Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature: Exiles at Home

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Author: Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya

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L ocati ng Exiled W r iters in C o ntemporary Russ ian Lite rature

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Locati ng Exiled W r iters in C o ntempora ry Russ ian Lit erature

E xil es at H o m e

Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya

locating exiled writers in contemporary russian literature Copyright © Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-62185-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wakamiya, Lisa Ryoko, 1969Locating exiled writers in contemporary Russian literature : exiles at home / Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-230-62185-5 (alk. paper) 1. Exiles’ writings, Russian—History and criticism. 2. Russian literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Return migration in literature. 4. Self in literature. 5. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 6. National characteristics, Russian, in literature. I. Title. PG3515.W35 2010 891.709'9206914—dc22

2009024121

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

1

Introduction: The Exiles Return

1

2

Russian Cosmopolitan

27

3

Agency Abroad and at Home

69

4

Authenticity, Camera, Action

109

5

The End of Exile—The End of Return?

147

Notes

155

Works Cited

187

Index

201


Acknowledgments

I am fortunate to have benefited from the generous support of many institutions and people as I worked on this book. A Fulbright research grant enabled me to spend much of 2006 in Moscow and supported the research and experiences that made this book possible. Grants from the Office of the Provost, the Council of Research and Creativity, and the Winthrop-King Institute at Florida State University supported additional research. The Faculty Senate Library Committee provided a Primary Sources Materials grant, which, along with the interlibrary loan service, aided in the acquisition of materials that contributed to my work. The staff in the libraries and special collections units of the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Michigan provided invaluable assistance. In Moscow, I am grateful to Elena Evgen’evna Chugunova and Dmitrii Viktorovich Neustroev of the State Russian Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI). The staff at the Library-Foundation “Russia Abroad” and the Russian State Library permitted access to rare materials. Marisa Fushille of the American Center at the Library of Foreign Literature and Ekaterina Iur’evna Genieva, director of the Library of Foreign Literature, gave me materials indispensable for completing Chapter 3. Edward Roslof and Valentina Gruzintseva of the Moscow Fulbright office and many faculty and staff at The Russian State University of the Humanities (RGGU) provided conditions conducive to writing. I am particularly indebted to the late Vassily Aksyonov and to my friend Viktor Mikhailovich Essipov.

viii

Acknowledgments

Marina Balina, Angela Brintlinger, Galya Diment, and Andrei Rogachevskii provided instrumental support during this project’s early stages. They, along with David M. Bethea, Ann Komaromi, Mark Lipovetsky, Leo Livak, and Alexei Pavlenko heard or read preliminary versions of parts of this book and shared their knowledge and comments. D. Barton Johnson generously shared materials and welcomed conversations that assisted with writing Chapter 2. Konstantin Kustanovich read a substantial part of an early version of the manuscript and readily offered his insights. Tetsuo Mochizuki invited me to present a preliminary version of Chapter 2 at the Slavic Research Center of Hokkaido University and volunteered many helpful suggestions. The esteemed presenters at the 2007 conference “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as Writer, Myth-Maker, and Public Figure” at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign inspired and encouraged me as I wrote Chapter 3. I am especially indebted to Edward E. Ericson, Alexis Klimoff, Michael Nicholson, Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna and Ignat and Stephan Solzhenitsyn, and Richard Tempest. I owe years of intellectual mentorship to Michael Henry Heim. In innumerable ways this project has benefited from the counsel of Vyacheslav Vs. Ivanov, Olga Kagan, Roman Koropeckyj, and Ronald Vroon. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University for their boundless encouragement and all manner of sustenance. I am especially thankful to Mark Pietralunga and Feng Lan for their invaluable guidance, Alec Hargreaves, and Bill Cloonan for his unwavering support. My editors Brigitte Shull and Lee Norton at Palgrave worked with extraordinary efficiency to bring this book into its present form. I thank them and Rachel Tekula of Palgrave and Daniel Constantino of Scribe for their enthusiastic support of this project. The anonymous reviewers of the manuscript provided constructive criticism and comments that have been gratefully incorporated into this book. Brief sections of Chapter 2 appeared in an earlier form in the volume American Contributions to the XIV International Congress of Slavists, edited by David M. Bethea and

Acknowledgments

ix

Christina Y. Bethin (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers at Indiana University, 2008). A previous version of brief sections of Chapter 4 appeared in Canadian-American Slavonic Studies 37 (Spring–Summer 2003): 1–2. These passages are reproduced with kind permission from the original publishers. I am grateful for the unconditional support of my family and friends. I dedicate this book to my parents. Writing, like everything else, is more fun with Rob.


Chapter 1

4

I ntroduc tion The Exiles Ret ur n

T

he legacy of exile is not confined to the tradition of texts that chronicle the experience of expulsion or longing for a lost homeland. Its traces can be found even in narratives of return. By its very existence, the narrative project of return acknowledges the writing of exile that preceded it. It reorganizes the poetics of exile in various ways, reshaping and refracting an inherited set of figures to rhetorically construct and enact the experience of return and the place called home. As part of the project of reconfiguring exilic narrative constructions from a position more of familiarity than of difference, the writing of return offers a complex of figures of estrangement and connection and rhetorically marks a movement from the former to the latter. The goal of this study is to analyze and critically situate narratives of repatriation produced by former exiles. In the 1990s, several writers exiled from the Soviet Union returned to a reformed Russia. They initiated narrative processes of self-definition oriented simultaneously toward writers, readers, and more broadly, the nation, all seeking self-identity at a time of social, political, and cultural transition. Their narratives of return variously reorganized the poetics of exilic writing and engaged in the project of rhetorically constructing stable identities within a rapidly changing national imaginary. Their narratives of return were, and are, as notable for their

2

Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

heterogeneity as for their reshaping of the rhetorical constructions of exile that defined the earlier works produced abroad. At first glance, the predicament of the returned exiles may seem ideal—seemingly against all odds, they returned to a renamed and reformed homeland, reclaimed their readership, and reestablished a productive relationship with both. But their return also raises provocative questions: Have these former exiles ceased striving to engage Western readers? To what extent is their writing informed by the dynamics of the post-Soviet period, including Russia’s resistance to adopting Western economic and political structures; the transnational migrations of its writers and literature; the increasing effects of globalization on Russian culture; and nostalgic nationalist constructs that look to the Soviet and imperial past? Does exile, even in the act of being “undone,” still contribute to estrangement? In addressing these questions, this study strives to elucidate the relationship between exilic writing and the writing of return, and the latter’s narrative processes of adaptation, reintegration, and allegorization oriented toward local audiences. It critically identifies the location of contemporary Russian narratives of return at the interstices of modernism and postmodernism, Soviet and post-Soviet, to demonstrate how the path from exile to return is mediated by narrative. In striving to deny the effects of exile and maintain coherent subjects and narrative worlds, exilic writing may project a tenuous and fraught stability. Conversely, it may explicitly reflect its dislocation in violent rhetorical disjunctures. Exilic writing, with all of its diverse rhetorical positions, is nevertheless forced to renegotiate its predicament when its authors return to a post-Soviet Russia characterized by competing cultural discourses following a fundamental rupture in the “discursive regime” established during the Soviet era.1 A comparative study of their narratives of exile and return and the conditions in which these narratives emerge allows us to plot the diachronic and rhetorical movement from exile to return against a cultural map of simultaneous and competing discourses.

Introduction

3

The complex nature of the cultural processes and products associated with the reorientation and rearticulation of national identity, however, is also indicative of the multiple challenges that face both returning exiles and those who study their work. The dialogue between exilic writing and the writing of return may be fluid or contentious. Writers and critics may look to essentializing constructions of identity to establish homogeneous subjects and readerships in an effort to promote a vision of “Russianness” as a repository for a unique set of cultural values. The relationship between the individual’s narrated journey of return and the projected collaborative processes that enlist local audiences in the construction of national identity may be overdetermined. These processes, moreover, may prove difficult to define without recourse to diasporic or other formations of identity that require substantive adaptation to the contexts of return. These challenges emphasize the need to question the ideological premises that inform the construction of return and its study.

Why Study Retur n? Return reinscribes territorial and disciplinary boundaries. As Rey Chow has indicated in her investigation of the relationship between area and cultural studies, transnational and diasporic writing are often associated with tropes of connection and enabling, with those productive figures extending to the scholar’s commitments to interdisciplinarity.2 The writing of return, conversely, can imply finality, a form of closure that is less accommodating to interdisciplinary study and more resistant to translation. Critical approaches to return risk becoming implicated in narratological processes that lead toward conclusion, a summing up and end to the experience of exile that closes off productive outlets of investigation by privileging localizing discourses, and in effect, marginalizing the critic’s position and work. At the same time, the scholar who studies narrative strategies of return may be seen as pursuing subjects or writers that were considered topical in exile but are now regarded as irrelevant. During the cold war, the West provided a haven for

4


writers and narratives deemed anti-Soviet. Universities offered forums for writers’ views, whether at invited lectures or with long-term professorships. Presses and libraries made their works available in the original Russian and in translations. Academics integrated writings by exiled writers into their curricula and research. But it was not only the exiles who found their place in the Western academy. Scholars in Slavic studies made valuable contributions to the field with their studies of exiled writers and translations of their works, interviews, and public presentations. They also facilitated connections between exiled writers and audiences in the West. In some respects, the study of return can be regarded as a continuation and critical revisitation of these scholars’ efforts to accommodate the circumstances by which exile entered the creative and critical traditions and the Western academy. Return, however, does not carry the frisson of excitement or the sense of ethical mission associated with handling “forbidden” texts. Works by returned exiles can take the form of television serials shown in nightly installments, as is the case with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and Vassily Aksyonov’s Moscow Saga. The writers may publish their works online and participate in online forums. They may publish works that are not eventually released in translation or, indeed, not intended for an international readership at all. To paraphrase Chow, scholars of exilic writing gained a certain upward mobility from their solidarity with exiles. And to continue Chow’s evaluation of such affiliations, the Slavist’s melancholy at the loss of the exile may be expressed as a denigration of “nationalism,” “globalization,” “postmodernism,” or other contemporary modalities that finalize the loss of his object of study and the ethical values it was felt to scholar noted that represent.3 The writing of return, in contrast to works produced in exile, may seem somehow undeserving of scholarly attention. But Russian exiles living in the West during the seventies and eighties were not an undifferentiated group of unequivocal literary heroes any more than repatriated former exiles are all literary icons of the postmodern age or irrelevant

Introduction

5

has-beens indulging in nostalgic reveries about the “good old, bad old” days when their writing mattered. While some readers may contend that exile is best and most dramatically challenged from within the condition of exile itself, narratives of return should not be approached exclusively as false evidence toward claims of the writer’s triumph over exile and adversity. Some readers may strive to find meaning in establishing more rigid disciplinary and cultural boundaries in the return of writers and their narratives to their ancestral home. However, narratives of return cannot be idealized as exemplary representations of national and personal history any more than they can be dismissed as purely reactionary affirmations of essentialist notions of identity, nation, or belonging. By maintaining ethical evaluations of literature shaped by cold war ideologies in historical context and moving toward an awareness of strategies of narrating and studying return that are oriented toward establishing consensus on issues of national and cultural identity, the study of the relationship between the writing of exile and return can reveal a heterogeneous set of texts and practices that directs our attention to new questions, approaches, and issues. The varieties of contemporary exilic writing were noted by literary scholars who observed that the wave of exiles and émigrés who left the Soviet Union from 1966 to the early 1980s did not constitute a group with a unified vision of its homeland, itself, or its goals upon reaching its adoptive lands.4 One scholar has noted that “any attempt to survey recent Russian émigré prose is an exercise in frustration. There is too much of it, by too many authors, in too many different genres.”5 Scholars attempted to address the heterogeneity of the writers of this “third wave” of emigration by compiling works of an encyclopedic nature that featured alphabetically or chronologically ordered entries for individual writers6 or by assembling collections of articles about émigré writers and their experiences.7 The latter category includes published conference proceedings in which scholars and writers presented their views of the exilic experience8 and scholars’ collections of interviews with émigré writers.9 Third-wave writers themselves actively

6


participated in the process, founding their own journals—such as Vladimir Maksimov’s Kontinent and Andrei Siniavskii’s Sintaksis—whose contents gave a loose indication of the writers’ creative and political affiliations and orientations.10 The diversity of Russian exilic writing has yielded a wide range of responses in the writing of return. If “all displaced people do not experience exile equally or uniformly” and “exile discourse thrives on detail, specificity, and locality,”11 return yields equally individualized experiences and narratives. Of those writers who have returned to Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, not all have done so in the same way or with the same intent. Many writers—Joseph Brodsky, Sergei Dovlatov, and Viktor Nekrasov among them—opted not to return to Russia or died before they could. Their returns were enacted exclusively on paper. Their works were included in the flood of previously unpublishable writings that entered into print in Russia in the 1990s, contributing to the diversity of new voices that characterized the years of perestroika and new articulations of the literary canon that have emerged since. Other writers maintain a regime of regular travel between Russia and the West. Zinovy Zinik, despite having become well integrated into London’s literary scene and having visited Russia many times since he emigrated in 1975, maintains that he is an “émigré writer.” In his words, this is “a useful concept to define a specific type of literature.”12 Iuz Aleshkovskii, Igor’ Efimov, Anatolii Gladilin, Natal’ia Gorbanevskaia, Iurii Kashkarov (1940–1994), Naum Korzhavin, Sasha Sokolov, and Aleksei Tsvetkov also are among those who have returned to Russia sporadically to visit or who travel regularly between Russia and their homes abroad. Others divide their time between a residence in the West and one in Russia but orient their creative activity, with varying degrees of exclusivity, to Russian audiences. Vassily Aksyonov (1932–2009), whose work I treat in detail in this study, spent considerable time in Moscow while maintaining a home in Biarritz.13 Among others who divide their time between two residences are Bakhit Kenzheev, Iurii Mamleev, Siniavskii (1925–1997), and Vladimir Voinovich. Some writers, such as Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008)

Introduction

7

and Eduard Limonov—both of whom I will treat at length— returned permanently, as did Iurii Kublanovskii and Aleksandr Zinov’ev (1922–2006). Even the offices of some émigré journals established abroad—Kontinent, Grani, and Strelets—permanently relocated their operations to Moscow. Despite the vast number of identifications and practices associated with return, in the wide range of narratives by those writers who no longer identify as exiles or émigrés and who maintain that they have permanently returned to Russia or a Russian readership, it is possible to discern shared practices that we can identify as rhetorical points of commonality in the construction of a writing of return.14 The writing of return reveals a debt to the exilic writing that preceded it. In addition to undoing their own exilic writings, the writers’ initial narratives of return reveal signs of discursive displacement that reflect the transitional status of their own work and that of the nation as both seek a stable self-identity. Eventually, following the initial transitional works produced soon after repatriation, their narratives of return find situated points of enunciation. While these features are found in the work of each of the returned exiles I treat in this study, the respective narrative constructions of home they project in their writing and other methods of self-presentation remain highly differentiated from one another. In identifying certain shared tendencies in the rhetorical representation of return, including the integration of social imperatives directed toward readers, I acknowledge the difficulty in posing questions of resistance to, or complicity with, certain imagined national aspirations. It can be an especially thorny issue to treat texts that engage such issues as nostalgia, rootedness, and the articulation of national identity at the same time they strive to negate previous narrativizations of exile. Problematizing the narrative processes and critical space between exile and return foregrounds the assumption that the rhetorical refiguration of exilic modes into modes emblematic of return can never be illustrated as a hermetic there-and-back in which identities developed in exile become seamlessly reintegrated following the writer’s repatriation. The aspirations

8


and proposed affiliations of returned exiles need not determine or overtake our understanding of how and why exilic texts become rewritten following the writers’ returns and the range of meanings this journey yields. In critical juxtaposition with one another and with postexilic writers outside of the Russian tradition, the shared practices of the writing of return must be historically and critically situated, but they cannot be characterized as a rigid system that generates a uniform corpus of texts and makes broadly generalized assumptions about returned writers and their audiences. In revealing the rhetorical practices affiliated with exile and return and by analyzing their narrative products, I aim for the methods and readings presented here to elucidate these writers’ narratives of return, which have received less attention and more limited distribution than their exilic writing, and to contribute to the small but growing corpus of studies of return. Because the recent Russian literary context is one of very few in which return is a realized, and not merely an idealized, counterpoint to exile, its models of “emplacement”15 can facilitate discussion of literary repatriation in the productive spaces between negative accounts of return as an inscribed end to exilic discourse and capitulation to isolationist constructs of national belonging and romanticized homecomings accompanied by nostalgic appropriations of past cultural roles for the writer and reader. Return, like exile, is constituted of diverse experiences and narratives. The writers who have experienced it position themselves variously, and their initial, transitional narratives of return—as well as their later, more stable constructions of emplacement—assume the potential to enact social and critical change. In tandem with transnational and diasporic literatures, the writing of return can reveal that which often has been omitted or suppressed from our understanding of what the end of exile might yield. Its study demonstrates the potential to generate a critical space alongside the study of exile and map the diverse processes of eliding difference between exilic narratives and narratives of return, as I will argue is the case in my reading of Aksyonov, or of emphasizing those differences,

Introduction

9

as in my readings of Solzhenitsyn and Limonov. At the same time, the end of exile entails a consideration of exile and return as finite modalities that occupy interstitial temporal zones. Having crossed geographical boundaries, the former exile then navigates discursive space to leave exile and arrive at return. In studying this journey, it is vital to acknowledge that while return is inevitably linked to history and biography and its narratives to the writers’ particular moment, narratives of return also widen the critical possibilities for understanding how and why specific subjects relocate themselves after exile.

H ow S h o ul d We Study Retur n? The diverse narratives I examine share rhetorical points of commonality in constructing a writing of return at the same time their agendas do not inscribe a uniform notion of home, identity, or nation. In identifying rhetorical constructs of exile that gradually become refigured to produce a writing of return that is not unvarying but variously oriented to the nation and the reader in its cultural politics, a comparative study allows for the examination of a heterogeneous body of texts that do not easily lend themselves to an overarching paradigm. A comparative study also accommodates readings that explore productive, and often provocative, lines of questioning while generating a model for the analysis of narratives of return that may be applied more broadly to texts outside of the Russian tradition. For this reason, I have devoted separate chapters to individual writers to demonstrate how each variously reorganizes his experienced and narrated exile into a highly mediated return that unites the writer, readers, and nation in stable, if differently imagined, constructs of community. I examine the work of Aksyonov, Solzhenitsyn, and Limonov, treating each writer’s narrative trajectory of exile and return as a case study to come to grips with the particular rhetorical strategies and cultural positions they adopt as they enact their returns. The selection of three writers whose creative production and politics could not be more distinct from one another is deliberate. Aksyonov, Solzhenitsyn, and

10


Limonov represent a wide range, one might even say the extremes, of the last generation of writers to return from exile. Yet the juxtaposition of these writers—and their works with vastly divergent politics, themes, and agendas—yields a discernible pattern of shared rhetorical practices by which exilic narratives become a writing of return. I elucidate the processes by which the exilic modes observable in each writer’s work—Aksyonov’s cosmopolitan ethics, Solzhenitsyn’s historiographical imperatives, and Limonov’s transgressive quasi-autobiographism—gradually become reshaped into narrative figures of return. Each writer initiates his return with a provisional discourse—Aksyonov’s writing of return features an unsituated transnational persona, transient figures in Solzhenitsyn’s “Binary Tales” emerge from the writer’s own two-month journey of return across Russia by train, and Limonov’s improbably named dislocated literary subject “Indiana Ivanovich” is “an alien among aliens”— that then gives way to a situated rhetorical position that is maintained through subsequent works and that functions as a national allegory. In each chapter, I identify the complex of narrative strategies and practices of self-presentation that the exiled writer employs to mediate between preexilic and exilic narratives and audiences at home and abroad. I then demonstrate how those strategies and practices are adapted to produce narratives of return, which include extraliterary projects such as photography and film and television adaptations of their work, to illustrate the processes by which identities and narratives previously available primarily to Western audiences become reindigenized. Michael Seidel describes the relationship between preexilic and exilic writing as “a necessary recourse: projection images proximity, imagination reinforms, allegorizes and enlivens material already assimilated, or to put it another way, new accounts draw from funds already on deposit.”16 Even as exilic narratives portray the impotence and eventual destruction of preexilic identities, as in the case of Limonov’s novel It’s Me, Eddie, they yield allusions to their preexilic sources. Exilic narratives also encode their intended reception—an

