetcars slip perilously from their rails. Similar to the early days of the Chernobyl accident in 1986, rumors spread like wildfires in the capital, fanned by the official media's prolonged silence concerning the apocalyptic happening. Only when one of the red stars gracing a Kremlin tower comes crashing to the ground under the weight of the malodorous guano, does officialdom react. Yet it is too late. Perhaps emboldened by the potent fumes emitted by the droppings, Muscovites lose all fear of the authorities and begin to demonstrate openly their disgust with the established order. But then the cranes suddenly disappear, and life seems to return to normal. An eerie sense of anticipation lingers in the minds of the citizens, however, just as it must have in Kievan Rus in 1223, when the Mongols appeared out of nowhere, defeated the Rusan armies at the Kalka River, and then vanished, only to return ten years later with a fury, bringing an abrupt end to Kievan civilization.

Chasanow writes as an archeologist, stripping away layer after layer of sediment from the remains of a now-extinct empire. Most of the characters he portrays in "Birds Over Moscow" are involved in some sort of deceit or corruption. His hero, Ilya Rubin, a dissident writer who seeks to chronicle life around him, introduces the woman he loves, Shura Nezvorova, to Oleg Erastovich, a procurer of attractive women for the upper reaches of the Soviet nomenklatura. Oleg Erastovich, whose patronymic calls to mind the name of the seducer in Karamzin's "Poor Liza," presents the beautiful Shura to the obtuse party boss of a Central Asian autonomous republic. Shura quickly becomes his mistress and is exposed to a life-style that she could not have imagined existed in the Soviet Union. The party boss, addressed simply as the "Polovtsian khan," is an aspiring poet who has never written a line of verse in his life. Yet in the "final days" anything goes, and the would-be literary laureate seeks to hire a talented translator to write poems which would subsequently be "translated" back into his native language and passed off as the originals. For this reason he travels to Moscow, where he spends his time like a Roman emperor might have in the last days of Rome, in bouts of heavy drinking and in the warm embraces of the beautiful Shura. Yet fate plays a mean joke on the khan, and he dies of a heart attack during a brawl in an elite party bathhouse. The death of such a high-ranking personality, especially given the suspicious circumstances surrounding it, predictably gives rise to the question of who is guilty. The KGB launches a sweeping investigation. Fearing his arrest to be imminent, Rubin burns his chronicles and kills himself, while Shura and the hapless bathhouse attendant flee the Soviet capital.

Throughout "Birds" Chasanow's omniscient narrator weaves a rich tapestry of cultural and historical allusions linking the demise of the Soviet Union to the fall of Rome and Kievan Rus. The simple plot of seduction and corruption is embellished by numerous philosophical asides. "The future," the narrator notes, "has arrived and brought an unsuspecting era to an ignominious end. The chronicler can now look at it with equanimity and detachment, just as a tourist views the remains of a prehistoric settlement." The sense of closure permits the narrator to make a number of conclusions about Soviet life that could not have been made while experiencing it, for "no one understands his time so poorly as he who is living it." For him there can be no doubt that "neither Diocletian the Great nor the last shameless Roman rulers could have created a more perfect system of police surveillance" than that which existed in the Soviet Union. And from the murky waters of surveillance, denunciations, incarcerations, and prison camps arose the great Russian myth of freedom with its central idea of "die spurlos fur immer gegluckte Flucht" (the dream of a successful escape without a trace and without any chance of ever being caught and brought back). Because of the futility of attempting an escape either from the zone of the camps or from the "larger zone"-i.e., the country as such-tales of the few who managed to break out have always fired the imagination of millions. Although the novel ends with a cleansing rain that washes away the "dirt of yesterday," Chasanow's narrator remains pessimistic, acknowledging that a completely successful escape from Soviet life has not occurred. He concludes that it is still too early to begin gathering stones in post-Soviet Russia.

Boris Chasanow himself managed to escape the "larger zone" in 1982, after having spent six years as a political prisoner in a Soviet concentration camp (1949- 55). He emigrated to Germany and lives and writes in Munich today. Vogel uber Moskau is a powerful literary study of Soviet life which draws upon a wealth of experience and juxtaposes the real and tragic with the surreal and comically absurd. Chasanow's work is proof that Russian literature is still resilient and capable of a renaissance despite the chaos in post-Soviet Russia.

Joseph P. Mozur Jr.

University of South Alabama

Leonid Dobychin. The Town of N. Richard C. Borden, Natalia Belova, trs. Evanston, Il. Northwestern University Press. 1998. xxvi + 117 pages. $14.95. ISBN 0-8101-1589-1.

Leonid Dobychin's only novel, The Town of N, was first published in Moscow in 1935. Hostile reaction to the work by orthodox Soviet critics because of its "formalism" and "decadence"-the novel was repeatedly denounced as "Joycean"- played a determining role in Dobychin's disappearance and probable suicide in 1936, when the much-maligned and scarcely appreciated writer was in his early forties. It was only with the novel's republication in 1989 that a more balanced assessment of its merits became possible. Richard Borden asserts that "Dobychin may well prove to have been the single most significant revelation in Russian letters during glasnost." While this endorsement may to an extent reflect the partisan sentiments of the translator, the novel undoubtedly represents an important and potentially influential stylistic achievement. Indeed, Dobychin's impact on contemporary "alternative" Russian prose is already being recognized.

