The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

From the first Thaw to the end 237

liberal-humanist condemnation of Stalinist oppression (and thus in the Solzhenitsyn line of self-critique, a confession from educated society forced to face up to the camps) through a more absurdist and blankly postmodernist

fantasy.23

Bitov explores a theme much beloved in Russian literature, that of warring “Fathers and Sons,” in the context of an “evil Stalin” plot. A young literary scholar discovers that his father (a famous academic) had denounced his own father (an even more famous academic) during the height of the Stalinist purges, building a career on those paternal ashes. The grandson’s attempt to get to know his grandfather – who, it so happens, is not dead as assumed but unexpectedly rehabilitated – is a disaster. The old man, turned cynical and alcoholic in the camps, resents his rehabilitation, because it made a mess of his attempt to give shape and meaning to his fate: “The regime is the regime. Had I been in their place, I would have put myself away.”24 Not only was his life ruined; his martyrdom too had been interrupted. The old man disdains his grandson as a fop whose knowledge of life is nil, who doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know, who thinks he can work with life the way he works with his favorite books.

Indeed, that is the fantasy fueling Pushkin House the Book. Bitov labels his sections, chapters, and episodes with famous titles (or garbled parodies) from the Russian classics: Fathers and Sons, A Hero of our Time, The Fatalist, The Duel, The Shot, “The Humble [or Poor] Horseman” [Bednyi vsadnik instead of Mednyi vsadnik, Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman”] and “Bronze People” [Mednye lyudi instead of Bednye lyudi, the “Poor Folk” of Dostoevsky fame]. No literary parallel quite works, of course, so the hero has a chance to gloss each of them with scholarly commentary, partly for real and partly farce. The Pushkin House is an authentic research institute in Petersburg. It is also the site of the novel’s final caper, in which the hero generates his own rival and double. On the eve of thefiftieth anniversary of the Revolution, these two rivals get into afistfight that degenerates into a duel in which the hero is killed – but not before the two of themtrash pricelessdocuments in the Museum of the Pushkin House. Cursorily brought back to life, the anxious scholar hurries to replace the destroyed items with forgeries. But no one notices the difference.

Confusion between the real and the fake ends up as indifference to the distinction: the perfect postmodernist scenario of a simulacrum without an original. Bitov’s Pushkin House is an early statement of this condition, written for insiders, contained within research libraries and museums. The next generation of genuinely post-communist writers breaks out of that House. Of our three exemplary prose writers, Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955), Viktor Pelevin (b. 1962), and Boris Akunin (b. 1956), the last two especially have managed