Introduction

11

exilic gesture both in its compensatory projection of audience and in the occasional variances between intended reception and individualized readings. All of these exilic rhetorical constructions are recognizable in their refigured forms in narratives of return. I examine the work of Aksyonov, Solzhenitsyn, and Limonov within the larger tropes of “travel,” “historiography,” and “autobiographism” to explicate the rhetorical confluences between their preexilic and exilic writing and, later, between their exilic work and their writing of return. The writers’ movement from an exilic predicament to one of return is grounded in the narrative and historical moments that reorient the relationship between the writer and his audience and necessitate a reengagement with ongoing processes of cultural identification. The questions that emerge in the course of examining the trajectory from exile to return are difficult and have ramifications for both the contemporary literary context and its study. Are non-Russian readers at all concerned with the work produced by former Russian exiles in return? Do contemporary Russian culture’s evocations of the Soviet past occasion a need for the return of oppositional writing and a return to redemptive constructions, such as those associated with exilic identity? If so, do the constructions of identity proposed in narratives of return challenge this process with writings that evince complicity with certain nationalist discourses or that propose various representations of the writing subject as competing proxies for the nation? Do they support this process by encouraging nostalgic appropriations of literary value? Taking into account the recent television adaptations of Aksyonov’s and Solzhenitsyn’s novels and Limonov’s departure from the literary world for a career in politics, it is also necessary to address whether, in figuring its own condition as well as that of the nation, the creative practices associated with return constitute a response to the post-Soviet waning of literature as a social force. In introducing my methodology and approach to these questions, it is instructive to look to the examples of two relevant studies: Amy K. Kaminsky’s After Exile (1999), a

12


study of South American narratives of postexile, and Andrew Baruch Wachtel’s Remaining Relevant after Communism (2006), a paradigmatic treatment of the types of writing that emerged across Eastern Europe after the fall of the iron curtain. My study responds to Kaminsky’s call to avoid universalizing metaphors of exile and return by offering case studies of individual writers and close readings of their work. “The colors, shape, and weight of the word ‘exile,’” Kaminsky writes, have been “eroded by the carelessness of those who picked it up and made use of it in their desire to name something else.”17 Certainly, a study of exilic writing that construes exile as a universal condition of alienation experienced similarly by all writing subjects would propose an easier task for itself by accounting for return in similarly universal terms. As Kaminsky notes, however, it is not in an undifferentiated universality but in specificity that we find productive, if difficult, directions for the study of return that confront the relationship between the historical and individual contexts of exile. In an effort to avoid contributing to the semantic erosion of the expansively accommodating metaphors of “exile” and “return,” I remain focused exclusively on the work of writers who physically returned to Russia and announced their return to the Russian reader and whose physical returns coincided with the widespread reformulation of Soviet constructions of identity into postSoviet Russian notions of selfhood. Kaminsky moreover argues that “the postexile who does not return is always something of an outsider. As is the one who does return.”18 The diasporic condition, in Kaminsky’s view, is the inevitable outcome of all cases of literary displacement.19 The “impossibility of national identity” for displaced writers of the Southern Cone becomes the impetus for their discursive forms. The wider context of the study of displacement allows for consideration of the diasporic condition of the exile who remains abroad, as well as for the returned exile who still feels not quite at home. The writers I treat, in distinction from the displaced figures Kaminsky discusses in her work, all believe in national identity. They are all willing

Introduction

13

to take the risks involved in defining and narrativizing it in exchange for the potential social and cultural contributions of its productive structures. The rhetorical strategies put forward by Aksyonov, Solzhenitsyn, and Limonov, together with these writers’ personal narratives of commitment to return, call upon the reader to participate in their respective agendas: the construction of home, the preservation of endangered cultural sites, and opposition to governing ideologies. The various means by which they elicit the reader’s participation in these agendas and in the construction of a sufficiently rooted and viable national identity form the subject of my work. It has been argued that writers and critics who experienced the fall of the Soviet Union from within its borders also transformed their rhetorical practices. However, to expand the notion of “return” to include those who did not experience exile as such would necessitate the creation of a broad and flexible framework within which “exile” and “return” would include the experiences of diasporic communities, religious groups, internal exiles, and numerous other constituencies. The definitions of “exile” and “return” would have to be extended to include discontinuities and reconnections of many kinds. Existing studies—for example, those that examine the rebirth of Orthodox Christianity in post-Soviet Russia—have focused on the “return” of particular traditions and communities. To organize the “return” of several such communities in an encyclopedic volume on the post-Soviet condition is a task for another study. My work complements Wachtel’s Remaining Relevant after Communism in that we both treat the same cultural moment and consider the question of how writers strive to maintain their relevance in the post-Soviet era. My approach, however, emphasizes the differences that Wachtel elides. Wachtel focuses “on broad literary strategies, more or less ignoring the differences between the various countries” of the former Eastern bloc to produce an ambitious “introduction to a transnational consideration of postcommunist literature,” a study of the “most significant currents of literary

14


development in Eastern Europe today.”20 In contrast, I work with a group of writers that may seem to be relatively small and homogeneous—all Russians, all male, all exiles of the late Soviet era who returned to Russia in the 1990s—but whose divergent constructions of exile and return require individual consideration of their rhetorical strategies of rearticulation and allegorization. If our subjects and methodologies differ, it is in our shared interest in uncovering the relationship between historical processes and narrative ones that Wachtel’s study and mine find common ground. Wachtel identifies distinguishable literary trends across the vast region he surveys but acknowledges in conclusion that recent events indicate “this period of broad postcommunist similarity might be coming to an end.”21 Biography and history function as guideposts that ground my analysis in organizing structures that help to determine when exile ends and return begins. My interrogation of the methods by which exile ends and becomes rearticulated as return takes place against this backdrop. My comparative approach to the exilic writing and narratives of return by three writers is not intended as a comprehensive or even representative survey of the writing of return. The specificity of the experiences of exile and return, not to mention the heterogeneity of the examples of Aksyonov, Solzhenitsyn, and Limonov, does not easily lend itself to a single, uniform, and comprehensive paradigm. Narrative returns may aspire to a coherent totality of post-Soviet Russian identities shared by the writer, reader, and critic and project a certain uniformity of intent and intended reception. This localized and highly ideologized set of similarities, however, should be juxtaposed with the processes by which initial, provisional narratives of return become stable and situated allegories. The former set of practices risks reinscribing cultural and disciplinary boundaries that can isolate returned exiles, their narratives, and their investigation. As a form of closure, return defined as such may emphasize claims to irreconcilable cultural and disciplinary differences. The latter processes more productively gesture toward how the writing

Introduction

15

of return, regardless of where its authors call home, is rhetorically constructed and how it interacts with other historically and biographically conditioned forms of cultural production. With this study, I aim to reconcile a sensitivity to individual articulations of exile and return, a critical approach to isolating ideologies of disciplinary difference, and the pragmatic goal of presenting a viable rhetorical model of return that is germane to other literary traditions and disciplines. The critic who seeks out confluences between interdisciplinary dialogue and the study of return is presented with a range of critical approaches that require adaptation if they are to serve their purpose. Interdisciplinarity is most often associated with diaspora, a critical modality that elucidates the relationship of diasporic communities to ancestral and adoptive homelands. Kaminsky reveals that the diasporic condition can in fact accommodate exiles and even returned former exiles, but can it describe returned exiles who deny displacement and claim their rootedness as exemplary for the nation? In considering the relationship between the relatively unstudied body of narratives of return and the prominence of diaspora in cultural studies of postcolonial contexts, the utility of diaspora for addressing and indeed enabling transnational connections over the more circumscribed national and local becomes evident. As Ella Shohat notes, “Since the very definition of house, home, and homeland requires a boundary, whether that is a fence, a wall, or a border, the metaphors of fluidity in diaspora and postcolonial discourses express the critique of a fixed notion of identity.”22 It may even be said that the writer who moves from exilic to diasporic constructs becomes critically viable. Nico Israel’s Outlandish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora (2000) explores the space between exile and diaspora to critically situate identity in works produced “out of place.” Israel offers exemplary readings of works by Joseph Conrad, Theodor Adorno, and Salman Rushdie that elucidate the tensions between modern constructions of exile as a solitary—often enabling—condition, diaspora, and the theories of postmodernism, hybridity, and postcoloniality that are often used to explicate them. In

16


Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (1998), Caren Kaplan looks to metaphors of travel, including diaspora, displacement, and exile; she explores how they operate in literary and feminist theory to critique the politics of location as an essentializing form of identity politics. Both Israel and Kaplan construe exile outside of universalizing ahistorical metaphors and totalizing modernist constructs to broaden the critical vocabularies used to study diasporic writing and situate narrative and critical texts in the viable interpretive spaces in between. Alternately, one encounters constructions of the national that are rooted and situated and that may find greater relevance to narratives of return. Timothy Brennan contrasts the cosmopolitan writer with the indigenous artist, the former “easier to embrace” and the latter posing “explicit challenges” to contemporary Western critical practices.23 In treating a writing of return that seeks above all to undo its exilic rhetorical constructs and situate itself at home, the critic must become attuned to constructions of national history, national identity, and the role of the writer that are challenging to accept. Indeed, one of the premises of Wachtel’s study is that the national writer as nation-builder is no longer a productive, or at all emergent, cultural figure. As a response to diaspora and diasporic studies, return and its study appear to close off appealing and expansive avenues for understanding the relationship between exile and displacement. Return seems to orient the critic toward assumptions about the writer’s role that have been attenuated by the economic and historical contingencies of the post-Soviet era. The nostalgia that accompanies figurations of the writer as a repository for truth and authentic constructions of national identity finds a counterpart in nostalgic affirmations of Russia’s recent return to authoritarianism. Discussions of the need for writers who openly oppose the state accompany speculation that the ideologies shaped by the cold war have returned more or less intact. In confronting the implications of such affirmations, an insistence upon the individuality of

Introduction

17

each writer’s response to his exilic and postexilic predicament may appear to set the “minor” struggles of identity politics against the larger problem of resurgent authoritarianism. This opposition, however, would assume that the writing of return functions in opposition to, or even unheeding of, institutional patriotic or nationalist interests. In fact, the writing of return can at times intersect with certain statesanctioned initiatives to rekindle support for such values. Whether or not they believe the writer should position his work to promote or contest state initiatives, returned former exiles—like the state—propose to establish a unifying sense of belonging and national identity. Alexei Yurchak has claimed that “an undeniable constitutive part of today’s phenomenon of ‘post-Soviet nostalgia,’ which is a complex post-Soviet construct, is the longing for the very real humane values, ethics, friendships, and creative possibilities that the reality of socialism afforded—often in spite of the state’s proclaimed goals.”24 The variety of unifying strategies and visions found in the writing of return demonstrate that the very conditions that occasion a rewriting of exilic narratives can also produce nostalgia for certain aspects of exilic writing and its production. Are nostalgic constructions to be the exclusive modality through which we approach repatriated writers and their study if we are to claim that they matter? By insisting upon the individuality of returned writers and the constructions of home that emerge in their narratives of return, my study itself may be implicated in nostalgic structures that privilege the artist and his role within the broader context of the third wave of emigration as a whole and the larger scale migrations taking place across and beyond Russia’s post-Soviet borders. A study of literary exile and return can potentially appear to write itself into an impasse by juxtaposing the individualized particularities of the experience and writing of return to a monolithically defined nation or by contrasting localized concerns—that draw their interpretive and critical models from the modern exilic past—with the empowering constructs of diasporic identity.

18


When studies of diaspora are construed not in opposition to the study of return, but alongside it in that they also propose potentially productive outcomes to exile, they can assist in the apprehension of narratives committed to a nationally defined identity. They do not envision unanchored freefloating subjects entirely deprived of location or agency any more than studies of return are restricted to proposing that its subjects can only be conceived in opposition to or in collaboration with the state, the West, or other monolithically conceived social institutions and the assumptions that accompany them. Diaspora studies often predicate the emergence of cohesive diasporic communities upon the rejection of certain contested notions of what constitutes the nation; studies of return and their subjects focus upon a variety of points of identification with the nation. In both cases, however, the study and narrativization of particularized articulations of national identity lends itself to the critique of false universals posited in the name of commonality and unity. These variations make it possible to treat three distinct representations of exile and return by writers from three separate generations (Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918, Aksyonov in 1932, and Limonov in 1943), while emphasizing that any similarity in their methods for writing return are not deliberately shared between them or passed down from one generation to the next. I begin with the example of Aksyonov, as his work follows a trajectory compatible with the critical concepts outlined in this introduction. He does not disavow his exile as Solzhenitsyn does, a gesture that in Solzhenitsyn’s case challenges the very premise that he rewrites his exilic narratives to generate a writing of return, nor do Aksyonov’s writings of return exhibit the stereotyped primordial nationalism that Limonov claims for his political platform. In arguing for the study of return I do not intend to suggest that a few narratives of return can make the uncontested claim to have global currency. Rather, this study of returned writers and their narratives locates their articulations of the nation within contemporary criticism and against the background of ongoing post-Soviet cultural processes, such as

Introduction

19

the emergence of nostalgia as a dominant mode of cultural production and interpretation. The brief excurses I have provided in these introductory remarks and the more detailed materials and case studies presented in subsequent chapters are intended to demonstrate how we can productively read and discuss the corpus of texts and other mediations that constitute narratives of return, and how investigations into the shared rhetorical patterns and individuated refractions found in narratives of return that propose to construct an “imagined community” can contribute more broadly to the study of return as a complex outcome of exile and a subject of critical inquiry.

S ituating Retur n “Exile,” as I have used it in this introduction, refers to lived experiences and modalities of writing and is not intended to conflate individualized personal circumstances or creative agendas under a single category. Similarly, “return” refers to a complex of practices, including the dissolution of exilic rhetorical structures and the dynamics of reception, that do not always correspond to a single moment of physical repatriation, although it is accompanied by a realized journey of repatriation in the case of each writer I study. Focusing on individual histories in separate chapters allows for discussion of the specific conditions and rhetorical refractions of each writer’s exile and return. Aksyonov has referred to himself at different times as a voluntary émigré and a forced exile. Solzhenitsyn depicts the moment of his forced departure in 1974 in unambiguous terms: hustled to Moscow’s Sheremetevo airport from a cell in Lefortovo prison, he was placed on a flight to Germany under official escort, a coarse piece of prison-issue bread still in his pocket as “a lump of something solid to show that it did really happen.”25 Limonov maintains his separation from other exiles and the “literary ghetto” of Russian literature abroad by asserting that he left Russia of his own accord. While I treat these individual stories and their implications for writing in the chapters devoted to each author, I use the term “exile” to refer to the narrative constructs that accompany physical exile

20


and that feature the rhetorical patterns that will be dismantled and rearticulated after return. Once exile becomes a biographical fact for the authors I treat in my study, it quickly obtains specific rhetorical and thematic reflections in their work. Aksyonov’s travel memoir In Search of Melancholy Baby (1987) chronicles his process of finding a home in a foreign land, Solzhenitsyn’s The Little Grain Fell between Two Millstones (Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov, 1998–2003) describes his self-admitted disorientation when confronted with certain Western institutions, and Limonov’s It’s Me, Eddie: A Fictional Memoir (1983) introduces his exilic alter ego “Eddie,” who loses his wife and his identity as a poet upon arriving in New York. Situated firmly within historically specific conditions of writing, exile here does not dissolve into “a metaphor for the alienated or marginalized modern consciousness,” a generalized discourse of displacement so expansive as to encompass any alienation or cultural disaffiliation that is not grounded in the lived experience of exile as such.26 While Aksyonov and Limonov may frequently tap into motifs of dislocation and outsiderhood by respectively positioning themselves within a multicultural America or among fellow social outcasts, all the writers, to greater or lesser degrees, acknowledge the impact of exile on their lives and work in autobiographical contexts. Aksyonov, Solzhenitsyn, and Limonov respond to their post-Soviet predicament by first acknowledging their dislocation as newly returned subjects in the confusing, if exhilarating, early 1990s and then engaging the well-defined cultural mechanisms at work in the Putin era’s “new regime.”27 The relationship of their most recent writing of return to statesponsored projects of cultural definition ranges from a shared commitment to resurrecting particular sites of cultural meaning to organized, even violent, political opposition. Their projects of return also occasion a response to the economic, political, and cultural changes that marked the transition from the Soviet to post-Soviet and saw a sharp decline in the literary market.28 In depicting its own predicament along with that of the nation, the writing of return promotes vastly

Introduction

21

divergent projects of nation-building and problematizes constructions of agency. Through a comparative analysis of these writers’ histories and narratives, the study of return can account for the representation of the writer, the reader, and the nation within a period of transition while avoiding overextended metaphors of national belonging that could result in a scholarly hermeticism that removes its subjects and their investigation from wider debate. In Chapter 2, “Russian Cosmopolitan,” I treat the return of Aksyonov to discuss how the “unexpected cosmopolitanism” of exile becomes expressed as an ethical commitment to cosmopolitan ideals on the part of the returned writer, who encourages the same commitment on the part of the reader in his post-Soviet narratives. In contrast to his exilic narratives, which invite the reader to explore the potentials of estrangement, Aksyonov’s writings of return rhetorically enact homecomings. They identify the reader as “coauthor” and invite participation in collaborative creative performances that have real-world applications, such as contributing to the building of one’s “home” inside and outside the text, and participating in projects that increase the engagement and standing of Russian culture in the global sphere. His novels The New Sweet Style (1997) and Caesarean Illumination (2002) evince the social agenda at their center, confronting not only isolationist nationalist ideologies but figures such as Brennan’s diasporic “third-world celebrity” writer and opportunistic new Russian businessmen—global entrepreneurs who exploit the local for their own gain—to promote social and cultural values that situate Russian culture constructively within the processes of cultural globalization. Extraliterary arenas of creative endeavor, such as television, allow the mediated presence of the author as a figure of return to be quickly and effectively transmitted to a local audience, and account for Western readers’ and publishers’ reduced exposure to their work, along with the post-Soviet marginalization of literature. I demonstrate how Aksyonov’s Moscow Saga (1993; released in translation as Generations of Winter and The Winter’s Hero), a family novel written for a Western

22


audience, was marketed to Russian readers as a historical and national epic, and ultimately produced as a popular television miniseries in 2004, to argue that these adaptations repackage representations of national identity for increasingly local audiences. Like Moskva-kva-kva (2006), set in the apartment building where Aksyonov lived until his passing in July 2009, such narratives illustrate how constructions of home may conflict with cosmopolitan ideals. In Chapter 3, “Agency Abroad and at Home,” I examine the trajectory of Solzhenitsyn, whose work strives to negate exile’s effects while engaging the potentials of return. His narrative of exile and return, as he has written it, renders an uninterrupted arc, illustrated in his immediate pronouncement of his intent to return to Russia upon his exile to the West; his revisitation of preexilic genres and works, such as the prose-poem “Miniatures,” first written from 1958 to 1960 and then after his return from 1996 to 1999; and his 2006 screenplay for the television adaptation of his 1969 novel The First Circle. Within the narrative continuity of his oeuvre, I identify exilic constructs in the rhetorical gaps in The Red Wheel, a work that depicts not only the 1917 February Revolution, but the discontinuities between the stated public utility and individual readings of the work— that is, between authority and agency. Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return is concerned with preserving local cultural values, emblematized in the ruins that appear throughout the recent “Miniatures” and the rural way of life the writer encountered during his two-month odyssey of return and described in his “Binary Tales.” Solzhenitsyn sought to avoid any association between exile and marginality; yet following his return he becomes an advocate for threatened discourses that have become marginalized in contemporary Russian culture. Critics have argued that Solzhenitsyn’s position represents a troubling mode of affirmation in that it is predicated upon the need for marginalized local populations and values. The television adaptation of The First Circle thus has been read by some as Solzhenitsyn’s inclusion of his own writing among the marginalized discourses that require advocacy, and an

Introduction

23

illustration of the process by which the novel becomes a state-sponsored television channel’s reconciliation with, and appropriation of, oppositional writing. The complex issues of identification and affiliation, authority and agency that organize the “last great Russian writer’s” narratives of return are indicative of the tensions in the task of writing national literature in a globalized world in which the national writer, and even the nation itself, are often considered obsolete. The fourth chapter of my study, “Authenticity, Camera, Action,” concerns the exile who abandons literature upon his return. For Limonov, return is a process of revelation that generates a series of autobiographical albums, narratives, and public performances intended to archive his exilic past and reveal an authentic self. If Limonov’s exilic novel It’s Me Eddie (1978) depicted the rage of a Russian poet on the cultural periphery of New York, repatriation involved occupying the cultural center by returning to Moscow and founding an ultranationalist political party. The photographic autobiography Limonov in Photographs (1996) visually documents this shift with images and captions that identify in succession the “poet,” “Eddie,” and “the thinker and his AK-47.” From the lace and lilac finery of the exilic persona of It’s Me, Eddie, to the army fatigues he wore when he joined snipers in Sarajevo, Limonov’s sartorial choices chronicle his perpetuation of self-valorizing myths and integration into chosen communities. His writing of return reflects this transition, with exilic novels that eschew any potential comparison with literary predecessors giving way to the political antiutopian allegory 316, Point “B” (1998), in which a Russian immigrant becomes president of an allegorized United States, and eventually to nonfiction works such as My Political Biography and Limonov versus Putin that align Limonov with a selected pantheon of writers-cum-political thinkers. Limonov’s series of autobiographical portraits documents his development as he sought to establish himself outside of Russian émigré literary circles, then countered his self-constructed image of a Westernized individual subject by immersing himself in the communal and highly nativist nationalist ideology of his National Bolshevik