The Town of N had its genesis in the intertwined strands of autobiography and demonstratively acknowledged literary influence. The novel is set in the first decade of the twentieth century in an unspecified Latvian city recognizable as Daugavpils (Dvinsk), where Dobychin lived for much of his life. Not only the setting but many of the characters and events described and referred to in the novel have identifiable autobiographical and historical roots. At the same time, the very title of the novel, which instantly evokes the imaginary satiric world of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, announces that The Town of N has prominent literary roots as well. On one level the novel is a story of childhood that provides first-person glimpses spanning nearly a decade, from age seven in 1901, into the existence and observations of an upper-middle-class Russian boy. School experiences, literature, the death of a parent, reverberations from the Russo- Japanese War, and the myriad components of provincial life-all are represented through the lens of an immature and impressionable consciousness. The satire occurs as it were inadvertently, as Dobychin uses his child narrator as an instrument to expose provincial hypocrisy and bigotry in a manner in keeping with Gogol's merciless exposure of an analogous milieu a few decades earlier.

Rich in metaphor and recurrent imagery, The Town of N in part reflects a familiar theme, the conflict between the ideals found in literary works and the disappointments of unlovely reality. The introverted, bookish narrator hopes to use literature as a guide to life, but repeatedly stumbles over the discrepancies between the two. His inability to interpret his environment

correctly is symbolized by his poor eyesight, which is not accurately diagnosed until the end of the novel. The narrator's observational handicaps hamper, but do not prevent the reader from perceiving the flaws riddling "N" and its inhabitants.

Dobychin's novel, with its richly textured style and touching narrator, is a pleasure to read. The extensive notes provided by the translator facilitate a more sophisticated appreciation of the text. The Town of N is indeed a literary and cultural find.

Margaret Ziolkowski

Miami University (Ohio)

Noted

Vladimir Makanin. The Loss: A Novella and Two Short Stories. Byron Lindsey, tr. Evanston, Il. Northwestern University Press. 1998. xvi + 154 pages. $44.95 ($14.95 paper). ISBN 0-8101-1639-1 (1640-5 paper).

A relatively new series titled "Writings from an Unbound Europe," having introduced a number of mostly young, lesser-known writers, has now added to its list the name of Vladimir Makanin (b. 1937), whose works have begun to emerge lately in such Russian literary journals as Sever (1982) and Znamia (1998) and whose short novel The Escape Hatch was recently published in English translation (1996; see WLT 70:4, p. 985). In the collection under review we have a fairly good representation of his writings, mixing fantasy with stark realism, irony with pity, poetic vision with social criticism. Commenting on Makanin's earlier writings, Byron Lindsey states: "Here was a writer who embodied the spirit of the freer new period-one who writes against the grain, challenges orthodoxies, experiments with narrative point of view, and who maintains a strict, even silent independence, an approach usually associated with Western culture. Until the advent of glasnost under Gorbachev, such qualities were impermissible in the Russian literary world."

The three short pieces collected under one cover confirm those observations. The longest of them, "The Loss," relates a story of a man who decided to dig a tunnel under the Ural River in order to prove that he could accomplish the impossible, "confirming the mystery of human nature, which reveals itself only at those minutes when a human being unshackles himself." The second story, "Klyucharyov and Alimushkin," deals with a contrast between two entirely different individuals, one of whom profits from the other's misfortune. Finally, there is the most successful story, "The Prisoner from the Caucasus," a narrative of the most recent war in Chechnya wherein compassion for the enemy is stronger than hatred in a magnificent mountain setting oblivious to passing human follies. An illuminating preface has been provided by the translator.

Jerzy R. Krzy[section]anowski

Ohio State University

Igor' Vishnevetski|. Tro|noe zrenie. New York. Slovo/Word. 1997. 87 pages. ICBN 97-062037.

The virtues of Igor Vishnevetsky's verses are twofold: they sound poetic, musical even without comprehension, and they show deep metaphysical thought if studied very carefully. What they do not offer is an immediate "charge," emotional or intellectual. The poet's keen euphonic sense manifests itself not so much in easily discernible effects of sound orchestration as in an ability to keep the sounds of his verse subdued, avoiding all excessive harshness, loudness, or regularity.

The metaphysical content of Vishnevetsky's verse shows the effect of many years of study of Russian symbolism and acmeism. There are some direct echoes: "Svitok vozdushno| grozy" reminds one of Mandelstam's "Nashedshi| podkovu," "O, cho ostalos' posle stol'kikh let!" of his "Ja slovo pozabyl"; the color effects of "Vechernee" are reminiscent of Andrei Bely; the elemental mythology of "S severa" sounds like Vyacheslav Ivanov. Altogether, Vishnevetsky's vision is decidedly symbolist, often strikingly so-in "Patmos," for example. The poet faces the dualism of being, but also a thirdness of shadowy, fleeting existence between the phenomenal and the noumenal. Mystic visions of this thirdness account for the most memorable poems of Tro|noe zrenie (Triple Sight). Vishnevetsky is a remarkable poet who has created his own voice from the legacy of Russian modernism.

Victor Terras

Brown University