Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture

602 Pages·2015·2.62 MB·English

by  Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, Slobodanka Millicent Vladiv-Glover

RUSSIANPOSTMODERNISM

R
USSIAN
P
OSTMODERNISM
New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture
Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis,
and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover
Translated by
Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover
berghahn
N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
First published in 1999
Revised edition published in 2016 by
Berghahn Books
© 2016 Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Epstein, Mikhail, author.
Russian postmodernism : new perspectives on late Soviet and post-
Soviet culture / Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis and Slobodanka
Vladiv-Glover ; translated by Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover. — Second
edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-78238-864-7 (pbk. : acid-free paper) —
ISBN 978-1-78238-865-4 (ebook)
1. Russian literature—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Postmodernism (Literature)—Soviet Union. 3. Postmodernism
(Literature)—Russia (Federation) I. Genis, Aleksandr, 1953– author.
II. Vladiv-Glover, Slobodanka, author. III. Title.
PG3026.P67E67 2015
891.709’0044—dc23
2015004789
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78238-864-7 paperback
ISBN 978-1-78238-865-4 ebook
CONTENTS
Preface to the First Edition by Thomas Epstein vii
Preface to the Second Edition: Postmodernism and the Explosive
Style of the Twenty-First Century by Mikhail Epstein xiii
Introduction: “New Sectarianism” and the Pleasure Principle in
Postmodern Russian Culture by Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover 1
Part I: The Making of Russian Postmodernism
1. The Dialectics of Hyper:From Modernism to Postmodernism 23
Mikhail Epstein
2. Postmodernism, Communism, and Sots-Art 51
Mikhail Epstein
3. The 1960s and the Rediscovery of the Other in Russian
Culture: Andrei Bitov 95
Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover
4. Perestroikaas a Shift in Literary Paradigm 151
Alexander Genis
Part II. Manifestos of Russian Postmodernism
Literary Manifestos by Mikhail Epstein
5. Theses on Metarealism and Conceptualism (1983) 169
6. On Olga Sedakova and Lev Rubinshtein (1984) 177
7. What Is Metarealism? Facts and Hypotheses (1986) 182
8. What Is Metabole? (On the Third Trope) (1986) 189
9. Like a Corpse in the Desert: Dehumanization in the New
Moscow Poetry (1987) 198
10. A Catalogue of New Poetries (1987) 209
Cultural Manifestos by Mikhail Epstein
11. Essayism: An Essay on the Essay (1982) 216
vi | Contents
12. The Ecology of Thinking (1982) 222
13. Minimal Religion(1982) 227
14. The Age of Universalism (1983) 236
15. The Paradox of Acceleration (1985) 241
Part III. Socialist Realism and Postmodernism
16. Archaic Postmodernism: The Aesthetics of Andrei Sinyavsky 249
Alexander Genis
17. Postmodernism and Sots-Realism: From Andrei Sinyavsky to
Vladimir Sorokin 261
Alexander Genis
18. Borders and Metamorphoses: Viktor Pelevin in the Context
of Post-Soviet Literature 276
Alexander Genis
Part IV. Conceptualism
19. The New Model of Discourse in Post–Soviet Fiction:
Liudmila Petrushevskaia and Tatiana Tolstaia 291
Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover
20. Heterogeneity and the Russian Post-Avant-Garde:
The Excremental Poetics of Vladimir Sorokin 333
Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover
21. Emptiness as a Technique: Word and Image in Ilya Kabakov 363
Mikhail Epstein
22. The Philosophical Implications of Russian Conceptualism 410
Mikhail Epstein
Part V. Postmodernism and Spirituality
23. Post-Atheism: From Apophatic Theology to “Minimal
Religion” 431
Mikhail Epstein
24. Onions and Cabbages: Paradigms of Contemporary Culture 480
Alexander Genis
25. Charms of Entropy and New Sentimentality: The Myth of
Venedikt Erofeev 509
Mikhail Epstein
Conclusion: On the Place of Postmodernism in Postmodernity 542
Mikhail Epstein
Select Bibliography 555
Index of Names 564
Index of Subjects 571
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
Thomas Epstein
ike its Western counterpart, Russian postmodernism and
L
the discourse surrounding it have proven to be a vast,
rich, and diverse storehouse of competing ideas and aes-
thetics. Alternately intriguing and maddening, insightful and bom-
bastic, humble and totalitarian, Russian postmodernism and its
discourse raise questions, some of them quite unpleasant, that are
nevertheless fundamental to the cultural experience of the last third
of the twentieth century.
The instructiveness of the Russian case is in part a result of its
“unnaturalness”: appearing with its all too familiar temporal lag (in
this case, a result of decades of censorship and other forms of repres-
sion of the cultural process), Russian postmodernism presents a con-
centrated, intellectualized, and accelerated form of the phenomenon.
Always taken with extremes, Russia has once again “caught up,” and
with a vengeance, producing a body of challenging, sophisticated, and
sometimes extremely radical postmodern texts. This is no less true for
the discourse onpostmodernism, as the present volume demonstrates.
Given the deconstructionist underpinnings of much postmodern