24


Party. Limonov’s emplacement is now contingent on both his self-suppression, which denies discursive autonomy to his former exilic literary selves, and his suppression by state authorities. As literature no longer generates serious threats to the state, Limonov—the leader of a now-banned political party— appropriates the hegemonic discourses of those in power to suppress his own past and to assert his own oppositional platform within culturally dominant hierarchical structures. In my conclusion, I address the question of when the writing of return might be said to come to an end. As the incomplete list of returned writers of the third wave provided above indicates, many practitioners of return are at least a generation older than the new voices contributing to current Russian literature. Some, such as the late Aksyonov, Siniavskii and Solzhenitsyn, demonstrate that neither biography nor its rhetorical reflections in the writing of exile and return generates a static system that is impermeable to further productive readings. Does return continue as long as its writers and readers continue to creatively enact it, or does return continue as long as post-Soviet questions of identity find validation in narratives of return? Does return end earlier, when its narratives reach some final state of assimilation? I also address the issue of nostalgia, as the potential to recuperate national discourses through nostalgic formations, including the figure of the author-dissident, suggests that renewed interest in the writing of returned exiles may stem from recovering reading practices and author functions associated with the Soviet past. The question of whether nostalgia should be applied to the writing of return, or whether it can be effectively critiqued when both writers and readers can be seen to channel its potential for emancipatory readings, has ramifications for both contemporary Russian culture and its study.29 In Aksyonov’s, Solzhenitsyn’s, and Limonov’s work, exile is rhetorically represented, then undone, to create emplaced voices that engage in dialogue with national and critical discourses. As the title of my study indicates, exiles at home represent a point of transition that helps to map the cultural

Introduction

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and critical locations of contemporary Russian writing. The risks of self-orientalization, nostalgia, and institutionalism (or clichés of anti-institutionalism) bump up against questions of whether emplacement may be posited as a feasible, or even appropriate, end to exile and transition to new forms of national writing. Return entails a reconsideration of redemptive constructions of reading and the relationship between literature and the state. Its study may alienate readers for whom such reading practices represent a nostalgic form of cultural identification. It may also be selectively appropriated by those who wish to elaborate a monolithic vision of post-Soviet Russian national identity and cultural value. A comparative approach to the writers and emphasis on the rhetorical constructions in their enactments of return frustrates such appropriations; it may also create conflict for those who believe that the exiled writer, even in return, does not seek the confluence of constructed authorial and national identities but remains a defender of objective truths. At the same time it raises provocative questions, return continues the dialogue begun by earlier generations. In 1956 Gleb Struve introduced the image of Russian exilic writing as a temporarily diverted stream that would eventually flow back into the river of Russian literature. Few could have imagined how this neat metaphor would, on the one hand, illustrate precisely what happened, and on the other, require qualifiers and caveats by way of demonstrating how personalized experiences and narratives of exile would lead to the production and performance of highly individualized returns at a moment of dramatic social and cultural change. This book— in its partial mapping of the range of the writing of return and its demonstration that the commitments and constructs of narrative return allow its subjects to come home, even as “home” obtains a different set of values and associations for each writer—is intended to continue earlier discussions at the same time that it opens a dialogue between the growing body of studies of exilic writing and the imagined or realized returns of their subjects.


Chapter 2

4

Russi a n Cosmopolitan

With the reinstatement of his Russian citizenship in 1990,

the writer Vassily Aksyonov, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1980, began returning to Moscow twice a year from his home in Washington, DC. Rapid changes to the city guaranteed the writer would see a different Moscow on each visit, but it has been said that each trip brought a different Aksyonov to Moscow as well. First he was the reigning writer for the generation of the 1960s, returning to a country that no longer existed. Then he was the author of The Island of Crimea (1981), a novel only publishable after the reforms of perestroika that depicted a utopia as attractive and unstable as Russia was during the early 1990s.1 The young Aksyonov enjoyed a reputation as a cosmopolitan writer for the urbane, Westernized image he cultivated during the Soviet era, and he maintained that image during his ten years in exile. In more recent years Aksyonov’s cosmopolitan outlook returned to its roots and became increasingly oriented to exclusively Russian readers. As of 2004, Aksyonov no longer lived in Washington, but split his time between a home in Biarritz and the Moscow apartment made available to him in 1991. He traveled to Russia several times a year to promote his work on television and in public appearances, and regularly published novels, interviews, and journalistic pieces for his Russian audience, having published no fewer than ten books between 1991 and 2007.2 Judging by the commercial success of Aksyonov’s 2006 novel Moskva kva-kva—whose title features an echolike play on the name of the Russian capital—his popularity among his

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Russian readers only increased following his return from exile. The novel became available in stores on February 25, 2006, and by March 14, at a reading and discussion of the novel organized by the publishing house Eksmo, it was announced that the first print run of 30,100 copies was nearly sold out.3 Moskva kva-kva is not only a novel about Russia’s capital—the city Aksyonov called home for more than half of every year after 2004. It is, in fact, about the very apartment building in which he lived. The building is one of Moscow’s “Seven Sisters,” a Stalin-era high-rise apartment building on the Kotel’nicheskaya River embankment whose distinctive towers were completed in 1952. Aksyonov’s trajectory—from cosmopolitan Soviet youth, to exile in America, to a returned exile whose constructions of home include even the nostalgically tinged heady optimism and monumental architecture of the Stalin era—illustrates that the end of exile can generate unexpected perspectives on the relationships between exile and return, narration, and rhetorical emplacement. As Aksyonov’s recent activities and novel suggest, the conditions of his many returns to Russia and his constructions of home substantively refigure motifs that structured his creative activity during his period of exile. Émigré critics have seen in Aksyonov a “mirror of Russian liberalism” and have proposed that the development of the author’s writerly persona is representative of the changing attitudes of the Russian intelligentsia during the late Soviet period. However, if “Aksyonov’s artistic experiments corresponded almost perfectly with the insight of the late 1950s, the hope of the early 60s, the doubts of the late 60s, and the despair of the early 70s,”4 it can be said that his writings of exile, produced during the 1980s, and his writings of return, dating from the mid-1990s to the present, offer narratives about narratives: the writings of exile continue to reflect the lives and social conditions of his contemporaries, but they also establish connections with new audiences and refigured rhetorical strategies; following the writer’s return they undo those relationships and strategies to generate new modes of interaction with local audiences. The reflexivity


29

of Aksyonov’s writing of these periods, with its continual reconfigurations of community and national and authorial identity, must be construed against the background of changing institutional critical and cultural practices that accompanies his exile and many returns. Once he finds himself abroad, Aksyonov’s embrace and criticism of the exilic condition reveal his allegiances to, and doubts about, modernist formulations of exile and its universalizing discourses of cultural displacement. This will lead him to experiment with varied constructions of national cultural identity following his physical return, and the return of his texts, to Russia. Throughout the period of exile and return, Aksyonov writes travelogues, whether to challenge the opposition of cultural belonging and dislocation, to redefine the location of the reader vis-à-vis the author, or to support, then eventually challenge, postmodern claims to inclusivity. The travelogue In Search of Melancholy Baby rhetorically structures his exile, finding commonality, rather than opposition, between aesthetic tropes of travel and exile. A transitional period distinguished by the numerous short works produced during his early regime of travel between Russia and the West reveals transnational figures ungrounded in either sustained narratives or place. These modalities eventually give way to rooted representations of culturally, nationally, and rhetorically defined formations of community. I place Aksyonov’s writing within the broader discussion of metaphors of travel as a means of understanding how his early Soviet and exilic writings negotiate tropes of commonality, and how his later writings of return in contrast navigate more uneasily between the rubrics of national belonging and cosmopolitan commitment. I look to contemporary theorizations of travel, especially those put forward by Caren Kaplan and Aihwa Ong, as means of challenging binary formations (such as official/unofficial), and the constraints they place on critical readings of Aksyonov’s explorations of travel, displacement, and belonging. This dynamic opens possibilities for recognizing the productive imperatives that organize Aksyonov’s later novels of return, while also demonstrating

30


that these works often present a precarious balance between the rhetoric of return, with its emphasis upon on the writer’s relation to the reader, and institutions that would appropriate this rhetoric toward supporting nationalist ideologies. Also of interest here is Aksyonov’s self-identification as a cosmopolitan writer, for it sustains the tension, to use Bruce Robbins’s terms, between the “negative” sense of cosmopolitanism that associates it with privileged figures who are not at all “rootless” but are in fact situated within professional or elite institutions, and the “positive” values associated with cosmopolitan “‘belonging’ to parts of the world other than one’s nation,” as a means of negotiating local and global cultural articulations.5 Aksyonov’s embrace of the term “cosmopolitan” may initially appear simply to provide another name for his status as an exile. His swift acclimatization to the Western academy, where he held employment while continuing his career as a writer, suggests that his exile might be associated with the privileged detachment often negatively associated with cosmopolitanism. His acknowledgement of a deep American provincialism, unimaginable during his America-infatuated Soviet youth, as well as his deliberate challenges to the Soviet regime’s pejorative use of the term to designate Jewish intellectuals, however, shape the cosmopolitan cultural imperatives that he orients to his respective audiences. It is only after Aksyonov begins to travel regularly to Russia that he begins to explore his Jewish heritage in both his travels and his writing, and the ensuing narratives form the initial part of his strategy to join the figures of the writer and reader in the creative act of constructing narratives of return. None of this is to say that Aksyonov’s exile was not a forcible expulsion outside Russia’s borders, that he construed his exile in purely enabling terms, or that his recent regimen of travel, frequent returns to Russia and their resulting narratives ameliorated the pain of his exile. Rather, by proposing that his writing of return reflects the strained relationship between certain national and cosmopolitan affiliations, we can consider questions that have yet to be raised about his


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recent works. Does Aksyonov’s self-proclaimed shift from modernist exile to postmodern modes of displacement account for the increasingly particularized definitions of home and his orientation to a narrower audience in his narratives of return? How did his family novel A Moscow Saga become repositioned from potential American bestseller to contemporary Russian national epic to blockbuster television miniseries, and what do these adaptations reveal about the particularities of reception for “national” literature? The movement of the writer and his texts facilitates an approach to the writing of return that takes such transitions into account, and demonstrates the critical potential of exploring the boundaries between them. In this chapter, I will first treat Aksyonov’s early travelogues and their relation to his works written in exile. By negotiating between travel and exile, the writer and his texts mediate between Soviet and Western culture, allowing both the authorial persona and his audiences to traverse the borders between them. The later narratives of return interrogate the boundaries between the cosmopolitan and national, narrating author-figure and biographical subject, and pose more complicated relations that will be addressed in more detail in the second part of the chapter devoted to narratives of return. Beginning with Aksyonov’s writings of the late 1960s, which simultaneously address readers of his published works and unpublished manuscripts and traverse the boundaries between these publication sites, the authorial persona is a necessary figure for establishing a connection between the particular conditions of the author and the shared experiences of his readers. If it can be said that one extreme of criticism would eliminate all vestiges of the author, and the other proposes to limit readings to how they compare with the biographical author’s experiences, it is vital to look to the mediating figure of the authorial persona in the case of the Soviet writer who integrates a quasi-autobiographical narrator or protagonist into much of his work as Aksyonov does. The authorial persona allows for a construction of authorship that is multiple, and includes biographical facts about

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the author, the reader who appropriates the text, as well as intertextual references.6 In this way the persona is also an effective medium for historically and socially grounding the movement from exile to return, which is figured in the writer’s biography and the broader reception of his later texts.

As tro nauts and Amphi b i an s Metaphors of travel appear frequently in Aksyonov’s writing—from his “youth prose” of the 1960s, and his works produced in exile, to his writing of return—and develop over time. Whether generating a sense of mobility that challenges stable conventions for locating identity in the Soviet context, or introducing new tropes for the physical and rhetorical acts of exile and return into contemporary Russian writing, Aksyonov’s travel narratives reflect the experiences and creative tasks he shares with his audience. Travel themes allowed the young Aksyonov to broaden the rigid boundaries of Soviet prose. The protagonists of A Starry Ticket (Zvezdnyi bilet, 1961) are motivated by a vacation in Tallinn rather than professional or social obligations, and their journey takes them west to the Baltics, rather than east to Siberia, where most youth were sent to participate in Soviet construction projects. Such narratives marked a break from published tales “about the glorious deeds of our youth at the building sites of communism” that often inspired young writers to travel eastward and write construction narratives of their own.7 The writer Victor Erofeyev paraphrases Neil Armstrong to metaphorically link the journeys undertaken by the protagonists of A Starry Ticket and “Halfway to the Moon” (“Na polputi k lune,” 1962) with the groundbreaking literary path forged by Aksyonov—a path subsequently traversed by his readers and fellow writers—when he describes the effect of reading A Starry Ticket as one “small step for a writer, but a giant leap for the Russian mentality.”8 This feature of Aksyonov’s work is similarly reflected in the title of the 1966 film project The Journey (Puteshestvie), which consists of three adaptations of Aksyonov’s early stories “Halfway to the Moon,” “Papa, What Does it Spell?”


33

(“Papa, slozhi!” 1962) and “Lunches of 1943” (“Zavtraki sorok tret’ego,” 1962). “Halfway to the Moon,” the tale of a coarse working man who becomes enamored of a flight attendant on a trip from Khabarovsk to Moscow and is transformed through the numerous flights on the same itinerary he takes in the hope of encountering her again, is the only tale of the three to explicitly feature the theme of travel. The incongruity of the protagonist’s rough demeanor in the genteel environment of the plane on his initial flight parallels the clash between the smell “of tomatoes and ChechenIngush cognac” in a room in which a song by “three French boys . . . about how they had been round the whole wide world and seen things you would never see” plays.9 Such conflicting notes eventually give way as travel and reading become an integral part of the protagonist’s life; just as travel and its attendant pastimes contribute to the distinct identities of the flight attendant, a sailor acquaintance, and a past love interest who leads geological expeditions, so are they instrumental to the protagonist’s process of self-discovery.10 The other two stories adapted for The Journey are among those Konstantin Kustanovich describes as “anti-romantic,” in that they do not offer escapes to far-off places or the promise of love, but unconventional approaches to conflict and coping with dissatisfaction in one’s day to day life. In this way, they break from the stories of the early 1960s—which depicted a kind of balance between social commitment and youthful desires—to explore an older protagonist’s complex relations with others and the world around him.11 They also depict reading practices that do not so much resemble models for romantic appropriation as propose unconventional and creative answers to artistic and social conventions.12 A characteristic work of this period is “Little Whale, Varnisher of Reality” (1964), in which a father reads fairy tales to his son before bed. The boy reacts angrily to the violent climax of a story in which one animal attacks another, and is unable to wait for the resolution to the conflict. When the next story comes to a similarly violent climax, in which a wolf grips a goat kid in its jaws, the boy describes the scenario as

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a billy goat playing with its son. The father points out his son’s mistake and tries to explain the conventions of storytelling to him, but soon accepts his son’s version of events. The child’s view of the world provides an escape from the difficult social conditions the protagonist confronts each day, as well as an approach to rewriting circumstances that seem predetermined and out of his control. The rules of storytelling, which the protagonist treated as rigid system unto itself, are revealed to be mutable. This shift in reading habits allows the protagonist to change his view of the narrative of his life.13 Aksyonov incorporated similar constructions into the travelogues he began to write in the mid-1960s. Here Aksyonov also introduces tropes that are further explored in the later works he had no hope of publishing in the Soviet Union, such as his novel The Burn (completed in 1975), as well as the works he would write in the West following his exile. Like many of the works written “for the drawer,” his exilic writings and narratives of return, the travelogues explore the predicament of narrating on the interstices of the national and the cosmopolitan. As the travelogues were intended for publication in the Soviet Union, however, Aksyonov does not posit a cosmopolitan identity as an alternative to an ideologically defined, internationalist Soviet one, but incorporates brief, subjective meditations into the travelogues as a means of considering the role of the artist and reader between the social and aesthetic imperatives of the Russian and European modernist traditions and political realities in the Soviet Union.14 It is these meditations, largely centered around the modernist trope of alienation, that find echoes in his unpublishable novels and stories that eventually find their way into print abroad. Following Nikita Khrushchev’s assertion in 1963 that writers needed to travel abroad to inform Soviet readers of how people of other nations lived, the number of works devoted to travel grew dramatically.15 Permission to travel was a privilege granted only to those writers who were considered ideologically trustworthy, but by most accounts,


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writers were kept on an extremely short leash. To get a sense of what these officially organized trips for writers were like, we can look to Anatoly Gladilin’s account of his 1961 trip to Paris. Like Aksyonov, Gladilin published several examples of travel prose, but only in emigration could he reveal just how constricted the conditions of these travels were. The Soviet writers in Paris were accompanied by chaperones at every step, and interaction with Parisians was so restricted that a planned meeting with students was spontaneously cancelled, allowing the students and writers only a brief glance at each other through the windows of a bus while a Soviet guide invented a reason why the meeting could not take place.16 As Marina Balina demonstrates in her study of travel prose of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, writers confronted with such circumstances sought out loopholes in the conventions of their genre that allowed them to circumvent any discussion of the actual conditions of their trips and invite the reader to become an active participant in the experience of travel and the creation of the travel text.17 Aksyonov was allowed to visit India, Italy, Japan, and Poland in 1962. In 1963 he traveled to Argentina and visited Japan a second time. These trips resulted in the travelogues “Japanese Jottings” (“Iaponskie zametki,” 1964) and “Under the Sky of Sultry Argentina” (“Pod nebom znoinoi Argentiny,” 1966). In the period from 1965 to 1967, he traveled to Austria, Bulgaria, England, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia. Between 1975 and 1979, he visited France, Germany, Italy, and the United States.18 His account of his trip to the United States, titled Around the Clock NonStop (Kruglye sutki non-stop, 1976), would be followed by a second American travelogue written in exile, In Search of Melancholy Baby (V poiskakh grustnogo bebi, 1987), in which he narrates the process by which he was deprived of his Soviet citizenship and made his home in Washington, DC. Travel privileges and their ensuing travel narratives, along with Aksyonov’s participation in a thriving youth culture during the early 1960s that extended beyond the page to promote Western styles of music and clothing, contributed

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to Aksyonov’s image as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan figure. Far from being born out of the ennui of privilege, however, Aksyonov’s travel writings brought with them a sense of excitement and expressed a concomitant shared, if covert, sense of alienation from certain elements of Soviet life. The sense of expectation with which the protagonist of “Halfway to the Moon” purchases three new suits upon arriving in Moscow, and his later near desperation as he tears open the seams of his undergarments to spend his remaining travelers checks on more cross-country airplane tickets is emblematic of this cultural impulse.19 “Japanese Jottings,” “Under the Sky of Sultry Argentina,” and Around the Clock Non-Stop all appeared in the Soviet press. As the Soviet reader of this time could hardly be expected to enjoy similar travel experiences, Aksyonov, like other travel writers of the period, developed a strategy of interspersing highly subjective passages among generalized impressions of his travels, so that issues of aesthetic and ideological difference became inextricably tied to questions of identity.20 This device diminishes the social divide that separates the experiences of the reader and writer by allowing the reader to, as Balina notes, “travel along with the writer” and thus lift the “mask of the official representative from the face of the writer just a little bit, making him or her human again and showing that the writer had not yet fully learned how not to think, suffer, and doubt.”21 On the one hand, these writings may be read more generally within a universalized idiom of alienation that cultivates an intimate relationship of affiliation between reader and writer despite the official institutions that would prefer to place the writer in a position of social instruction and privilege. On the other hand, Aksyonov’s travel writings feature linguistic tropes, such as the consistent mispronunciation of his name, that contribute to a rhetorical construction of displacement in which signifier and signified rarely correspond. These features will be developed in Aksyonov’s exilic travelogue In Search of Melancholy Baby to produce the rhetoric of exile characteristic of Aksyonov’s later works written in the United States.


