The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

42 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

town: is this a realistic portrait or a parody? Dostoevsky- the most frightening, most hilariously comic master of all types of fool in Russian literature -built his greatest plots on the edge of blasphemy. He did not hesitate to breed a shut, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, with an abused, weak-minded orphan girl (“Stinking Lizaveta”), whom her seducer cynically calls a holy fool. The result of this union is the depraved offspring Smerdyakov, family cook and epileptic, who commits parricide.

Must Russian fools be subversive, and are they always comic? Not necessarily; the tone of a foolish narrative can be lyrical, delicate, laden with pathos. But fools must always be strange, governed by rules that others cannot grasp, or else by no rules at all. For this reason fools proliferate when cultural norms break down. In the decade following the death of Stalin (1953), there was such an explosion of eccentrics, dreamers, and wanderers - charismatically portrayed in the work of the short-story writer and film actor-director Vasily Shukshin (1929-74) - that some critics declared the chudak, the oddball or misfit, to be Russia’s new contemporary hero.11 Female fools and madwomen realize a different symbolic trajectory. In her 1998 novel Little Fool [Durochka], Svetlana Vasilenko (b. 1956) continued the tradition of “violated, pregnant holy fools” initiated by Dostoevsky12 The heroine Ganna-Nad'ka, a young mute girl with Down’s syndrome who performs miracles and is persecuted by everyone she meets in her provincial town, sings to the surrounding evil or flees it with animal-like cries. At the end, heavily pregnant, she ascends to heaven to give birth to a new sun on the brink of the Cuban missile crisis, 1962. “Nad'ka had saved us,” the narrator suddenly realizes, “there would be no nuclear strike, no missiles ... There would be no death!”13

Do holy fools always intercede for sinners, and do secular fools always stumble their way to success? That indeed has been the convention. But in the 1980s, the declining moments of the Soviet regime, a strange and colorful group of “foolish” performance artists emerged in Leningrad who targeted precisely that rosy plot - and all the plots by which our various types of Russian fool have lived. They called themselves, after their founder the Petersburg artist Dmitry Shagin, the mit'ki. They shunned work, earned next to nothing, accepted everything with a smile of good-natured irony and gentleness, and ignored all the usual standards of victory or success so as to have time for art, conversation, drink, and recitation of oral epics based on their life. In keeping with their passivity and professed “aesthetics of failure,” they dressed in grubby striped sailor shirts resembling prison garb and adopted as Russia’s defining historical event the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), when the Russian navy was defeated - that is, sunk - in several hours, a military event of unprecedented national humiliation. On principle, mit'ki neither produced