The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

From the first Thaw to the end 249

also predicted the demise of literature, the poverty of present-day writers. But these are cyclical complaints, Kataev assures his readers (p. 228), and never come true:

In their campaign against petrified language cliche´s, the postmodernists can be compared with wolves, the sanitary workers of the forest, who fulfill the honorable and necessary task of eating refuse and eliminating the weak so that the fittest remain, ensuring that life continues. But to consider – as the admirers of Sorokin do – that from now on one must write only the way he writes or not write at all, this would be like insisting that out of all the animals of the forest, only wolves should remain. Fortunately, nature permits nothing of the sort.

“Postmodernism today should be understood as a sort of pause, an intermission in the development of literature and culture,” Kataev advises (p. 231). “In general it might seem that literature has been completely crushed by the aggressiveness of other forms of information transfer. But as long as literature is alive, any development taking place in it – however endlessly distant from traditions it might appear – one way or another, ultimately returns to the classics.” This sentiment was given lapidary formulation by Mikhail Bakhtin, in the 1940s, during twentieth-century Russia’s darkest years. In a fragment devoted to Gogol’s laughter that has lost none of its relevance to the present century, Bakhtin wrote, “Only memory, not forgetfulness, can go forward.”46