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The early “Japanese Jottings” has been described as a “safe content” piece that utilizes “a radical, impressionistic style.”22 Along with the traveler’s impressions of his surroundings, it explores his thoughts on alienation, personified in the figure of a lone bicyclist. Of his encounter with the bicyclist, Aksyonov writes, “He is very close to me, and I understand only too well what it means to transport one’s inner world on two small wheels, to ride off into the darkness on brittle spokes.”23 Here Aksyonov draws on both meanings of the word “close” (blizok) to suggest that the bicyclist’s state of isolation is very much akin to his own, a sentiment that allows Aksyonov to address individual, rather than collective, concerns in his travel essay. Far from suggesting that he and the bicyclist share a universal sense of alienation, however, Aksyonov elucidates their differences through terms that do not correspond to one another in register. Thus, a later passage invoking the bicyclist concludes, “one cannot dissolve into another nation. The soul has no ‘emergency ration,’ it is all consumed on one’s own country. Perhaps that is why one cannot discover the exact nature of another’s sorrow.”24 This passage may be read as an example of the formal requirement to champion Soviet culture, with the writer dutifully noting that his soul, like that of every Soviet citizen, is thoroughly invested in his homeland. Yet Aksyonov also allows that this point of identification is restricted in its capacity to understand others by this very same definition. The image of the traveler as a space-suited astronaut is a distinctly Soviet one: strictly enforced rules about movement outside of Russia’s borders give the traveler little choice but to experience foreign lands from within a protected bubble. By suggesting that this bubble may have a social or ideological function but has little bearing on matters of the soul, Aksyonov rhetorically identifies the differences between himself and the Japanese bicyclist in the displacement constructed by the social institutions that surround him, rather than on individual terms. This sentiment is mirrored in the “I” and “he” that Aksyonov uses to describe himself and the bicyclist as closely identified individuals, pronouns that

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yield to the impersonal constructions he uses to describe the sphere of officialdom that surrounds him but does not define his identity while abroad. Aksyonov will revisit the image of the traveler as astronaut in his essay “Lungs and Gills,” written six years after his exile from the Soviet Union. In reference to the condition of the writer in emigration, he notes, “A working writer . . . shouldn’t count on the steadily leaking container on his back . . . With a limited amount of the authentic Russian air in your shoulder cylinders, those batteries cannot be recharged whenever you want.”25 As suggested by the title of the essay, the cultural isolation of the astronaut should instead give way to an amphibious existence. Aksyonov proposes the exiled writer develop “lungs and gills” that will allow him to dive and emerge through diverse linguistic and cultural territories throughout each day. Noting moreover that the needs of the Russian reader may be better met by the amphibious cosmopolitan than the space-suited traveler counting each last breath of artificially preserved native air, he advises fellow exiles: “Take advantage of your unexpected cosmopolitanism. You cannot vouch that this is exactly what your native culture wants from you at the moment.”26 The exile as amphibian will reemerge later as a significant rewriting of the trope of displacement in In Search of Melancholy Baby. Like “Japanese Jottings,” “Under the Sky of Sultry Argentina” is an early travel memoir that introduces ideas that find resonance in Aksyonov’s later exilic writings. The author arrives in Argentina as part of a Soviet delegation promoting the film The Colleagues, an adaptation of Aksyonov’s early novel of the same name. “Under the Sky of Sultry Argentina” also features subjective passages intended to draw the reader and writer into a complicit relationship in which the mediation of an official point of view is absent. Commenting on Orson Welles’s 1962 film adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial for example, he writes, “All right, when an argument starts over Kafka’s, or in this case, Orson Welles’, right to depict such a world, just try to remember if you have never in your life found yourself in endless, terrifying corridors or


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in a constricting dead end. I know I have.”27 Those who are aware of Aksyonov’s tendency to insert subjective statements directed to the reader will recognize that at the same time he appears to be describing sensations universally associated with fear, he is describing the claustrophobia or “ideological congestion” associated with Soviet life.28 This idea will be elucidated in a 1992 essay in which Aksyonov discusses the phenomenon of writers living in close proximity to one another in the Soviet Union. Writers were “grouped together in various ‘palaces of the arts’ and literary settlements,” where “fundamental betrayals were initiated . . . In an area covering eleven time-zones the regime contrived to create an unimaginable crush of people . . . a labyrinth of Kafkaesque corridors and dead-ends.”29 Aksyonov’s strategy of developing the tropes of alienation found in his early Soviet travel writings for the English-reading audience he encounters in exile can be further illustrated through examples of linguistic disarticulation, exemplified not only by his shift from publishing in Russian to English but by the diverse renderings of his name. It is natural that accepted transliteration systems produce “Aksenov,” “Axionow,” and “Axionov,” among other variants, and the writer offers his preferred, if unconventional, variant “Aksyonov.” But intentional and unintentional misspellings of Aksyonov’s name provide a productive trope of displacement that simultaneously liberates and dislocates the writer from any fixed sense of identity associated with his name. In “Under the Sky of Sultry Argentina,” the writer’s photograph appears in the newspaper over the legend: “Boris Arsenov, officer of the fire department for Mosfil’m studios.” The film festival also begins with a showing of The Colleagues, “based on the story of the same name by Boris Arsenov, officer of the fire department of Mosfil’m.”30 The misidentification of the author results in the creation of an alter ego, “Boris Arsenov,” who leaves Buenos Aires for a glamorous Hollywood-like world of film and fantasy and eventually disappears into the world of dreams. The creation of this alter ego allows Aksyonov to insert fantastic episodes

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into his travelogue and depart from the tendency to construct travel writings around the delicate balance between ideological tenets and the author’s observations. The identity of Aksyonov’s alter ego may have emerged from at least two instances of misidentification that befell Aksyonov while one of his stories was being considered for film adaptation. An official request submitted by the screenwriter Konstantin Piotrovskii on December 7, 1959, to develop a film based on Aksyonov’s short story “Asphalt Roads” as well as the letter from the studio confirming receipt of the request, identified the author as “V. Arseniev,”31 a misidentification that may have led Aksyonov to consider introducing a split between “Aksyonov,” the Soviet writer, and “Arsenov,” the personage who lives in the world of film and fiction. The assertion of multiple identities, or the creation of an identity that challenged the essentialized image and task of the writer in the Soviet period, would eventually become an important strategy for Aksyonov by the late 1960s and 1970s. Establishing an official reputation as a screenwriter as well as a novelist,32 Aksyonov would also become known as a translator, travel writer, playwright, and writer of children’s books and short stories. Alongside his identity as a writer in these genres, Aksyonov established himself as the author of works that could not be published in Russia, but could be acquired and read by intrepid and resourceful readers of samizdat editions and eventually by readers abroad. By making intertextual references in his officially published travelogues to works that would not see print in Russia until the 1990s, Aksyonov contests the boundaries between his Soviet travel writings and later exilic writings, and encourages his readers to negotiate the margins between the two to consider them as a creative whole.

N ot- S o -S entimental Jour n eys Tropes in Aksyonov’s prose that link travel to the condition of exile, and later, to the experience of return, demonstrate that travel and displacement need not be treated, as Kaplan notes, as “binary categories where travel simply


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signifies modernism and displacement purely articulates postmodernism” but instead should be treated as modalities that allow us to question “the construction and proliferation of modernisms from a postmodern critical standpoint.”33 As we have seen, travel in the Soviet context is hardly the consumer-driven leisure activity it is in the West, and the Euro-American modernist tropes of exile that Kaplan argues work to remove themselves from political or historical contexts to generate aesthetic categories and ahistorical values are distinct from the highly politicized and historically specific rhetorical circumstances in which late Soviet exiles like Aksyonov found themselves.34 From his use of figures such as the mispronunciation of his name it becomes apparent that in his published works Aksyonov shared his sense of cultural isolation with his Soviet readers by using modernist idioms to elucidate shared conditions of alienation and anxiety, but given the opportunity to explicate these ideas in essays published abroad, turned the focus of these passages to the specific condition of the Soviet writer. Far from creating simple narratives of opposition that posit official strictures and themes against unofficial ones, “Japanese Jottings,” “Under the Sky of Sultry Argentina,” and the later, associated essays printed in the West contend with proscribed conventions for Soviet travel literature and Western perceptions of Russian exiled writers. We encounter tropes that unravel the rules of signification, tropes that will become fully developed in the experience of exile chronicled in the American travel memoir In Search of Melancholy Baby, which builds on his earlier travel writings and the relationship they established with his Russian readers while cultivating a new relationship with a Western readership that does not yet know his name. By focusing on the links between the published travel narrative Around the Clock Non-Stop, the unpublishable manuscript of The Burn and the exilic travelogue In Search of Melancholy Baby, we can see that if earlier Aksyonov used subjective meditations to address the historically specific and individual conditions of Soviet internal exile, once abroad he will respond to American cultural

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narratives associated with immigration and Soviet dissidence with new tropes of displacement that are germane to both his Russian and American audiences. The travelogue Around the Clock Non-Stop, which features fictional passages, reportage, and the creation of an authorial alter ego “The Muscovite,” is notable as the first Soviet work to portray America in exclusively positive terms, and this distinction allows the work to function outside of certain prescribed conventions for travel writing, in which negative appraisals of particular aspects of American life would be obligatory.35 Like Aksyonov’s travelogues of the 1960s, Around the Clock Non-Stop furthers the complicit relationship between the figure of the author and his reader, but does so through allusions to the unpublishable manuscript of his novel The Burn and the author’s developing interest in bridging the margins between his identities, genres, and published and unpublished manuscripts. Around the Clock Non-Stop ostensibly records the events of Aksyonov’s visit to the United States following an invitation to give a series of lectures at the University of California, Los Angeles. These sections of reportage are interspersed with the fantastic “Typical American Adventures” experienced by “The Muscovite,” and the merging of these modes is in fact the subject of one of the first sections of the work, titled “Imagination and Reality.” Although the “Typical American Adventures” allowed readers to accompany the narrator on his travels to Las Vegas, the Monterey Jazz Festival, Los Angeles, and New York, it is in the passages in which the narrator, as part of his teaching responsibilities, gives lectures on literature and art that the intertextual allusions to Aksyonov’s unpublished manuscript appear. The role of the reader as a complicit collaborator in the creation of his texts is explicated in the lecture on Iurii Trifonov’s short stories: “Once at a lecture I read one of Trifonov’s stories, and using his example, spoke about intuitive prose and how here the reader is summoned as a coauthor and becomes (with certain, no doubt, well-known efforts) a participant in the creative act, like the listener at a jazz concert.”36 When an


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American student expresses disappointment that such literature cannot be published in the Soviet Union, Aksyonov shows him his Russian edition of Trifonov’s book, published in a print run of one hundred thousand copies. With the revelation that such prose can be published in the Soviet Union, Aksyonov suggests that the Soviet literary establishment is more progressive than Americans are willing to believe. Significantly, this discussion of Trifonov’s story and his own published writings, which can be read as the dutiful response of a Soviet citizen educating an American audience misinformed about his motherland, immediately follows one of his lectures about a bas-relief he saw in a museum in Berlin, which depicts the legendary battle between the gods Zeus, Athena, Heracles, and Poseidon and the Giants, a mythical race of savage men. As if in answer to the question he consistently poses to his students—“How does something come out of nothing?”—Aksyonov draws an association between the everyday act of visiting a museum and the creative acts of ekphrasis and narration. He concludes with an homage to marble and paper, the media that record and preserve the process by which ephemeral events and ideas become art, when “something” emerges out of “nothing.” Aksyonov’s construction of a tacit relationship between the reader and writer takes on a new dimension by this time: his substantial reading public could seek out his less-controversial published pieces and recognize coded references to his unpublished works in them. Aksyonov’s manuscript of The Burn, which would be completed by the time Around the Clock Non-Stop appeared in print, features a similar discussion of the battle between the gods and Giants in relation to the artist’s struggle to communicate his ideas without ideological compromise. Samsik Sabler, a saxophonist, leads his jazz band, The Giants, at a concert where he performs a new composition that expresses his hopes for the future while preserving his artistic integrity.37 Sabler’s attempt at optimism in the face of Soviet authorities’ efforts to repress his creativity is defeated, however, when the militia arrives to stop the concert. The conflict between the artist and representatives of

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the state is presented in a visual image reminiscent of the basrelief described in Around the Clock Non-Stop: “Samsik’s six shadows flickered back and forth over the wall, soon joined by the shadows of the approaching police officers. The sax wailed and a creative thought was born: The Battle Between the Gods and the Giants.”38 Using scenes from the mythical battle to juxtapose the free conditions for artistic creation described in the sunny narrative Around the Clock Non-Stop with the repressive atmosphere of The Burn, in which creative individuals struggle to maintain their integrity at considerable risk, Aksyonov draws attention to the reader’s role in two iterations of the creative process. The need for reciprocal dialogue between alternating models of the creative process proves vital, for without it, the art that is the outcome of this dialogue and the act of reading can be reduced to nothing through the reader’s own negligence. The 1987 travelogue In Search of Melancholy Baby was written and published in the United States, rendering Aksyonov’s strategy of inserting subjective passages into an otherwise “safe” text unnecessary. The impetus to engage the reader in the creative process remains, however, for now Aksyonov becomes introduced to his new, Western audience first by the fact of his exile, and then by his writing. The tendency to jump forward to Aksyonov’s exile as the salient feature of his biography for the Western reader is notable in a feature story published in the Los Angeles Times: “After his first novel The Colleagues was published in 1960, he quickly established a reputation as one of Russia’s most outspoken anti-Soviet writers, eventually leading Communist Party authorities to strip him of his citizenship in 1981.”39 Despite, or perhaps because of, the potential shifts in audience and agency evinced by such journalistic interventions, Aksyonov continues his strategy of juxtaposing intertextual references intended to engage his new audience in the creative act of reading, particularly when the creation of authorial identity is at issue. Thus In Search of Melancholy Baby introduces both his Western and Soviet readers (if the latter could get their hands on the work in a sam- or tamizdat copy) to his new status as an exile and encourages


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them to approach the work as an exploration of the writer’s new identity as well as his new land. Exile and travel are the two themes that orient the narrative toward Aksyonov’s two audiences: on the one hand, his journey parallels that of his book, which would eventually find its way to Russian readers; on the other, it parallels the journey of his fellow Americans, who, he observes, “all come from somewhere else.” In Search of Melancholy Baby allowed the Russian reader to participate in Aksyonov’s border crossing in that it confronted or confirmed their long-held beliefs about America as Aksyonov experienced them. More important, Russian readers recognized that the untold stories of their generation—the thaw years under Khrushchev, Boris Pasternak’s forced renunciation of the Nobel Prize, samizdat, magnitizdat, dissidence and exile—were being told abroad. Not only was Aksyonov engaging with the Russian reader by openly affirming their shared cultural heritage, he was teaching it to a generation of American readers. The work allowed Russian readers to experience America while simultaneously becoming part of its university curriculum. As Aksyonov writes, “I talk to [my students] about Soviet reality in terms of my old friends and what happened to them and watch their picture of Russia changing from a vast dark blob on the map to a battleground for human dignity . . . [and] I realize I am doing something eminently worthwhile.”40 At the same time, Aksyonov’s affirmation of social and creative identity over national origins throughout In Search of Melancholy Baby is directed to his American audience, who, he believes, can transcend his otherness to understand his condition. In this way, In Search of Melancholy Baby becomes an enabling fiction in which the author, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, renews his commitment to Russian literature while discovering a new home and audience. It is not a coincidence that he explores the alienation of ethnic communities in America, who, like the exile, experience the split between cultural identity and nationality. Aksyonov goes so far as to claim that all Americans are exiles—and that identity crisis and exile go hand in hand.

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Throughout In Search of Melancholy Baby, sections of reportage are interspersed with “Sketches for a Novel to Be,” which follow the adventures of a Muscovite living abroad. The sketches would eventually become incorporated into a later novel of return, 1997’s The New Sweet Style, while the reportage sections tellingly feature passages in which the writer is plagued by constant misrenderings of his name. Early in In Search of Melancholy Baby, the writer receives a call from a furniture store: “The morning of the first day of the third week Mr. Eskintow received a phone call.”41 An encounter with a police officer leads the writer to realize that he is unknown to representatives of the state in America; later Aksyonov is mistaken for a dentist. These numerous instances of mistaken identity reveal the flip side of the need for a “Boris Arsenov” who can discard the identity of Soviet writer and escape into a world of creative freedom; in exile in the United States “Vassily Aksyonov” is deprived of all sense of identity and is forced to construct it anew. Aksyonov depicts the disorienting experience of having one’s name stripped of all meaning in a key passage in which a well-known American writer calls him at home. Aksyonov’s wife takes a message and asks the illustrious writer to spell his name. The stammer on the other end of the line echoes the experience of exilic displacement, when one’s name means nothing to others, and is amplified when the American writer calls again and asks for “Mr.—uh—Axolotl?”42 thus associating Aksyonov with the amphibious creature and Julio Cortázar’s story of the same name. Later in In Search of Melancholy Baby, Aksyonov identifies himself by this name when he writes of the temptation to write about himself: “The temptation is great. I know from experience. Every morning I sit at my desk, look out over the rooftops of Washington, and yearn to write: ‘Mr. Axolotl, writer in exile, sat down at his desk and looked out over the rooftops of Washington.’”43 References to the axolotl must be read along with Aksyonov’s 1986 article “Lungs and Gills,” as well as “Fundamental Displacement,” the first public presentation he gave upon returning to Russia in 1990 at the invitation of


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the American ambassador, in which he stated, “We live in two environments, in two linguistic environments. Like amphibians, we use gills.”44 He evokes the same image in a talk he gave at a 1989 meeting of Russian émigré writers living in the West: “As a part of the writer’s life, the novel cannot but reflect all its circumstances, both the former experiences of his fatherland and the everyday life of his new home. The novelist in emigration is a kind of amphibian: he uses his lungs and gills.”45 Taken together, these texts form a matrix of intertextual references to the condition of exile and Cortázar’s story “Axolotl,” in which a profoundly lonely young man observes an aquarium of axolotls at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Staring at the strange aquatic salamanders in their enclosure, the narrator communicates with them, learning from them “of a different life, or another way of seeing.”46 Finally the narrator himself becomes transformed into an axolotl, fully aware of the impossibility of comprehending his former self, who remains outside the glass enclosure. He comes to realize that “every axolotl thinks like a man,” a prisoner “buried alive” inside the salamander’s body.47 His only consolation lies in the hope that the young man, his self that remains outside the enclosure, will write a story about the axolotls and communicate their experience to the world. It comes as little surprise that the events of Cortázar’s story take place in the same zoo where, in a wretched gesture of isolation described by Vladimir Nabokov, a gorilla communicated its experiences to the world through a drawing—of the bars of its cage. As early as 1972, Aksyonov acknowledged the importance of Cortázar for his writing,48 and if prior to his exile Aksyonov recognized the Argentine exile’s depiction of isolation, once abroad he will take on the task of the young man in “Axolotl” by communicating the condition of the exiled writer in his written texts. In effect, when he begins writing for an American audience, he inverts the terms he used to acknowledge the extratextual relationship he shared with his Russian readers; it is after all only the text he has in

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common with his new audience. Thus, in his travelogue written in the United States he begins constructing a new kind of extratextual relationship with the reader emblematized in “Mr. Axolotl,” who is both a misunderstood creature behind glass and a cosmopolitan amphibian who traverses discursive worlds with ease. Significantly, “Mr. Axolotl” reappears in The New Sweet Style, the first novel to feature the complex of attributes that constitutes Aksyonov’s rhetoric of return, in which exilic tropes give way to figures of connection: A sea lion plays near Fisherman’s Wharf. For the third time in five years I come to the Alioto restaurant. They haven’t forgotten me here, they remember I’m not a thief. Last time, a certain Señor Axelotl [sic] greeted me here. .......... Maître Axelotl comes up as a type from my major oeuvre.49

“Mr. Axolotl” reappears in 2007’s Rare Earths as “Bazz Okselotl, provocateur of cosmopolitan literature,” in which “Okselotl” is revealed not to be a mispronunciation, but itself a name of Russian origin.50 The refiguration of the axolotl from an emblem of exilic displacement to a figure of Russian origin who promotes interaction between Russian and world culture is emblematic of the method by which Aksyonov transitions from a writing of exile oriented to Western and Soviet audiences to a writing of return attuned to its local reception and readers. Cosmopolitan identity, as depicted in Aksyonov’s exilic work, is not the default condition of the exile, but requires participation in a diverse range of communities and activities that allow one to shape one’s identity, then communicate those experiences and identities to others. In his essay “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Kwame Anthony Appiah describes the conditions that allow such a process to take place: The fundamental thought of the cosmopolitanism I defend is that the freedom to create oneself—the freedom that liberalism celebrates—requires a range of socially transmitted options from which to invent what he have come to call our identities. Our


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families and schools, our churches and temples, our professional associations and clubs, provide two essential elements in the tool kit of self-creation: first, they provide ready-made identities . . . whose shapes are constituted by norms and expectations, stereotypes and demands, rights and obligations; second, they give us a language in which to think about these identities and with which we may shape new ones.51

