The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

236 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

beings not be manipulated or denied their freedom of choice. “Anna” might even be the conventional nomination for this burden of the flesh. In 1990, Viktor Erofeyev’s three-page story, “Anna’s Body,” appeared in an anthology of glasnost-era writings.21 The plot takes place mostly in bed, alone, during one of her nightmares, amid cigarettes and cognac, lamenting her lost youth and the lovers who had jilted her. Various parts of that body had been going out of control for some time: “Sometimes Anna felt that she was Anna Karenina, sometimes – Anna Akhmatova, sometimes just an Anna on the neck.” At the end of her reverie she turned off the light, “passed her dry tongue over her lips, and, as in an old fairy tale, gobbled up the man she loved.”

Viktor Erofeyev (b. 1947, not to be confused with Venedikt Erofeyev, 1933– 88, author of the phantasmagoric Moscow to the End of the Line) is a skilled male practitioner of “women’s prose.” It is no accident that his Anna in Bed eats her men, like some latter-day Baba Yaga. In Erofeyev’s novel Russian Beauty (1990), the high-class prostitute Irina Tarakanova, in search of true love, moves to Moscow, compromises a wide circle of Russian dissidents, then forms a mystical union with an elderly man whose child she conceives after he is already deceased. Hailed as both a “Russian Molly Bloom” and a “Russian Moll Flanders,” Erofeyev’s sex-queen also recalls a more local prototype updated to psychedelic dimensions: Martona, the “debauched woman” of Chulkov’s 1770 Comely Cook.

In 1990, the yearhepublishedRussian Beauty, Erofeyev announced the death of socialist realism and the liberationofthe Russian author from all socio-moral strictures, in a landmark essay titled “A Wake for Russian Literature.” Five years later, in his “Russia’s Fleurs du mal,” he called for a new, unsentimental literature of evil to re-complicate the simplistic psychology of the Soviet period. Post-communist freedom had arrived, and postmodernism could not be far behind. Or perhaps the sequence should be reversed? Mikhail Epstein has argued that postmodernism was born in Russia, in the Russia of the Brezhnev stagnation – post-Stalinist, but still within the rhetorical force field of socialist realism.22 In that unfree, unreal place, fullofruins and scrap-heaps ofanofficial faith system, postmodernism possessed a vigor beyond the wildest dreams of academic theorists in the West.

We are only several decades into this unraveling process and cannot yet know which of the recent generations of writers and works will endure. Soviet communism’s twilight years yielded several precocious candidates. One is Pushkin House (completed 1971, published in Russia 1989) by Andrei Bitov (b. 1937), a piece of “delayed literature” and a carnivalesque “post-mortem on the tradition” that ends up – very much in the Russian manner – confirming the tradition. Pushkin House has been read in a wide variety of ways, from a