The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

From the first Thaw to the end 239

imposed. Several emigre writers, including Solzhenitsyn before and after his return to Russia in 1994, made passionate pleas to restore the authority of the “thick journals” that had once carried high literary culture. But subscriptions plummeted. By the mid-1990s, with the legalization of multiple political parties, Dostoevsky was recruited and celebrated by Russian neo-fascists as an anti-Semite (replacing his earlier, “dissident” image as a Christian mystic). Tolstoy, sanitized and officially canonized since 1928, was declared anathema in 1994 by several reactionary chauvinistic parties for his criticism of Holy Russia, the Emperor, and the Orthodox Church. Calls even went out to young people to resist Tolstoy’s corrupting, unpatriotic teachings.25

A large number of new heroes and plots emerged, created by writers for whom Stalin and World War II were fully historical events, over before they were born. If they were parodists, these writers addressed a tradition that they had absorbed as a “relic,” not experienced in their own lives. Among the most controversial of these “workers with relics” has been the visual and verbal Moscow conceptualist artist Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955), master at the metaphysics of disgust.26 Trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, Sorokin worked throughout the 1980s as a graphic artist and book illustrator. His stories were banned. In 1985, the Paris publishing house Syntaxis brought out his comic romance The Queue [Ochered'], several hundred pages of random snatches of dialogue overheard in line (including an attendance roll call of 720 names), spun out of the socialist-economy shortage-of-everything cliche: if you see a line in the street, immediately join it, even if no one can tell you what isbeingsold up front. The English translator of The Queue aptly likens the narrative to “a musical score ... for some bizarre street symphony”27 We never find out what the line was for. But the hero befriends the saleswoman who had engineered the queue and ends up satisfied and happy - in the final chapters, several dozen “dialogic” pages are devoted to the monosyllabic sighs and moans of lovemaking. More scandalous than this mildly dissident, naughty spoof has been Sorokin’s mature work and its “bipartite style.”28 A trivially banal “model” text (household, landscape, routine conversation) is abruptly interrupted by a stretch of “killer” text from the mouths of the same speakers -shockingly violent, obscene, or incomprehensible images or words - only to have the banal model stereotype resume its course, unruffled. Unlike the classic “mad” or schizophrenic heroes in the Gogol-Dostoevsky line, who degenerate as their narrative proceeds inexorably to its denouement, Sorokin’s characters are sane and insane simultaneously. They can reclaim their surface conformity even after their monstrous subcutaneous life is revealed. According to this psychology, we do not develop or decay in any linear manner but simply display ourselves at different levels.