In Search of Melancholy Baby documents Aksyonov’s participation in various institutions, as multiple identities—writer, Russian, resident of Washington, DC, Redskins fan—to name only a few, begin to emerge. Aksyonov also reacts against some of their expectations, stereotypes and demands by engaging in the forms of semantic slippage he used earlier to construct rhetorical tropes of displacement that cultivated a complicit relationship with his Russian readers. Only now, rather than juxtaposing terms that seem incompatible with one another (emergency ration/soul, Arsenov/Aksyonov) to elucidate his displacement, he redefines and increases the signifying potential of terms that have been applied to him by the Western media. In doing so, he juxtaposes competing definitions of a single term of identification, forcing the Western reader to confront the expectations or stereotypes they may have formed of the writer even before encountering his creative work. At the start of his process of self-definition for the American reader, Aksyonov expands the semantic range of the term “dissident,” which was generally applied to him by the Western media at the time of his arrival in the United States. Russian writers in the West were broadly conflated with political dissidence, as demonstrated by the title of a 1982 conference held at the New School for Social Research— “Writers in Exile: A Conference of Soviet and East European Dissidents”—a forum in which Aksyonov participated. The conference moderator used the terms “writer” and “dissident” interchangeably, referring to the group of writers present as “dissidents” so consistently that one audience member protested that this was an opportunistic exploitation of the writers in an attempt to frame the discussion in terms of the moderator’s political orientation.52 At the conference

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Aksyonov responded to the use of the term “dissident” as a designation for one’s professional identity: “Well, here we use the term ‘dissident’ as if it were some kind of occupation. I’m not much of a politician you know, and I would prefer to talk about literature.” Elsewhere, he similarly distinguished between the terms, noting that “political dissidence is by no means an artistic criterion”53 and that had he stayed in Russia, “[he] would not write, but would become a political figure, a dissident.” “I could have stayed and fought,” he observed, “but then I would have become a different person.”54 If discursive displacement engages the reader to work with the writer in evaluating the terms of identity construction in Aksyonov’s travel writings, this strategy will undergo its own encounter with displacement when his texts return to Russia during the period of perestroika. With an additional shift in audience and agency, In Search of Melancholy Baby undertook an uncomfortable journey into a reformed Russia’s periodical press. Without recourse to Aksyonov’s original Russian manuscript, the journal Krokodil in 1988 published an excerpt back-translated from the English-language edition into Russian. In addition to significantly altering the very fabric of the text and its rhetorical constructions of the relationship between the reader and writer, the editors of Krokodil encouraged Russian readers to respond to this distorted edition by proposing that “the author not only writes in the first person, but on behalf of Soviet citizens as a whole and his generation in particular; with this in mind, we await your letters.”55 The appeal did not go unheeded, and readers in subsequent issues responded to the characterization of “their generation” by contesting Aksyonov’s account of events in the Soviet Union during the Second World War and expressing indignation at the views written “in their name.”56 This double act of misreading—produced as a result of a misplaced effort to quickly publish works previously unavailable to Russian readers and a provocation to respond to a distorted version of the text—complicated Aksyonov’s literary return in ways that could not have been foreseen. Far from breaking down barriers imposed by Soviet authorities


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nearly a decade earlier, the incident raises important questions about the reception of returning literature and writers. In his discussion of the work of Cortázar, Arjun Appadurai observes that “contemporary literary fantasies tell us something about displacement, disorientation, and agency in the contemporary world” and that all the macronarratives that can be construed from Cortázar’s work “remind us that lives today are as much acts of projection and imagination as they are enactments of known scripts or predictable outcomes.”57 The acts of projection that threw obstacles in the path of Aksyonov’s literary return and provoked responses that harkened back to the Soviet past in their maligning of the author stand in sharp contrast to Aksyonov’s first published narrative of his physical return to Russia, his 1990 essay “Not Quite a Sentimental Journey.” Here the author admits, apropos of Appadurai’s description of enactments, that “looking back, the scene would seem a bit too tidily symbolic.”58 Upon his arrival at Moscow’s Sheremetevo airport after ten years in exile, the first three people Aksyonov sees upon entering the terminal form a gallery of distinctly Russian types: a tiotka, a female type so culturally specific as to be nearly untranslatable (Aksyonov offers “a dumpy, shabbily dressed woman of indeterminate age; a specific stratum of society that even a doctoral dissertation could not describe”), a soldier, and a Dostoevskian clerk.59 Upon entering the terminal, Aksyonov is followed by television cameras that capture another encounter: when a KGB officer attempts to block all television cameras in the customs zone, the reform-emboldened journalists turn their cameras on him.

Wr iting Retur n Return becomes the subject, and very structure, of Aksyonov’s works written following the restoration of his citizenship and an apartment in Moscow. If in the essay “Not Quite a Sentimental Journey” he would “too tidily” formulate the conditions of his homecoming, the narratives of return he writes in the late 1990s and later reveal an unwieldy quality that stands in contrast to themes of rootedness and closure. It is perhaps

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this contrast that Aksyonov has in mind when he describes his later narratives of return as “cutting off the previous century and a certain period in my creative life, after which I have since moved into a different stage of self-expression.”60 Following the Krokodil incident and the first publication of The Burn in Russia, a timidly printed perestroika-era edition with all sexually explicit passages excised, the rapid publication of Aksyonov’s works written in exile gave the Russian reader the opportunity to read (in some cases, revisit) works in which the relationship between the reader and writer was well-defined. If for the American reader, the redefinition of seemingly familiar terms resulted in a kind of exilic rhetorical displacement that paralleled the condition of the simultaneously famous and unknown writer, the large-scale arrival of Aksyonov’s exilic works in Russia reintroduced the cosmopolitan identity of the writer to Russian readers. Later publications written following his repatriation include declarations of an ethical commitment to cosmopolitan ideals on the part of the writer and encourage the same on the part of the post-Soviet reader in the face of growing support for nationalist ideologies, a position that eventually yields to more rigidly national allegories inflected with popular nostalgia for the Soviet past. With these shifts in mind, we may turn to the question of how the family novel, the return of the exilic works to Russian audiences, and the publication of new writings that not only demarcate the previous century, but his connection with an American audience as well, contribute to the complex that constitutes Aksyonov’s return. A Moscow Saga, a sweeping trilogy that appeared in both Russia and the West (published in two volumes in the United States, 1995’s Generations of Winter and 1998’s The Winter’s Hero), was the first new novel to be published after Aksyonov’s return. Approached by American producers to create a documentary film about the Stalin era, Aksyonov instead developed a screenplay following the fictional Gradov family over three decades, from 1925 to the years immediately following Joseph Stalin’s death. Conceived for the broad American viewing public, rewritten as a family novel, and then adapted


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for Russian television audiences, A Moscow Saga illustrates what can happen when Russian subjects selectively engage in what Ong describes as “self-orientalization,” the tendency of one’s voice to be inflected by orientalist essentialisms as well as the agency to maneuver and manipulate meanings in public exchanges about culture.61 If, as Aksyonov asserts, American readers are uninterested in contemporary Russian writing,62 this may be in part due to the dominance of frames of reference that privilege canonical and historically oriented texts but regard contemporary ones as derivative of Western models. If, as Rey Chow reminds us however, in the Asian context these frames of reference create and valorize an Asia that “continues to produce ancient culture,”63 in the Russian context they organize culture almost exclusively around the traditional canon of late nineteenth-century realist novelists. Self-orientalization and its attendant agency may help to explain Aksyonov’s temporary turn from texts about dislocation that demand performative readings to the more traditional form of the family novel in A Moscow Saga. Aksyonov readily adopted the role of realist novelist to produce A Moscow Saga, inviting comparisons to Leo Tolstoy with the titles of the second and third books of the trilogy (“War and Jail” and “Jail and Peace”) and its exploration of questions of Russian national identity and character through historical figures and the family. Yet his reorientation of his literary genealogy—which he had previously defined as going “back to the Russian avant-garde and from there back to Gogol rather than Dostoevsky”64—was likely not undertaken exclusively in the interest of exposing Western tendencies to privilege certain nineteenth-century Russian realist discourses over contemporary ones, or to demonstrate his own abilities in both idioms. Rather, his decision to, in the words of one critic, “abandon the allusiveness of much of his earlier work to write directly of Russian history and current events” and “evoke all the grandeur of Tolstoy and all the inhuman psychology of Dostoevsky”65 represents a conscious appropriation of the family novel as an attempt to revitalize the contemporary Russian novel and the debate about its relation

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to national identity and national literature. A Moscow Saga and its subsequent adaptation for television provide a discursive home for post-Soviet audiences, although this incentive is not without its risks. At the same time the novel strives to mediate between its positive social imperatives and the ideological discourses it confronts, it can—especially in its televised form—become appropriated by the very ideological discourses it was intended to dispute. As a writer subject to Western constructions of Russian identity, Aksyonov was well positioned to demonstrate how a family novel could once again generate, and be generated by, notions of “Russianness” as a counterpoint to the Western subject and the Western European literary tradition. The opening lines of the novel offer panoramic descriptions of the activity in downtown Moscow, where police are “not yet entirely convinced of reality of their . . . role” and “everything has the appearance of an amateur production.”66 Aksyonov’s familiar use of a camera lens to call attention to the competing narrative frames that produce his story, a device present at the conclusion of The Island of Crimea and the introductions to Around the Clock Non-Stop and In Search of Melancholy Baby, points to the filmic roots of the project and immediately draws attention to the conventions being employed in the name of “realism” and “authenticity.” Perhaps accordingly, when read without irony as a national allegory played out at the level of the individual and the family, A Moscow Saga fulfilled Western expectations about what a Russian novel should be.67 Critical comparisons to Tolstoy and bestseller status in France illustrate the success “the Russian novel” can achieve as a cultural commodity. The weak critical reception of the novel in Russia, however, largely resulted from the perception that the novel was written for an American audience. One critic declared A Moscow Saga “a revision of Children of the Arbat,” a reference to the popular perestroika-era novel by Anatoli Rybakov, replete with a brooding Stalin in need of medical attention and the spectacle of public and private lives unfolding against the background of the 1930s.68


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It was the adaptation of A Moscow Saga for Russian television, a teleserial well positioned amid the boom in adapting classic Russian novels for the small screen initiated by Vladimir Bortko’s 2003 adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, that had greater impact among Russian audiences, and led to a resurgence in the popular reception of the novel among readers. In his study of the Russian teleserial and its emphasis on social values, romance, and the family, David MacFadyen writes, Television is remembering, quoting, and, in some senses, saving the literature that society’s movers and shakers don’t know very well. Yet TV does so by keeping people away from libraries and on their sofas. Romantically-driven and melodramatic television series show this strange process best of all, with the kind of caring, cultured and morally upstanding social bonds that allow producers and directors to rummage around in the past. These broadcasts can mine the metaphors of socialism (parenthood/brotherhood/ family/love), thus keeping the “social” yet dumping the “ism.” They show kindness in a cruel society and do so by leaning heavily on the structural workings of the narratives they most resemble: serialized novels of the nineteenth century.69

In the case of A Moscow Saga, the 2004 miniseries strongly engaged the relationship between socialism and the social that MacFadyen describes. Aksyonov ultimately had little to do with the production, which Arsenii Roginskii, chairman of the human rights group Memorial, characterized as having “nothing to do with Stalin and a lot to do with today” in that it could be seen to support the current Kremlin strategy of invoking, and controlling, nostalgia for the Soviet past.70 Aksyonov, for his part, emphasized the social elements of the film (“it is most important to liberate our memories [of past generations] from ideology”), which corresponded more closely to his intent in taking on the family novel, both in terms of resurrecting interest in the novel as a literary form as well as challenging its conventional relationship to national ideals.71 Only when adapted to the nationally specific broadcast of the teleserial, with its own goals of promoting communal identity among its viewing audience, was the novel effectively translated from the transnational to the local sphere.

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The effect of such mediations is amplified when we consider that the house that shelters three generations of the Gradov family is the only constant figure at the center of A Moscow Saga, itself becoming an emblem of symbolic imagining and national longing. It is a place where comforting aromas unceasingly emanate from the kitchen and family members congregate even as history sweeps them along to their fates. Like the novel itself, it is simultaneously posited as a refuge for the deterritorialized post-Soviet audience nostalgically revisiting its Soviet past, and for the writer, who risks the charge of sentimentality and ideological misreadings to appropriate some of the most traditional features of narrative toward exploring the relationship between home and homeland and positive and negative perceptions of “Russianness” and the “Russian novel.” Home emerges as a fragile construct that strives to join historical narrative and metanarrative, first among a broad international reading audience, then among a national viewing audience, the nature of its constructedness illustrated in the mixed reception of the novel and the varying success of its adaptations for multiple audiences, and quite literally epitomized when the house used as the location for A Moscow Saga burned down soon after filming. A Moscow Saga demonstrates that if “home is locus, custom, memory, familiarity, ease, security, sanctuary,”72 in striving to offer a narrative locus to multiple audiences, each seeking its own projections of national identity, the unstable home of the recently returned exile who remains displaced promotes unease and irresolution. The unrooted quality of such fragile constructions of home may have contributed to Aksyonov’s temporary recognition that if an exilic identity is no longer viable, and performing the return of the “the Russian writer” by resurrecting the family novel reflects displacement to the same degree it purports to project home, the unsettled subject could offer a workable alternative. The fragmented quality of the stories that comprise the collection Aksyonov published after A Moscow Saga complements the ungrounded identity of the writer as subject. Short travel narratives based on Aksyonov’s first trips to Israel and


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Croatia are interspersed among accounts of his experiences in the American university classroom and other disparate locales. Among the various identities he explores is an obsolescent author figure whose creative process is replaced by a team of programmers. A number of the stories explicitly address his search for identity. “Where are you, my Jewishness?” the writer asks in “The Wall,” as he retroactively wonders whether any latent traces of his Jewish identity can be found in his travel writings of the Soviet period. Eventually his observations of life in Israel and social interactions with the local population accrue to illustrate a process of identity formation through participation in the social and political life of the nation. He gradually comes to understand his Jewish heritage in the same terms by which he experienced a renewed sense of his Russianness “in August 1991 and August 1993,” while “walking in the ‘democratic column’ from the Arbat to the Moscow river.”73 These socially engaged experiences of identity formation, however, are interwoven with those that depict the writer as tourist, interacting with guides and other travelers, hotels and car rental agencies. If travel here is portrayed as a quest for identity (and the other short stories and essays published in the collection indeed reflect a similar concern), then among the boundaries the author traverses are those between the fragmented identities he participated in creating.74 Kaplan reminds us that the tourist “confirms and legitimates the social reality of constructions such as ‘First’ and ‘Third’ Worlds, ‘development’ and ‘underdevelopment,’ or ‘metropolitan’ and rural.’” “Driven by the need to ascertain identity and location in a world that undermines the certainty of those categories,” the tourist seeks to affirm these boundaries even as he negotiates them.75 In response to the vanishing figure of the Russian writer, effaced by a multiplicity of past identities, including that of the exile, Aksyonov’s tourist seeks roots and affinities. This process is similarly reflected in the publication history of the Israel travel narratives, which are later excerpted from the fragmented collection of stories and collected together in an anthology of stories and essays by fellow Russian writers commemorating the

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occasion of their 2003 trip to Israel together.76 The recontextualization of Aksyonov’s travels within a cohesive collection of narratives that affirm shared experiences and the elucidation of identity facilitates the movement from melancholic tourist to returned exile. Having rejected the unsettled authorial persona and established stable rhetorical ground for his reunion with the Russian reader, Aksyonov returns to the genre of the novel to negotiate his return. If A Moscow Saga tested the reception of narrative constructions of home, and the short stories abandoned any such construction only to acknowledge its indispensability, the subsequent novels, The New Sweet Style and Caesarean Illumination, propose more explicitly defined rhetorical constructions of return. In their proposal of rhetorical points of unity in the shared creation of social and historical narratives, these novel set out to resolve the tenuous position of the returned exile and that of his post-Soviet readership by defining their relation to one another. The New Sweet Style not only shifts its orientation from expulsion to homecoming, it features a narrator who “includes the reader” in the act of transcending her condition of alterity from the text. While the love story and verses at the center of the novel are the formal referents for its title, the narrative proper revolves around Alexander Korbach, a Soviet theater director who is exiled to the West and subsequently experiences no fewer than three enactments of homecoming. In the first, as a newly arrived exile in New York, Korbach looks up at a large building to see the name “Alexander Korbach” written in lights: a flagship department store on Times Square was founded by a namesake distant relative. The large, wealthy, and widely dispersed Korbach family integrates Alexander into their fold and involves him in their everyday activities, which include genealogical research and an ongoing quest to learn more about their ancestry. The second takes place on August 19, 1991, when Korbach returns to Moscow as head of the Moscow branch of the Korbach Fund, a humanitarian organization. The date of his arrival coincides with the hardline communist


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coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. With protesters throughout the city demonstrating against the takeover, and even Boris Yeltsin extending a warm welcome to the returning hero, Korbach’s second homecoming begins as he steps into a busy Moscow street and joins the crowd. Leaving behind his American dreams of becoming “someone” in hopes of rejoining everyone, Korbach is suddenly summoned by his American family to Tel Aviv, where the remains of an early ancestor have been discovered during an archeological dig. Returning to a third homeland, Korbach is introduced to a part of his identity he hardly knew. The reader is also invited to participate in Aksyonov’s rhetorical enactment of homecoming. The serialized publication of The New Sweet Style that appeared in the journal The Banner (Znamia) in 1997 featured a foreword (not reproduced in the later, book-format Russian edition or its English translation), in which the writer establishes his new relationship with the reader: “Such a publication will create a sort of snare for our ‘creative reader’ which he will willingly fall into in so far as he knows the rules of the game . . . at the end of his reading, the reader will consider himself a coauthor and present his own version of the entire text . . . Thus the reader will feel like taking the book and comparing his version with the author’s.”77 In other words, if the Russian reader once felt alienated from the writer who had lived abroad for so long, the reader and writer are again on equal terms, joined in the creative act on the unexplored terrain of a new, “sweet” style. By extending an invitation to the Russian reader to become a coauthor and participate in the creative process, an invitation reiterated in the novel itself, Aksyonov renders his rhetorical homecoming complete. Here we may look to Theodor Adorno’s thoughts on “home-in-writing” as a kind of modernist precursor to the rhetorical homecoming Aksyonov proposes in his introductory note. In Minima Moralia Adorno confronts notions of home and housing, addressing at the same time issues of nationhood and writing as he reflects on his displacement following his emigration to the United States. As Nico Israel

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observes, the ready-made quality of the modern house in Minima Moralia functions as a metaphor for “the prefabricated, ready-made thought that could produce the concentration and death camps along with the single-family suburban house with garden.”78 Because this metaphoric home is uninhabitable, Adorno turns to writing as a possible refuge. “In his text, the writer sets up house,” he proposes, but just as one’s home begins to accumulate needless refuse and junk, so does the writer’s text become cluttered and eventually uninhabitable. Adorno “builds a house out of writing, replete with intellectual furniture, then, in effect, evicts himself, or, rather, is evicted by the—stinking—process of writing.”79 In contrast to the rhetorical garbage heap that leaves Adorno perpetually displaced, Aksyonov’s “snare” is proposed to be a welcoming structure that the creative reader will willingly enter and build in collaboration with the author. Adorno’s resistance to a smooth idiom of exile contrasts dramatically with the “sweet style” of return Aksyonov offers as a rhetorical sanctuary. The comparison reveals that Aksyonov does not counter Adorno’s modernist displacement—a discourse that structures exile and writing as conditions of alienation—by proposing return as a purely postmodern renunciation of such modernist tropes. Rather, he proposes a structure for post-Soviet writing that is intended to reclaim discursive authority and share it with the reader with whom he has been reunited. Together, the reader and authorial figure generate narratives of participation in political and social change in one’s nation, the rhetorical creation of home, and the relationship of both processes to the creative acts of reading and writing. The encounter of the author figure and his broader readership through his collaborative creative agenda is emphasized throughout The New Sweet Style: “It’s [the] creative reader . . . that I consider the real coauthor of the book . . . every act of reading creates a new version of the book, as in jazz.”80 If the reader begins to feel at all estranged from the comic family saga unfolding on the pages, Aksyonov consistently inserts an authorial voice into the narrative to steadily