discourse, it is only natural that we begin with a question for which
we do not claim to have a definitive answer: “Just what is Russian
postmodernism?” Is it merely one cultural trend among others, fore-
grounding “play with the signifier,” parody, de-centered discourse,
and the absence of an organizing self? Or is postmodernism as such
part of a larger cultural paradigm, the Postmodern, marked by a
viii | Preface to the First Edition
sense of fragmentation and historical breakdown or transition, to
which artists of various stripes (Joseph Brodsky is but one telling
example) have reacted, each in his or her own way? By this latter def-
inition, we could talk about a Russian postmodern period in which
the role of the avant-garde has been played by the postmodernists,
largely synonymous with Moscow conceptualism. Finally, from the
outside, might we not speak of postmodern discourse as but another
example of the tyranny of the theoretical, ideological, and reduc-
tionistic over the diversity of real phenomena?
One thing is certain: Russian literature of the period stretching
from the late 1960s to the present has been remarkably productive. It
includes such canonically Russian and Soviet-Russian authors as
Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, the neo-modernists Voz -
nesensky and Evtushenko, the Romantic lyricism of Akhmadulina,
the traditional avant-garde aesthetics of Sapgir, Aigi, and Vsevolod
Nekrasov, the post-symbolism of the “metarealists” Zhdanov, Shvarts,
Krivulin, and Sedakova, the various forms of polystylistics (including
Iskrenko, Eremenko, Parshchikov, and Dragomoshchenko, some of
which is akin to American “language poetry”), and the postmodern
visual arts avant-garde itself, led by the conceptualists Kabakov and
Bulatov on one side, and the sots-artists1Komar and Melamid on the
other, which has found its most accomplished verbal embodiments
in the poetry of Dmitri Prigov and Lev Rubinshtein, and in the
uncompromisingly scatological prose of Vladimir Sorokin.2
Although some theorists of Russian postmodernism have argued
in favor of identifying socialist realism as the first manifestation of
the postmodern spirit in Soviet culture,3 as a practical matter (that
is, as a self-conscious movement) Russian verbal postmodernism was
born in the early 1970s with the emergence of Moscow conceptual-
ism, initially an art movement inspired by Joseph Kosuth’s concep-
tualism4 but which struck deep roots in the Soviet soil: using
quotation, silence, and a parodic conformism as their tools, poets
such as Prigov and Rubinshtein reached a “zero degree” of writing.
Setting language against itself, they exposed the illusions of the self,
the overdeterminations of ideology and monological discourse,
thereby opening Soviet-Russian culture to the experience of silence,
Preface to the First Edition | ix
the something (or no-thing) that lies beyond. One of the central
merits of the work here introduced is its highlighting of the spiritual
and religious dimensions of this process; indeed the spiritualization
of the postmodern aesthetic (or ethic) may be the most important
distinction between Soviet-Russian and Western postmodernism.
Even more so than in the West, the 1970s and 1980s in Russia
were a period of “post-history” (a period later to be called the era of
“stagnation” by Soviet ideologues). Both officially and in theory,
Soviet society had reached the paradise of communism, annulling
history and time. However, while in practice the official culture con-
tinued to enforce a narrow, generally socialist-realist, aesthetic, in the
underground a massive avant-garde flourished.5 Marginalized from
the centers of official culture (in sociological terms, this official cul-
ture can be construed as roughly equivalent, mutatis mutandis, to
Western popular culture), the writers, artists, and poets of the under-
ground were free to organize themselves into bands of like-minded
brethren, living outside the march of time. Employed as laborers,
night watchmen, or not at all, they in fact lived for and through lit-
erature (an already venerable tradition in a country notorious for dif-
ficult livingconditions). Whether using this intense engagement with
culture for purposes of parody (as was essentially the case with the
conceptualists) or for reconnecting with Russian spiritual and avant-
garde traditions, in particular with the not yet canonic Khlebnikov,
Mandel’shtam, and Tsvetaeva, and the Oberiu poets Harms, Oleini -
kov, and Vvedensky (who themselves lived on the margins of official
culture until their ultimate annihilation), these writers created a
ready-made canon—or anti-canon—that burst into the mainstream
during the latter half of perestroika(that is, after the exhaustion of the
dissident culture that had taken center stage in the mid-to late
1980s). Not surprisingly, the results of this integration were para-
doxical: while in a purely literary sense the aesthetic and spiritual val-
ues of the likes of Shvarts, Zhdanov, Rubinshtein, and Prigov clearly
won the day, definitively reconnecting Russia with a variety of “lost”
modernist traditions, this same emergence into the public eye, and
the gaining of general public respectability that followed, turned
into a kind of death-knell for the underground culture itself.