The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

248 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Stalin retorts. “And how would it be if we left one letter off?” asks Prigov. “How would it be?” repeats Stalin, drawn inexorably into the mirror-imaging poetic logic of the exchange. “It would be Talin!” Prigov shouts back. Now his interlocutor is labeled Talin. “Talin!” Stalin shouts. And from then on down to nothing, the dictator is undone by the poet:

Prigov

And if we left another off?

Talin

Another?

Prigov

It would be Alin.

Alin

It would be Alin!

Prigov

And if we left another off?

Alin

Another?

Prigov

It would be Lin.

Lin

It would be Lin!

Finally Stalin ispromptedtoremove the singleremaining letter N – and there the poem stops. There is no one left to answer; the tyrant has literally, letter by letter, dissolved. In Prigov’s postmodernist exercise, power is tricked into dismantling itself by very traditional means. The Poet, feigning foolishness, sets up the framework, poses the enticing question, and controls the final creative – or annihilating – Word.

There are many ways for “one word of truth to outweigh the whole world.” True to the Tolstoy line, Solzhenitsyn prefers this truth to be uttered righteously, single-voicedly, with the intonations of a preacher or prophet. Prigov, who belonged to the Gogol–Dostoevsky line, relies on double-voiced cunning and carnival dismemberment to reveal that truthful word. Both approaches are dependent on a vast reservoir of inherited literary images and values – especially, one could argue, from the Sentimentalist tradition, more durable on Russian soil than either the analytical or the cynical. From Karamzin through Dostoevsky’s redeemed sinners, Tolstoy’s idea of art, socialist realism, Solzhen-itsyn, even Pelevin’s quasi-parodic mystic fusion of East and West, painful or isolating complexity resolves itself through emotion and communion. The contemporary Russian avant-garde does not campaign for a “blank slate” or “fresh start” – one of the more intoxicating fantasies from the revolutionary 1910s and 1920s. That fantasy is over. The critic Vladimir Kataev concludes his book Playing with Shards: The Fate of the Russian Classic in the Era of the Postmodern (2002) with a relatively sanguine prognosis. Postmodernist writers are partial to “secondariness” and “citationality” in constructing their texts, he admits, but the classics have been neither encapsulated nor mummified by these strategies.45 In the early years of Bolshevik rule, the avant-garde Zamyatin