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guide the reader to his appointed place in the creative process. At a crucial moment of border crossing, when Korbach enters the airline terminal at JFK to leave the United States for Russia, the authorial voice interjects: “In order to conclude this highly significant section within the space of Part 10 allotted to it, we’ll have to resort to a device that we would characterize here as the ‘one day.’ This is not done to conceal any chronological inconsistencies—far from it; rather, we’re hoping, with these two little words, to smoothly lead you, the reader, through the waning years of the nineties up to the very moment when you, having laid down a small pile of rubles, dollars, or francs, open this book.”81 The unification of the reader and writer obtains particular resonance if we construe the novel as a rhetorical return homeward through the geography of the novel. The novel moves from exile—not only the protagonist’s, but the diasporic experience of the Korbachs— to return, the journey of homecoming that the Korbach family undertakes together and that concludes the novel. Aksyonov explores the possibility of overcoming the notion that exile is the prevailing modality that informs poetics in the Jewish tradition, and indeed, his own writing, by paralleling the act of return at the conclusion of the novel with the rhetorical homecoming that unites reader and writer in the creative act. The genealogical discoveries and authorial intrusions that smoothly steer the story into the family’s past and forward to the moment of reading do not so much provide a neat closure as posit the bonds between the widely dispersed family, and their diverse acts of homecoming, as tropes of return. The movement of the family toward a common ancestor and home parallels the relationship between the novel, writer and reader, outlining a tightly woven discursive arena in which tropes of return are affirmed as part of the project of reterritorialization and emplacement. If The New Sweet Style can be read as a rejection of the unsettled subject and declamation of the author’s rhetorical return, his subsequent novel, Caesarean Illumination, may be said to deviate from the enchanting snare of “the new sweet style” to present a complex of varied genres and loose

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strands of narrative whose reader must work to find cohesion among them.82 The novel invites the reader to become, at least for the duration of the time of reading, an editor and coauthor of the novel, and continues the collaborative relationship with the reader initiated in The New Sweet Style, although the highly fragmented multiple narratives of Caesarean Illumination demand a more active engagement with Aksyonov’s agenda. Aksyonov has stated that this novel was intended to be final and definitive: “I tried to sum up the twentieth century and my literary career . . . I honestly thought I would wrap it all up with this [novel].”83 The novel he describes as programmatic, a summation of his career and the favorite among all his works was not translated into English. Though the complex structure of the novel may have in fact limited its audience (one antagonistic Russian reviewer summarized it succinctly: “?”),84 the novel is notable for its pronouncements concerning the death of the novel and the reading and writing practices that could lead to its revitalization. Tropes of return and renewal lay the discursive ground for the novel’s illustration of these premises. Caesarean Illumination is an amalgam of prose, poetry, and plays, classical themes and New Russian realia, a novel that, in the words of one critic, “should have been published as unbound sheets, so that each reader can take what he needs.”85 Its protagonists are an exiled writer (the anagrammically named Stas Vaksino) who teaches at an American university and frequently travels back to Russia, a New Russian businessman as at home in New Hampshire as he is in Moscow, and the businessman’s girlfriend, a Russian woman rescued from a sexual trafficking ring. This gallery of Russian types exists in a world in which global entrepreneurs “sell” commodities—Russian novels, shares in the stock market, women—and their success depends on the sustained exploitation of the local. These types are not only recognizable Western constructions of Russian identity; they also constitute a destructive form of self-representation that, to use Ong’s terms, “[has] been shaped by a perception and experience of themselves as the Other of the Western world.”86


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Over the course of the novel these figures will gradually redefine themselves and ultimately challenge preconceptions about Russia’s role in the transnational arena. The wandering writer and university professor Vaksino is of course another tongue-in-cheek rendering of the writer “Aksyonov.”87 Well-known in Russia and unknown in the West, Vaksino employs a familiar device associated with the rhetoric of exile when he observes that Americans cannot properly pronounce his name. He is proud of his ability to negotiate diverse cultures and languages, but responds to the characterization of the cosmopolitan writer—whose home is always elsewhere, and therefore, nowhere—by contending that it is an untenable position. He begins his narrative with an allusion to the opening of Gogol’s Dead Souls, replacing the troika and the men riding in it with two young Russian businessmen in a car alternately speaking Russian and French, smoking Marlboros, and wearing Missoni socks with Timberland boots. These figures and their picaresque adventures not only reference Gogol, but invite comparison with the young Aksyonov’s early, fashionconscious, traveling protagonists. After receiving three million dollars and an invitation to travel to the imaginary Kukushkin Islands, Vaksino loses interest in writing and “definitively drops out of the literary process.”88 When critics charge that he had not had much of a reputation to lose, Vaksino responds with tropes of renewal and return: he averts a friend’s suicide attempt, offers the reader a collaborative creative project, speculates that at the turn of the century mankind will evolve into a “‘metaman’—capable of departure, and return,” and in the final portrayal of Vaskino in the novel, depicts himself resting in bed with his faithful cat—the writer at home.89 The transnational writer represented in Caesarean Illumination initially resembles the type of figure Timothy Brennan identifies as the “Third World metropolitan celebrity.” This figure is embraced by Western readers for, among other reasons, a “dismissive or parodic attitude toward the project of national culture; a manipulation of imperial imagery and local legend as a means of politicizing ‘current events’; and a declaration of cultural ‘hybridity’—a hybridity claimed to

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offer certain advantages in negotiating the collisions of language, race and art in a world of disparate peoples . . .”90 Aksyonov’s protagonist, having imagined himself in this role and after submitting to Western expectations about a particular kind of Russian identity, realizes that such a position cannot be sustained. In one of the poems that constitutes the “Diary of the Writer,” we read, Stas Vaksino, the celebrated classic, wanders. There is no vacancy in the world for such a colossus as he. ..... Stas, you are not a Russian here, you are not authoritative. Бродит Стас Ваксино, забуревший классик. В мире нет ваканций для таких колоссов. ..... Стас, ты здесь нерусский, неавторитетен.

As part of his efforts to invalidate and overcome this decentered, “non-Russian” identity, Vaksino presents the reader with a novel in the form of a personal telephone book, a spiral notebook consisting of short, interchangeable narratives about varied individuals. As a series of narrative fragments in various genres, the novel encourages the reader to weave personalized narratives from its various strands. The notebook allows the reader to insert or remove pages to personalize the text, and as such, offers a synecdoche for the novel itself. In a 2001 interview, Aksyonov proposed such just a narrative structure as a strategy for engaging the contemporary reader: “The novel must feature a Byronic type, with whom the reader can identify. It is possible that [the novel] will remain unchanged, but it might also take on completely different, more individualized forms. It is possible that it will become a form of hypertext: some future [writer] will propose a theme and some fundamental motifs, and anyone who wishes can play within this theme as he likes.”91 From a “Third World metropolitan celebrity” Vaksino develops into a cosmopolitan Russian writer who creates loosely woven literary structures that facilitate his active collaboration with a local readership. The New Russian businessman


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also grows to display a global commitment; he has not only rescued his girlfriend from a human trafficking network, he uses his fortune to develop alternative sources of energy. In the same year Caesarean Illumination appeared, Aksyonov published an essay in which he expressed his concerns about the novel as a genre in need of rehabilitation and focused on issues specific to the transnational writer’s situation, his own in particular.92 Aksyonov describes himself as “at the intersection of the American book market (bazar) and a Russian postmodern schmooze.” As he sees it, he could thrive in, or be estranged from, both environments; in the end, he acknowledges that he is less concerned with widening his audience, and more interested in narrowing it, as this “contributes to the creation of the writer’s dedicated and true co-authors.”93 Renouncing the publishing industry’s emphasis on ever broader audiences, he cultivates his relationship with a smaller, creative, local readership on his own terms. At the same time, he acknowledges that the “Byronic novel of self-expression,” which he argues continues to develop in Russia but is giving way to the mainstream tastes of the market in the West, is ideally suited to new media that the Russian reader might eventually use to coauthor her own text.94 Like The New Sweet Style, Caesarean Illumination rings optimistic about how cosmopolitan figures can encourage collaborative creative performances that have real-world applications: contributing to narratives that depict the act of homecoming or redefining the notion of home, and participation in historical processes and economic decisions that benefit the nation and its global standing. If Aksyonov articulates his commitment to this agenda in his art, however, he expresses a measure of pessimism in his essays. In his 2005 essay “Nostalgia or Schizophrenia?” he observes that post-Soviet Russia has, for the most part, ceased to look to the West for its social and cultural models and consequently has begun to look away from the potential to establish a cosmopolitan present and instead sets nostalgic sights upon the Soviet past. The title of Aksyonov’s essay echoes Claude Lévi Strauss’s “Cosmopolitanism and Schizophrenia,” in which a local population that

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is often essentialized—in this case, native Americans of the Pacific Northwest—is revealed to be cosmopolitan in its syncretic beliefs. If Lévi Strauss’s essay can be used as a response to antimulticulturalists who would argue that the canon has no room for certain “others,”95 Aksyonov’s essay might be seen as a warning of the risks of self-essentialization in the form of cozy nostalgia and nationalist isolationism. It is curious, then, that the 2006 novel Moskva kva-kva seems entirely compatible with the contemporary trend toward nostalgia for the Soviet past. Readers expressed apprehension about its orientation at two events promoting the publication of the novel, one public, the other attended by Aksyonov’s peers and prominent literary critics.96 At both venues, Aksyonov was asked whether he was concerned that by again depicting Stalin in his writing, and by endowing the language and youth of the Stalin period with such vitality, he was contributing to a popular remythification of Stalinist grand style.97 The novel’s comic depiction of Stalin and romanticized vision of cheerful, successful, Stalinist youth, is accompanied by a jarring juxtaposition of the Stalin period and post-Soviet Moscow in a single concluding chapter (“Forty-Two Years Later”). Omitting but the briefest mention of the narrator’s exile, the novel skips immediately from 1953 to 1995, the year in which the narrating protagonist returns to Moscow. The brief epilogue in which the narrator returns to the city features an entirely changed landscape, save for the skyscraper where he and his beloved once lived (and where Aksyonov resided) and one Soviet-era produce shop. It is here that the narrator realizes no one can recognize him or remember any of his acquaintances aside from his former flame, who is currently inaugurating a “new phase” of neo-Stalinism. The changes to the city (and, conversely, the preservation of the apartment building) contribute to the forgetfulness of its denizens, laying the ground for a nostalgia that selectively remembers the achievements of the Stalin era while forgetting their human cost. In interviews surrounding the release of the novel, Aksyonov noted that one of the walls in his apartment bears


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an anonymous inscription: “Prisoners built this house” (Stroili zakliuchennye).98 The inscription is included in the novel, etched into the glass of one of the protagonist’s apartment windows, and as a response to the cultural myths and the role of selective memory in perpetuating them that constitute the novel as a whole, the inscription does not permit the cultural amnesia that makes nostalgia possible.99 Moskva kva-kva correlates the selective memory of post-Soviet society with the sentimental exiled narrator’s reminiscences of his youth, proposing that both perspectives necessitate engagement with present concerns and the historical past to avoid the trap of nostalgia. The utopian myths of the Soviet past and the narrative of the returning exile remain linked by the figure of the house, the skyscraper with its outward-facing, monumental Socialist Realist façade and private inscription of disclosure on an inward-facing window. *

*

*

The uncomfortable confrontation of these imperatives points to the difficulties, and the risks, of the narrative project of return. Aksyonov’s writing of return identifies the novel as a site that unites the creative reader and writer, demonstrating the potential of dissolving critically or self-imposed boundaries between exilic discourse and unaffiliated authorial subjects and establishing a rhetoric of return in their place. At the same time the novels of return enact a rhetorical homecoming for the returning writer and his “coauthors,” they resituate his tropes of exile—the unrecognized, misidentified author and the axolotl among them—transforming them into figures of return by reinstituting them within explicitly national boundaries. Not all the constructions that contribute to the creation of a rhetoric of exile, most notably, the figure of the culturally displaced Western reader, find a place in Aksyonov’s rhetoric of return. In A Moscow Saga the figure of the exile is eschewed to depict the difficult balance between engaging the social dynamics of the family, home, and the collective experience of reading, and the ideological appropriation of

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these very institutions manifested in the novel’s television adaptation. Moskva kva-kva also omits the exilic narrative to demonstrate that nostalgia is not exclusive to those sympathetic to Soviet-era constructions of national identity, but may afflict exilic subjects exploring the cultural conditions of their youth in which their identities were formed. While the returned exile remains a viable figure in other narratives of return, new tropes of return are also introduced, such as the domestic sphere, which emerges as a space where family histories and allegorized national histories confront one another, requiring the reader to assert a role in coauthoring a personalized narrative and locating a national identity at the point of their intersection. It is a sign of the post-Soviet times in which Aksyonov wrote his narratives of return that some feared his readers would only hold up parts of the proposal, selectively resurrecting elements of the past to take nostalgia trips or allegorized national histories at face value. It is likewise significant that Aksyonov was willing to risk being accused of the same in the interest of creating narratives and identifying a community of readers that will commit to negotiating between the often antagonistic pairings of Russia and the West, and cultural and national identity. In my readings of Aksyonov’s work, I have demonstrated that Aksyonov’s writing of return responded to the challenges that face the post-Soviet returned exile by narrowing his readership and consenting to a popular television adaptation of his work, and more important, encouraging the reader’s participation in the rhetorical construction of home and the production of narratives that stimulate debate toward cultural and social change as a critical part of the search for a sense of national identity. These frameworks raise important questions about the rhetoric of exile and return in the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to be treated in the following chapter, in which the writer’s rhetorical constructions of place, which include a standpoint from which to articulate a position of historical truth, will be shown to stand in contentious relation to the universalizing modernist discourses and particularist local formations that frame their reception.

Chapter 3

4

Agency Abroad a nd at Home

No writer illustrates the complex and continually shifting

critical location of the returned exile more thoroughly than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Many have read the history of the twentieth century in Solzhenitsyn’s literary and biographical trajectory, and indeed, regard him as a figure who changed the course of that history through the publication of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. While such a reading accords Solzhenitsyn a place of honor few writers can hope to achieve, it also complicates an understanding of much of the work he produced in exile and after his return to Russia. Solzhenitsyn wrote in the faith that literature can effect monumental change. But if it is difficult to evaluate Solzhenitsyn’s preexilic works outside of the extraordinary conditions that produced them, it is equally difficult for many readers to reconcile the urgency he brought to his current projects with the reformed post-Soviet climate in which he wrote. The characterization of Solzhenitsyn as Russia’s last great writer is illustrative of this conflict of reception, for it confers a timeless prestige at the same time it relegates the writer and his work to modes of evaluation, self-presentation, and writing that are associated with the past. To complicate matters, Solzhenitsyn devoted much of his work in exile to The Red Wheel, a multivolume historiographical novel documenting the years leading to the Bolshevik Revolution that has been characterized as an artificial product of the “hermetic environment” of exile in which it was produced, an “exile from [Solzhenitsyn’s] great theme,

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Stalinism and the Gulag,” “a kind of time capsule and survival module in one,” and to emphasize the fact that it had largely gone unnoticed upon its initial publication in Russia, “a book for the future.”1 Other works produced in exile, such as the Dictionary for the Expansion of the Russian Language (1990), furthered the impression that Solzhenitsyn had become divorced from his readership, writing works “of use only to himself.”2 Moreover, his publicly stated aversion to postmodernism in all its cultural manifestations and the conditions of his return to Russia in 1994—as much a farewell to the West as a return to his homeland—furthered the perception that his work could not be read through contemporary critical paradigms. To read Solzhenitsyn’s writing of exile and return, then, is to confront a number of critical dissonances. How do we reconcile the power of Solzhenitsyn’s preexilic narratives of witness, which bear the authority of autobiographical experience while offering a paradigm of conduct for both the citizen and the writer, with the narrative autonomy of the exilic period emblematized by The Red Wheel? Is the sustained critical exile of Solzhenitsyn inevitable if the works he produced after his return appear to treat increasingly local concerns that define national perspectives, and like the homeward journey of the writer himself can be construed as a polemical gesture that opposes global cultural flows? In using terms such as “reconcile” and “critical exile,” I propose that it is Solzhenitsyn’s critical self-relocation as a writing subject that complicates the reception of his exilic writing and narratives of return. Approaches to Solzhenitsyn’s work have traditionally identified the writing subject as a conscious agent whose experiences and texts have endowed our age with meaning. While such an approach has produced valuable readings, it necessarily faces problems of reception when treating the work Solzhenitsyn produced during and after his exile. One side effect of the problem of agency is the postmodern undermining of the relevance of the traditional subject.3 It has become commonplace to regard agency as a vestige of imperial or nationalist projects,4 and indeed it has been


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claimed that Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel and the writer himself are, or have been associated with, such projects.5 For the contemporary critic, it is perhaps an easier task to “write off” the question of the role of agency, and Solzhenitsyn along with it, relegating both to the realm of irrelevance. The notion of an intentional agent, however, has not been entirely dissolved and its ramifications for the study of exile and return must yet be contended with. Michel Foucault observes in “What Is an Author?” that we have “merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity.” In citing Foucault in this context, Stanley Fish asserts that “we have not done away with intention and biography but merely relocated them. In principle it does not matter whether the originating agent is a discrete human consciousness or the spirit of an age or a literary tradition or a culture or language itself; to read something as the product of any one of these ‘transcendental anonymities’ is to endow that anonymity with an intention and a biography.”6 To this end, the characterization of Solzhenitsyn as Russia’s last great writer raises important questions for figuring the role of the reader in relocating the writing subject and situating his narratives of exile and return. Some would argue that The Red Wheel—and subsequent works written after Solzhenitsyn’s return—have no reader. In this view, having witnessed the disappearance of the cold war–era institutions that gave rise to the phenomenon of the “simultaneously highly talented and world-renowned” writer of social conscience,7 then observed the critical enactment of the “death of the author,” readers sought out other works, writers, or media that better exemplified their post-Soviet cultural and social politics. Without yielding to the tendency to mourn literary priorities that have, after all, not yet receeded into the past, we may look instead to what Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return professes to offer its potential or actual readers. It has been my contention that the writing of return acknowledges the physical and rhetorical separations of exile by seeking to overcome them. Aksyonov’s example indicates that if initially he sought open horizons for the former exile as writing

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subject, free to return home or travel elsewhere, he eventually saw such structures undermine the self-sufficiency of a national literature. Solzhenitsyn’s response to his physical exile was to contend that it did not have literary ramifications. His resistance to the deliberate thematization of exile, however, must be evaluated in light of the numerous figures of travel, return, and reengagement that structure his writing of return. Given these conditions, and the renewed interest in Solzhenitsyn’s work among Russian readers after nearly a decade of popular and critical indifference and even hostility following his return, it becomes necessary to reengage questions of agency, whether they situate the Solzhenitsyn of exile and return firmly within traditional constructs of authorial identity and intention, or situate his exilic works and writing of return somewhere between modern and postmodern historiographical and critical practices. This approach, however, requires interrogating the discursive and ethical boundaries that surround any discussion of the writer’s biography and its relationship to the writer’s body of work. Solzhenitsyn’s death on August 3, 2008, was an event the writer himself anticipated, and even prepared for, by returning to Russia. The fearlessness and foresight with which he met his passing, may, in time, generate studies that integrate it into posthumous readings of his work in meaningful ways. At this time, in its commitment to refiguring exilic narratives to negotiate marginalized and dominant cultural discourses and situate itself within localized subjectivities, his work remains appropriately, if not exclusively, contextualized within the interstitial territory occupied by narratives of return. The autobiographical imperatives and agency that structure the writing and experience of return retain their vitality, and Solzhenitsyn’s writings of return, far from isolating their author from literature, and by association, others who write and read it, continue to shape the historical, cultural, and individual contexts of their writing and reading. I will explore the question of the end of return, and how biographical, historical, and academic contingencies may contribute to it, at the conclusion of this study. For


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the remainder of this chapter, I will explore the tensions in Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return that stem from its denial of exilic displacement on the one hand and its acknowledgement of return as means of rearticulating constructions of home from a subjective position of belonging on the other.

Co ntinuities and Ruptures Solzhenitsyn almost exclusively used the word glavnyi (most important, principal) to describe the status he accords The Red Wheel among his works. It is intended as a bridge across gaps in the historical record, between Russians abroad and at home, and between Russia’s past and present. It is also an acknowledgement of the rupture in Solzhenitsyn’s life and work, his past and present, and his all-consuming effort to negate its effects. In describing the nearly two and a half years that elapsed after his forced expulsion from the Soviet Union and before his work on The Red Wheel could continue in earnest, Solzhenitsyn referred to a “breach and buildup of pressure” that would, in part, be relieved by the favorable work conditions (“space, solitude, access to archives and a Russian milieu”) he hoped to find upon relocating to the United States in 1976.8 When the “circumstances of [his] life and overwhelming intensity of [his] experience” spurred by conditions in the Soviet Union no longer interfered with the composition of The Red Wheel, it was the conditions of exile that allowed it to emerge.9 Continuities, rather than ruptures, are characteristically attributed to Solzhenitsyn’s work.10 Certain compositional forms and methods can be observed across his oeuvre, such as the compression of events into the narrative space of one or just a few days, and the “knot” structure that presents a cross section of several plots taking place simultaneously, both of which are central to The Red Wheel. The continuities create a controlled narrative of Solzhenitsyn’s creative trajectory, in which one work can be seen to contain the germ of the next, so that the entire oeuvre forms a tightly constructed continuum. Such thematic and formal continuities, however, bridge the rhetorical gaps that figure exilic displacement in

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the works produced in exile and immediately following his repatriation. It is in his later writing of return, namely the prose poem “Miniatures” (“Krokhotki,” written from 1996 to 1999), where rhetorical structures more characteristic of, and continuous with, his preexilic writing serve to “emplace” Solzhenitsyn’s work. To discern what constitutes the writing of exile and writing of return in Solzhenitsyn’s creative production, it is left to the reader to determine how the preexilic, exilic, and postexilic parts of his oeuvre are woven together. The “Binary Tales” (1993–1998), begun just before and completed after his repatriation, juxtapose events set in the 1920s–1930s and during the Second World War with contemporary impressions drawn from the writer’s two-month journey across Russia by train in 1994. Their emphasis on the dislocation between the past and the present—personified in the figure of a traveler—contrasts with the rootedness and continuity that is traditionally ascribed to Solzhenitsyn’s work. When Solzhenitsyn resumed writing his “Miniatures” following his return, after a thirty-year absence from the genre and twenty-year absence from Russia, he prefaced them with the note that he “could not write them there.”11 We are drawn to compare the preexilic verses with the ones he produced after his return to determine what continuities might exist between them and how we may account for the break in their composition. If the “Binary Tales” call attention to their textual gaps and cultural rifts, The Red Wheel, in its emphasis on completeness, strives to fill in every potential break. As Solzhenitsyn has asserted, “my business is to find the right facts, as many as I can, and knit them so tightly that no space is left unfilled; no room for argument . . . no room for empty space.”12 Yet the work is composed of disparate plots and parts—narrative chapters, the review or “political” chapters (identified by an apostrophe after the chapter number), the historical documents and “glances at the newspapers” inserted into the text, and “screen” passages that read as a screenplay complete with directorial notes—that remain unsynthesized. Narrative


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discourse is used to relate events and provide comprehensive information about fictional and historical figures, but The Red Wheel does not construct a plot or character-driven story of the revolution. The lack of synthesis and causality is central to the work; it contributes to the thesis that the revolution was not inevitable, that anything that happens, great or small, may have some later significance, or may not. In something akin to the gaps Wolfgang Iser describes in The Act of Reading: these unfilled spaces constitute a place for the reader, “a kind of pivot in which the whole text-reader relationship revolves.”13 As the reader has little leeway in filling in the blanks in a historiographical work, however, it is not imaginative projections that will determine the reader’s relation to the text, but her work as a historian: the reader’s activity consists primarily in the compilation of historical documents and facts into a meaningful narrative. The pedagogical imperative Solzhenitsyn hoped The Red Wheel would carry out derives not exclusively from “setting the record straight” through its incorporation of archival materials, but also in calling attention to its methods for presenting those materials. Outside of literary studies, as David Simpson reminds us, the retrieval of reading practices that affirm the ability of the novel to cultivate responsibility and social knowledge in the reader presents an exegetical model that reminds us of the extraordinary achievements of Solzhenitsyn’s preexilic work.14 Martha Nussbaum, in her 1995 study Poetic Justice, argues that literary texts, in making readers participants in the lives of others, enable an understanding of particularity and difference that can have powerful ramifications for rational decision making and the law. Her reading of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times finds value in the novel’s potential to generate empirical social change; the profound political and cultural transformations wrought by Solzhenitsyn’s One Day and The Gulag Archipelago demonstrate that reading can indeed “be a bridge both to a vision of justice and to the social enactment of that vision.”15 Solzhenitsyn in fact extended the public utility of his work to the point of

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distributing nearly all the royalties earned from The Gulag Archipelago to political prisoners, former zeks who served in labor camps, and their families through the charitable foundation he founded for that sole purpose and that continues its work to this day. Can reading practices focused on public utility, such as Nussbaum’s, contribute to an understanding of The Red Wheel and the short works of return Solzhenitsyn authored following his repatriation? Looking to Solzhenitsyn’s characterizations of his writing practices and stated objectives for his readers, it is evident that The Red Wheel was intended to fill a perceived shared sense of need for the representation of the events leading up to Russia’s February Revolution of 1917. In his “Author’s Note” to October 1916, the second volume or “knot” of The Red Wheel, he explains, “The recent history of our country is so little known, or taught in such a distorted fashion, that I have felt compelled, for the sake of my younger compatriots, to include more historical matter in this second Knot than might be expected in a work of literature.” While these ideals remain intact for the work as a whole, in later years Solzhenitsyn would describe the reader’s role in terms similar to those he used to describe the author’s method. In a statement issued in 2006 to readers of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn seems all too aware of how the power of literature has been inhibited by its adaptations to television and film, particularly when he contrasts the minimal effort exerted by an audience that empathizes with a character on screen with the difficult work reading entails: “Although the current times dispose us to sit back and watch our works of literature on the screen, there is no substituting for the effort we exert in spirit by reading, by going outside our own experience; in this case, by walking in the shoes of our cold, exhausted, famished brethren.”16 Solzhenitsyn’s involvement in the 2006 television adaptation of The First Circle and the cultural rifts he addressed by moving to that medium will be treated in a later section of this chapter. For now I wish to focus on his assertion that “there is no substituting for the effort we exert in spirit by reading,”


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which in the original Russian emphasizes that reading precipitates the exertion and suffering by which we step outside the boundaries of our own experience.17 Few works of literature better illustrate the potential of reading and writing to generate social change than One Day, whose publication in 1962 initiated worldwide discussion of Joseph Stalin’s labor camps while integrating camp-related themes and lexemes into Soviet literature and public discourse. In this connection, then, it is especially interesting to compare Solzhenitsyn’s discussion of the experience of reading with his description of his own methods of composing The Red Wheel: “I lived in 1917 with the people I was writing about, so much so that I felt myself in every sense their contemporary. In many ways they were more alive to me than people with whom I have been involved in the present day. I was totally wrapped up in them and no one disturbed me.”18 To account for the differences in how we read Solzhenitsyn’s preexilic novel One Day and the exilic historiographical epic The Red Wheel, then, we may look to Solzhenitsyn’s assertions that the reader participates in the world of the text through the act of reading much as the writer does in the process of writing. To generate understanding of the events that led to the February Revolution, Solzhenitsyn calls upon the reader’s aid in the process of recovering these events, and in so doing, endows them with meaning. His proposal that the processes of reading and writing share the potential to create understanding is perhaps not unusual or distinct from other writers’ or historians’ creative imperatives. However, if we gather from his account of the processes of reading One Day and composing The Red Wheel that he intends for the reader to approach the reading of these highly differentiated texts similarly, we may begin to recognize how the differing commitments to referentiality and structures of agency on the part of the author and the reader—that is, different processes of producing meaning—can result in highly divergent readings and receptions. In her analyses of the preexilic novels One Day and The First Circle, Leona Toker describes Solzhenitsyn’s method of

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composition as “paradigmatic,” in that the events presented in the novel are intended to be representative of the camp experience, rather than precise records of true to life occurrences. The method, Toker notes, offers a solution to the author’s dilemma of telling only part of the truth to facilitate publication, and at the same time presenting “this incomplete truth as typical (rather than individual, marginal, contingent) in order to legitimize his subject matter.”19 In the course of narrating the events of one day in the camps, the novel presents a range of possible outcomes at given moments; the novel’s protagonist often “knows the alternatives but has no way of telling which of them will emerge,” while the reader is reminded “of the metafictional nature of the reader-author pact.”20 Toker thus demonstrates how Solzhenitsyn makes the reader complicit in simultaneously engaging a fictional world and the extratextual reality that lies beyond it. The effect is not so much to reproduce a typical day in the camps for the reader’s vicarious experience as to validate the reader’s contribution to reading the literary text and understanding the atypical conditions outside of the text. This allows for multiple readings of the novel, but the contract between the reader and the author retains stable constructions of individual agency committed to the text’s referential qualities.21 The decades in exile during which Solzhenitsyn revised the first “knot” and composed later “knots” of The Red Wheel saw significant changes in his method as well as in the reader-author contract. If paradigmatic narratives such as One Day may be considered associative in structure, The Red Wheel is substitutive: it proposes to correct distortions of the historical record and offer in their place an accurate account of events. The first edition of August 1914 included an afterword that appealed to the reader with this imperative: “Almost all contemporary observers of the events described here who might have corrected me, added to the evidence, and revealed things which were not written at the time or preserved, are already dead . . . In publishing the first part of my work for the Russian reader abroad, I appeal to him to send me his criticisms and supplementary information,


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particularly about the historical characters about whom I had very little information.”22 Solzhenitsyn acknowledges that his work, despite its published form, is incomplete, inaccurate in parts, and therefore unfinished—a concern he will address through substantive research and revision in preparing the second edition for publication. In his biography of Solzhenitsyn, Michael Scammell observes that the afterword was not only provocative for its address to Russian émigrés while Solzhenitsyn still resided in Russia, but in that it “announced yet another of Solzhenitsyn’s ambitious intentions, namely, to bring the departed Russian millions back—metaphorically, at least—into the national fold . . . His passionate desire was for national unity and harmony.”23 When Solzhenitsyn found himself among those “departed” Russians following his exile and between the publication of the first and second editions of August 1914, completion of The Red Wheel and fulfillment of its multiple objectives—to restore truth to the historical record and provide harmony in place of the ruptures created by the revolution and its contemporary adherents—would become critical.24 Critics have cited Solzhenitsyn’s temporal distance from the historical period he describes in The Red Wheel and his physical absence from Russia as factors in its difficult reception.25 It is especially interesting, then, that Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the living link he experienced when working with his research materials and that he associates with the reader’s encounter with his work as well. Is Solzhenitsyn’s narrative autonomy, his claim to leaving no space left unfilled, a result of his presenting his own experiences of “having lived in 1917” as an addition to his narrative history despite the fact that the “real past” remains epistemically inaccessible to both him and his readers?26 At the same time Solzhenitsyn became more concerned with referentiality and completeness, he inevitably grew aware of the distance between the world of his book and the context in which it would appear. Conveying not only the need, but the experience of working with textual materials from the past, was a means of bridging that distance.

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E x il ic H isto r iogr aphy Although he formulated his ideas about The Red Wheel as early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn would continually revise the shape and method of his narrative over the decades of its production. Throughout the 1960s he would refer to The Red Wheel as a “novel.” Later, he would primarily identify it by its working title, R-17, or according to its component parts, that is, its four “knots,” the critical moments of activity from eleven to twenty-three days long composed of disparate narrative strands. More tellingly, in 1976 he would state, “I am the historian of the revolution; this is my main genre.”27 Solzhenitsyn noted that the “form of the novel will change as it goes,” and over time it appears to have moved from “novel” to “narrative,” and its author from novelist to “historian.”28 These shifts foreground Solzhenitsyn’s interest in interrogating the tradition of historical fiction while simultaneously acknowledging that the fictional modes of novelistic writing would risk greater estrangement between his subject matter and his textual representation of it. Unlike postmodern works of historiographical metafiction, The Red Wheel does not set out to problematize the question of historical knowledge as a whole.29 Rather, as Solzhenitsyn’s working through the examples of Leo Tolstoy, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway illustrates, he acknowledges, then puts aside, previous literary models to demonstrate how the form and method of The Red Wheel frame the material that makes up the work.30 The “material,” as Solzhenitsyn refers to his sources, and his need to “process” (prorabotat’) it, is the crux of the project. Archival materials are not only incorporated into the varied types of chapters that comprise the work, but determine the very shape and structure of those chapters. Solzhenitsyn acknowledges the dominant role the archival material exerted over the composition of The Red Wheel: “It is so interesting that everything becomes clear as it goes. Having set up for myself three types of exposition (narrative, political, cinematic), I was absolutely unable to incorporate the latter two types . . . into the first two parts of the novel. It turned out as traditional, slow


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exposition in the form of large chapters . . . then I suddenly realized: Parts I and II can but only be this way! They are before the revolution, in the former Russia. Thus the material itself corrected me.”31 Such principles are incorporated into the views of Olda Andozerskaya, one of the fictional characters in The Red Wheel, who teaches a course on “The Use of Sources.” When her students protest wasting “the present generation’s powers on the Middle Ages in Western Europe,” she responds, “History isn’t politics, my dears, with one loud-mouth echoing or contradicting what another loud-mouth has said. Sources, not opinion, are the material of history. And we must accept the conclusions as they come, even if they go against us.”32 Solzhenitsyn’s self-described willingness to cede to the demands of his material lends an archival quality to The Red Wheel itself, with the author making transparent his role as both archivist and historian. Having determined which documents were needed to reconstruct the social memory of the past after decades of distortion or exclusion by historians,33 Solzhenitsyn organized his assembled materials chronologically. To some extent, reading The Red Wheel is akin to working with archival fragments of the past that have been selected and labeled by the author, then arranged in files with dated headings, such as “February 25, Saturday,” or “February 26, Sunday.”34 The reader’s first inclination may be to break with this structure and follow the narrative strands devoted to particular historical figures or events, thus imposing reading practices associated with novels or more conventional histories. The fragmentary nature of the narrative strands and Solzhenitsyn’s admitted interpellations where the historical record was lacking, however,35 highlight the conflict between discursive practices associated with creative writing and those of the archivist or historian and demonstrates that the “finding aids” to Solzhenitsyn’s archival narrative are not to be found in its plots, but in this conflict itself. Passages throughout The Red Wheel appear to advance contradictory agendas that differentiate the methods of the creative writer and reader from those of the historian. In the

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portrayal of General Klyuev’s misconduct in battle in Prussia, the narrator of August 1914 states, “We shall permit ourselves no flourish of fantasy. We shall collect the most precise information we can, stick close to the historians and steer clear of the novelists—and even so we shall throw up our hands and admit once and for all that no one would ever dare to invent anything so unrelievedly black, that for the sake of verisimilitude any novelist would distribute light and shade more evenly.”36 If this passage warns against the imposition of conventional narrative constructions upon historical facts, others will strive to justify the integration of historical and discursive narratives within a single chapter. The biography of Pyotr Stolypin, for example, is set off in small type to distinguish it from the discursive sections of its chapter and is prefaced with a parenthetical note: “(Although the necessary outline of Stolypin’s life and work which follows will be as succinctly factual as the author can make it he suggests that only the most indefatigably curious readers immerse themselves in these details. Others can easily go straight on to the next section in larger print. The author would not permit himself such a crude distortion of the novel form if Russia’s whole history, her very memory, had not been so distorted in the past, and her historians silenced.)”37 For the sake of comprehensiveness the reader is provided with more information than is needed to come to an accurate and complete understanding of the events. However, for the reader-historian concerned that conventional narrative elements have eclipsed the truth to create a portrait of a born leader that is too idealized to have had any basis in fact, the details are available for verification. The deliberately clumsy narratorial intrusion calls attention to itself as a means of reminding the reader-historian of the utility of such biographical interventions and the project as a whole. Solzhenitsyn sets off proverbs in large typeface at the conclusion of selected chapters to figure how a discourse typically presented as a kind of folk wisdom or truth not only comments on the past but on the representation of the past. The proverbs do not epitomize the chapters to suggest that


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all the complex events of 1914–1917 can be summed up in a few timeworn maxims.38 Rather, as Solzhenitsyn has suggested, the proverbs can be understood as the opinion of “some old man who hears my story then straight away responds with a rejoinder. He’s commenting on the previous chapter” (emphasis mine).39 To cite one example from April 1917, a series of short chapters documenting the street protests of April 20–21 contrast isolated scenes of Bolsheviks and leaders of the provisional government and the Executive Committee competing for legitimacy as the protests grow in intensity. The scenes are juxtaposed to invoke comparison with one another: the indecision of Kolia Staniukovich (“Where should we go? Who should we find? How do we help?”) is contrasted with General Kornilov’s resolute orders to put troops on the streets to restore order; the Executive Committee refuses Kornilov’s orders; cries of “Long live Lenin” are instantly returned, “Down with Lenin!” The social fragmentation figured in the brevity of the chapters and opportunistic motives of various personalities elaborates the proverb that concludes Chapter 79: “A knot cannot be untied with one hand” (odnoi rukoi uzla ne zavyazhesh’). The proverb thus addresses the reader’s role alongside the writer’s in determining the link between the structure and material of the narrative knots. The inclusion of such passages points to the issues of referentiality and public utility that The Red Wheel sets out to resolve. On the one hand, narrative interventions are included to further The Red Wheel’s claim to comprehensiveness and extratextual referentiality. On the other, they acknowledge the impossibility of faithfully reproducing the past without conspicuous intervention on the part of the author. The narrative interventions highlight distinctions between archival materials and narratological structures such as dialogues, the “screen” chapters that instruct the reader in how to “view” events,40 narrative excurses that convey characters’ thoughts, and the proverbs, which function to eliminate the “dryness” and cold “rationality” he observed in other writers’ historical narratives.41 Such narratological

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elements, typically associated with fiction, are vital for providing details that help to establish the world of The Red Wheel as one that can be related to human experience. Solzhenitsyn noted this feature of Ivan Shmelev’s short story “Sun of the Dead” (1923); its narrative qualities render it “the first genuine testimony of its time about the revolution . . . such truth that it cannot be called fiction.”42 If Solzhenitsyn has argued that “it is hopeless to first create a general outline, then fill that outline with material,”43 the narrative passages in The Red Wheel, conversely, function to elaborate the heterogeneous fragments of archival material he has arranged into chronologically ordered segments. Solzhenitsyn’s consistent use of terms meaning “condensation” (“uplotnenie,” “kontsentratsiia,” “szhatie”) to describe his method of composition similarly functions as a guide to his narrative history.44 In the introductory “Author’s Note” to October 1916, Solzhenitsyn makes the claim that “art demands distillation of actuality” (kontsentratsiia deistvitel’nosti). Reluctant to burden the “book and the reader with the verbosity, indeed the empty verbiage” encountered in authentic documents, Solzhenitsyn has “therefore sometimes taken the liberty of condensing a whole text, or particular sentences in a text, to heighten the effect, without, however, the slightest distortion of meaning.”45 This admission to substitution, to exchanging modified variants of historical documents for authentic ones, is an acknowledgment of the considerable challenges that the work must overcome. Following Roman Jakobson, the correlation of condensation and displacement with the tropes of metaphor and metonymy has been extended by others and applied by Hayden White to his tropological view of historiography to demonstrate that “the historian’s language is not a transparent, passive medium through which we can see the past,” but a “vantage point” from which we may come to a relationship between narrative artifacts from the historical past and the historian’s narrative accounts of it.46 If we take Solzhenitsyn’s references to the process of condensation to denote


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his awareness that his self-referential narrative cannot be an unmediated mirror image of the past that presumes his narrative strategies to be invisible to the reader, we can view his narrative excurses (and other mediating processes that call attention to his discursive structures) as efforts to give prominence to his methodologies and critical location.47 Solzhenitsyn’s emphasis on the relationship between producing his historical narrative and having “lived” in the past suggests that the methodology behind The Red Wheel functions not only to present past events as they actually happened, but also to provide “a more or less autonomous instrument that can be used for understanding the past.”48 In highlighting the metaphorical qualities of the historical narrative, the reader’s role in finding organizational structure and meaning in the material is made clear: to have a meaningful understanding of history, one should not simply confront the Soviet version of the history of the revolution with “the truth” but recognize how to work with multiple sources and discourses to determine what they may reveal or conceal about the past and one’s relationship with it.49 But Solzhenitsyn did not exclusively intend for The Red Wheel to generate commentary about how it might be read. He envisioned that it would correct distortions of the historical record and illuminate the forgotten past.50 Some readers have taken this proposal to suggest that Solzhenitsyn effaces the distinction between historical events, their textual representations, and his narrative rendition of them to appeal to the reader’s identification with the lived experiences of his subjects. Thus, one reviewer of October 1916 describes the fictional Colonel Vorotyntsev’s view of the war as “stunning in its concreteness, an impressive piece of historical reconstruction,” noting that “we the readers, moreover, believe [Vorotyntsev] and his dire predictions for the future of Russia because Mr. Solzhenitsyn has already taken us to the front . . . We have seen for ourselves, as it were, how a routinized absurdity and the superiority of the German enemy have made the legendary courage of the Russian soldier almost obsolete.”51

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For others, the extratextual referentiality of Solzhenitsyn’s treatment of the February Revolution as a critical turning point in Russian and world history was more easily perceived in his nonfiction article “Reflections on the February Revolution,” written immediately after the completion of the third “knot,” March 1917. The article, published twice in Russia in 1995 to little notice, contributed to wide discussion of the revolution upon its reprinting in 2007 on the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the February Revolution. In noting this fact at a 2007 conference celebrating her husband’s work, Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna asked, “Is this not what the author of The Red Wheel wished for, that his countrymen might look back at their history and interpret it, free of the Bolsheviks’ distortions and omissions?”52 If so, it suggests that Solzhenitsyn’s narrative history and historical commentary may strive for identical public goals, but travel distinctly different paths toward achieving their aims. Can the public goals envisioned for The Red Wheel be realized? Or to paraphrase Kalle Pihlainen, what is the moral of the historical story? The kind of closure that The Red Wheel strives to effect in the public sphere is distinct from the reception it encourages among individual readers. Does what it achieves through its emphasis on textuality necessarily limit its claims to extratextual referentiality? Pihlainen has argued that “nothing is lost by . . . admitting referentiality as a specifically textual feature of historical narratives,”53 but Solzhenitsyn likely would not be willing to accept such terms. He strives to diminish the mediated quality of his narrative by gradually marginalizing his fictional characters over the course of its four knots and avoiding the organization of its various strands into convenient plots. To this end, the final section of The Red Wheel, “At the Break in the Narration” (Na obryve povestvovaniia), enumerates the projected contents of the unfinished sixteen knots excluding all the fictional narrative strands. Despite all these gestures toward greater referentiality, it remains apparent that the readers’ material, unlike Solzhenitsyn’s, is at a remove from the archives in which the author found them, and events


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depicted in the later knots are no more examples of “found” history than those depicted in the first volume.54 In inviting readers to work with a contemporary narrative rendering of earlier textual representations of historical phenomena, The Red Wheel calls attention to its own textuality to articulate a way of approaching historical narratives from a present-day perspective. In doing so, it displaces the discussion of The Red Wheel from the ontological level of the past to the discourse and methodology of the text itself.55 The introduction to “At the Break in the Narration,” along with Solzhenitsyn’s decision to leave unidentified the numerous archives and sources he consulted, might be read as a set of guidelines for the reader-historian who would take up the task of completing The Red Wheel: “From April the October Revolution already looms as inevitable. The situation after April changes not qualitatively but quantitatively. Moreover both the volume of what has been written and my age force the interruption of the narrative. For the subsequent Knots, however, I acquaint the reader with a summary of the main events that should not be passed over should one write them in full.”56 This is an unexpected conclusion to a text that, by the admission of its author, strives to leave no space unfilled—unless, as I have tried to demonstrate here, one of its tasks is to educate and engage the reader-historian in its methods. What we might call the grand narrative of The Red Wheel, emblematized in the “full screen” image of a burning wheel coming loose from an ammunition wagon and rolling unstoppably into the path of the viewer, similarly elucidates the double bind of its public aims and potential individual readings. The sense of multiple contingencies, that things could have turned out differently, is captured by Solzhenitsyn in all of its detail. And yet the wheel of doom rolls ever forward, bound by the referential pledge that points to the revolution’s tragic extratextual conclusion. This work—unconventional in its size, ambition, and striving for an ontological past that ultimately demonstrates its textuality and the reader’s agency exert greater control over its reception than its articulated

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goals do—has so far resisted any finalized appropriation into the system of closure that it was intended for. In its place, The Red Wheel has, perhaps despite its other aims, challenged the reader to bridge the gaps between its aggregate parts, the past and the present, to evaluate the process of producing historiographical discourse and to endow the tragic underpinnings of the revolutionary period with a contemporary critical vantage point. Solzhenitsyn’s narrative strategies in The Red Wheel gesture toward familiar paradigms for the reception of his work. Like The Gulag Archipelago, it confounds generic taxonomy and the boundaries between fact and fiction. It revisits the “knot” construction of The First Circle, and like that work, its first knot, August 1914, exists in two published redactions whose differences evince structures of self-evaluation. Unlike those works, however, the reader is challenged to reconcile all of Solzhenitsyn’s stated aims for The Red Wheel with what it ultimately achieves. The task of overcoming such dislocations is perhaps inevitable for a work composed over several decades in exile during which it strives to overcome discursive estrangement, and if not in the empirical social changes of the kind that Nussbaum envisions, the work eventually finds resolution and validation in the individual readings it generates.

Narrative Retur ns It has become commonplace to describe Solzhenitsyn returning to Russia on May 27, 1994, to a hero’s welcome, only to reveal himself increasingly in conflict with the zeitgeist and out of touch with the interests of Russian audiences.57 Commentators described Solzhenitsyn’s act of return as a performance, as “the grandest author tour in history,” or more cynically, as the arrival of the master-landowner to his provincial home.58 While journalists sought entry onto the private train that carried the newly arrived Solzhenitsyn from Vladivostok to Moscow in hopes of finding indiscretions to sensationalize for their own “narratives of return,” it was Solzhenitsyn the traveler, collecting experiences and voices from across the country, whose transitory status led


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to further rhetorical dislocations in the short “Binary Tales” (“Dvuchastnye rasskazy”) completed in 1998. The traveler is thematized in the “Binary Tales” as a figure incapable of contributing to the lives of the inhabitants of the countryside and their idealized, if threatened, landscapes. The conflation of displacement with travel to Russia’s rural heart allegorizes the condition of the returned exile as well as that of deterritorialized post-Soviet citizens wary of looking to Western cultural models. In drawing the arc of Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return, then, lines of continuity intended to “emplace” the writing subject and his readers coexist with rhetorical dislocations. These conflicting imperatives, particularly evident in Solzhenitsyn’s memoir of his years in exile, The Little Grain Fell between Two Millstones (Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov) and the “Binary Tales,” eventually give way to more cohesive rhetorical constructions of national identity in the prose poem “Miniatures” and the 2006 television adaptation of The First Circle. The Little Grain Fell between Two Millstones narrates the twenty years Solzhenitsyn lived in exile, from the moment of his forced transport to Germany in 1974 to his repatriation to Russia in May 1994. The rhetorical structures of its opening chapters divide and alienate the reader, fragmenting the reader’s engagement with the writing subject, whose profound alienation not only demarcates various national and cultural lines but estranges the reader from the text. The alienating discourses of the earlier chapters are resolved only at the conclusion of the narrative, through passages that engage the reader in vivid descriptions of Solzhenitsyn’s encounter from abroad with the events of perestroika that will coincide with the end of his exile and initiate his plans for return. Written concurrently with the events it describes but published serially from 1998 to 2003, The Little Grain shares several points of continuity with earlier publications. It reverberates with the author’s commitment to his work, affirmations of faith, and gratitude to colleagues and friends who assisted him in his endeavors, and in this way invites

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comparison with The Oak and the Calf (1975), a narrative account of the author’s battle to remain active as a writer, and its supplement Invisible Allies, not published until 1991 to preserve the anonymity of those who assisted the author with his work. Like The Oak and the Calf, which has been described as tactical and didactic,59 The Little Grain is highly polemical, and its provocative characterizations of certain individuals and generalizations about others have elicited pointed responses from several readers.60 These rebuttals, like Vladimir Lakshin’s and others written on behalf of Aleksandr Tvardovsky in response to The Oak and the Calf, form a necessary addendum to The Little Grain. The self-image of the writer that emerges from The Little Grain is distinct from that of his earlier autobiographical portraits. The Oak and the Calf, a “deeply archetypal work” that depicts the writer’s battle as “the struggle between good and evil,”61 is narrated in a bold idiom that befits the author’s sense of mission. If its subtitle, “sketches of literary life in the Soviet Union,” bears an ironic relation to the travails the author endured to see his work in print, the subtitle to The Little Grain, “sketches of exile,” is similarly ironic. Where one might expect to see traditional exilic binaries (e.g., here/ there, past/present) or the eschatological battle of The Oak and the Calf, The Little Grain instead splits the reader by assuming a certain unanimity while adopting a number of unresolvable positions. While individual readers inevitably found fault with The Oak and the Calf, that work pivoted on Solzhenitsyn’s positing of the binary of good and evil as an endemic feature of Soviet life. While the use of such binaries can deprive individuals of agency in that they are construed as having “allegedly subscribed to ‘communist values’ either because they were coerced to do so, or because they had no means of reflecting upon them critically,”62 it has been proposed that even critical readers uncomfortable with where Solzhenitsyn situated various individuals (including himself) within this binary nonetheless accepted it in their refutations.63 The Little Grain, particularly in its opening chapters, divides readers


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and leaves them stranded, their dislocation from the text emerging from an unwillingness to engage the work on such terms. If the conviction and pride of the “calf” drew from understanding how to outsmart Soviet authorities, in their absence and in facing unfamiliar territories and new challenges (foreign press corps, legal concerns, Japanese food), the “grain” remains outspoken, but dislocated from his bearings. By his own admission, he makes mistakes. At other times, he admits none when we think he should. By turns resisting and yielding to the text, one critic who had not yet read the work to its conclusion described it as “interesting,” “at times irritating,” and displaying a “negative charm.”64 Another writes that the serial publication of the work over five years “does not facilitate dialogue between the writer and reader,” adding that, in any case, “it seems Solzhenitsyn did not anticipate this dialogue” because “The Little Grain (like The Oak and the Calf) likely was written for himself, rather than for us.”65 By the conclusion of The Little Grain, however, Solzhenitsyn joins in Cavendish’s municipal celebration of Vermont’s two hundred years of statehood and appears very much at home. And as he follows news of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dawn of perestroika, and the dropping of criminal charges against him in Russia, his plans for return begin. The protracted serial publication of The Little Grain was strategic: if the reader was “exiled” from the text along with the unrooted exiled writer at its start, the reader yields to its resolution, which coincides with the author’s return.66 Such mediations have the effect of gradually reshaping Solzhenitsyn’s rhetorical—as well as physical—exile over time and seeing it to its end. If Solzhenitsyn appeared out of touch with readers when he returned to Russia in 1994, by the time of the publication of the last installment of The Little Grain in 2003 his return to the reader was well under way. In their continuation of the narrative project of return, the short stories and poems published after Solzhenitsyn’s repatriation are constructed so as to speak on behalf of voices and values that were denied any place within the Russian cultural

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discourse of the mid-1990s. Solzhenitsyn visited seventeen cities during his eight-week return journey from Vladivostok to Moscow, and he quotes the disenfranchised voices he heard all across Russia’s expanse—“No one needs our city at all” (ves’ gorod nash nikomu ne nuzhen)—in the travel diary he kept as his train traveled westward. At the same time he described his encounter with the post-Soviet landscape: “Through this entire journey, already three weeks’ time, I am overwhelmed by the sweep of Russian spaces. I had the sense that this was one of a series of blessings sent by God. And I felt clearly that in Moscow it would be completely different: overrun with hostile forces.”67 The contrasting values Solzhenitsyn encountered upon his return prompted discourses that simultaneously negotiated placement and displacement. In 1995, three years before the first installments of The Little Grain began to appear serially in print, the journal Novyi mir published the “Binary Tales,” begun the year before his departure from the United States and completed after his journey across Russia. As noted above, the figure of the traveler in the stories emblematizes the dislocation of the returned exile and post-Soviet citizens alike, with both in search of a cohesive identity. Both strive to “construct authenticities” in the shared belief “in a truer, more meaningful existence somewhere else.”68 In the “Binary Tales,” travel and transitoriness, however, signify an absence of meaning. While the term “binary” in English suggests either positive or negative correspondences between the two parts of each story, the neutral Russian “dvuchastnyi,” literally “bipartite” or “two-part,” may equally take into account the lack of easy resolution, reflected in the melancholic absences at the center of the tales. Their structure demonstrates that while certain dislocations have the potential to be resituated and settled, others remain open to the melancholy of vanishing sites of production and interpretation. The “Binary Tales” consist of eight short stories, each in two parts. The first two, “Ego” (1994) and “On the Extremes” (1994–1995) are set in Tambov during the 1920–1921 peasant rebellion against the Bolsheviks. The first part of “Ego”


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(the title derives from the protagonist’s nickname), follows the activity of Pavel Ektov, an organizer of the peasant rebellion until his arrest; the second details his imprisonment and torture in Moscow and return to Tambov, where he is forced to identify participants in the rebellion and condemn them to death. “On the Extremes” begins with the childhood and military training of Georgii Zhukov. It later depicts an aged Zhukov, compelled to write his memoirs to protect his reputation for posterity. Ironically, while determined to write “only the truth” in hopes that others might learn from his experiences, he is obliged to include a reference to Leonid Brezhnev, whom he never knew during the war, before his memoirs can be published. The only one of the “Binary Tales” completed before Solzhenitsyn’s return, “The Young Generation” (1993) tells a story of similar ethical compromise. A professor changes a student’s grade from “fail” to “pass” when the student protests that he will not be able to enter the Komsomol or receive his stipend. When later arrested, the professor is interrogated by his former student and released from a sentence to labor camp or death only after informing on his colleagues under duress. The first two stories are based on research materials that Solzhenitsyn had intended to incorporate into The Red Wheel. Their compact form and juxtaposition with “The Young Generation” helps to foreground an issue familiar to readers of Solzhenitsyn: how institutions of power in the Soviet era compromised individuals who sought to situate themselves ethically without harm to others or themselves. The next two stories in the collection explore the appropriation of art by institutions of power. “Nasten’ka” (1993–1995) depicts two possible fates for a young woman in the 1920s and 1930s. “Apricot Jam” (1994) concerns one man’s fate as seen from two perspectives. The first part of each story describes human suffering: a young woman is raped by a local Komsomol leader and raises a daughter on her own; a prisoner describes his torture in a letter of appeal he sends to a writer. “Nasten’ka” concludes with a literature instructor resigning herself to teaching ideology over art. “Apricot Jam” reveals

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the recipient of the letter (unnamed, but recognizable as the writer Aleksei Tolstoi) discussing its literary merits over tea and jam with a guest on the veranda of his summer home. The final three stories are set in the post-Soviet period. “At the Fractures” follows the professional paths of two men through the Soviet period and their difficult adjustment to privatization in the early 1990s. “It Makes No Difference” depicts two men in positions of power who are advised that events have a momentum of their own, and any effort to stop them is futile. By this rationale, a high-ranking official of the post-Soviet era allows the ecological destruction caused by the long-term construction of a hydroelectric plant to continue. The autobiographical “Zheliabug Settlements” details the author’s wartime experiences with his soundranging unit among the Zheliabug region’s residents, and his return to the region in 1995 to find war survivors living in poor conditions. If the reader had to seek out the cracks in the monolithic foundation of The Red Wheel to allow it to become both subject and object of the interpretive act, that break is literally inscribed in the “Binary Tales” between the two parts of each story. All the stories center upon absence: the absence of an ethical choice in saving one’s skin or substituting another’s; the vain wish for salvation in art that is ideologically compromised; the lack of institutional structures and individual will to provide social support and ecological conservation. Figuring their own situation in these absences, the tales reveal their involvement in the difficult conditions they depict. In this new era of self- and national definition, is meaning constituent upon absence, inscribed in the forms of a vanishing past and endangered locales? Confronted with such conditions, Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return seeks out situated communities in their particular social and cultural contexts. The “Binary Tales,” and especially the suffering they describe, cannot be left to hang in the gap between their parts, nor do they acquire meaning in simple juxtaposition to the cultural discourse of “emptiness” Solzhenitsyn finds dominant in both Russia and the


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West.69 Looking to the second part of the autobiographical “Zheliabug Settlements,” we see that memory does not suffice to fill these voids. When in 1995 the narrator and his traveling companion, his now retired former lieutenant colonel, follow the paths taken by their regiment fifty-two years earlier, the narrative gives itself over to reminiscences. They pass a long neglected cart on the side of the road with three wheels remaining—an echo of the burning ammunition wagon in The Red Wheel—in ruins, but surrounded by new growth. His companion recalls a fellow soldier’s birthday celebration near a deserted lake: “Yes, it was the Prussian night,” he recalls, evoking Solzhenitsyn’s 1950 poem “Prussian Nights,” drawn from his wartime experiences.70 The two men encounter an elderly woman whom the narrator is certain he remembers, but even he is aware that this memory does not bring resolution to their meeting: “It is strange. I want to tell her something joyous about that time, but what is there to be joyful about? Only our youth. Thoughtlessly I repeat: ‘I remember you.’” He feels even more ineffectual when she considers that he might be an official of some sort: “Why have you come to visit us? What sort of announcement do you have?” He can only reply that they are passing through to “see old places.”71 The narrator’s ineffectuality stems from his transitoriness. During his brief stop on the road, he looks for his past—he even finds the traces of it—but is unable to engage with the concerns of the here and the now, personified in the figure of the anxious old woman who questions a local administrator about her pension and the availability of food. Her conditions and the administrator’s promise to her (“I will personally deal with all questions concerning you, our veterans, and our mothers. If I can’t handle it, then we’ll go to the regional level. We won’t involve Moscow, we don’t have to”), attest to a self-sufficiency and rootedness that stands in stark contrast to transience of the traveler.72 Neither he, nor any visiting official from Moscow (as seen in “It Makes No Difference”) can reclaim past experiences or otherwise participate meaningfully in their space.

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“Zheliabug Settlements” presents only the melancholic hope for meaningful interaction with an authentic soul, with resolution remaining out of reach. For his own part, rejecting the position of the dislocated visitor, Solzhenitsyn carefully constructed the narrative of his own travels, keeping a notebook of his journey and allowing two simultaneous film recordings of his passage to record the concerns voiced by the people he encountered along the way.73 “While I am traveling through the provinces, I have the goal of meeting exclusively with the local people,” he wrote in an April 26, 1994, letter to then-president Boris Yeltsin, stipulating that no one from Moscow should be sent to meet him or accompany him on his trip.74 Solzhenitsyn’s insistence upon documentation of his encounters with “real people” without interference from Moscow reflects a desire to overcome a twin crisis of identity—his and the nation’s—by demarcating the territories of the local and authentic and representing them in his work.75 “Zheliabug Settlements,” the travel diary, and film cameras all call attention to the crisis of counting “among my friends Russian spaces, the Russian provinces, small and medium-sized towns”76 while acknowledging a need to reacquaint oneself with them. The “production of locality” Solzhenitsyn engages in here may strike some readers as similar to the characterization of writing by critics of ethnographic practice, as “a kind of technology of power that exercises dominant relations through representation.”77 Arjun Appadurai observes that among the processes that accompany the production of locality is the tendency of its discourses to be “drawn into the very localization they seek to document.”78 Following this argument, one may propose that in the opposition of threatened discourses and dominant ones, there is encoded yet another act of domination in which the marginalized is made to conspire in the writer’s project. To continue this line of thought and to paraphrase Appadurai, the very act of producing locality is paradoxical: the producer of locality authorizes himself to describe and defend particular discourses yet evinces no reflexivity, or awareness of the effect


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his own presence has on the discourse. In these terms, it might be said that writing becomes less about locality and more about the production of locality. While critics of ethnography explore this issue in the interest of reconceiving ethnographic writing practices, I note it here because it assists in critically historicizing Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return and its reception. The problem of nonreflexive complicity has long been identified with Solzhenitsyn’s work, implicating the author in power relations that affiliate his voice with authority. This problem is often touched upon in polemical contexts, and typically emerges when Solzhenitsyn’s constructions of identity move from the local to the national. Thus, despite his interest in historical contextualizations of constructions of identity—as in Two Hundred Years Together, a two-volume history of Russian-Jewish relations that grew out of his research for The Red Wheel—the distinctly modern perspective of such projects in their avoidance of problematizing identity as an object of study in itself leads to particular challenges. Vladimir Voinovich raises similar concerns about essentializing discourses in Solzhenitsyn’s work, and at the same time expresses fears that Solzhenitsyn has become a victim of his own self-orientalization.79 Such arguments have ramifications for the reception of Solzhenitsyn’s project of return in that they draw attention to Solzhenitsyn’s constructions of identity and the oppositional structures he inscribes into them. The localized identities that remained inaccessible to the traveling writing subject in the “Binary Tales” become emblematic of the nation as a whole in the later works Russia in Collapse (Rossiia v obvale, 1998) and the prose poem “Miniatures.” In Russia in Collapse besieged constructions of cultural value in a deterritorialized post-Soviet space depict a nation threatened with extinction. “How are we to live?” “Why are we alive?” “What does it mean to be Russian today?”80 Questions about survival and identity voiced by the people Solzhenitsyn met during his journey across Russia make up the entirety of “At the Ruptures of Russia’s Spaces,” the compellingly titled first chapter of Russia in Collapse. In subsequent chapters Solzhenitsyn

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responds to these questions and makes proposals for Russia’s future: the observer-traveler of the “Binary Tales” now points the way.81 Responses to such constructions of identity and the types of power relations they imply have been mixed. Solzhenitsyn’s biographer Liudmila Saraskina identifies 1998, and the publication of Russia in Collapse in particular, as the moment when Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return became relevant to Russian reading audiences.82 The critic Viacheslav Kuritsyn ironically makes himself complicit in discourses that construct identity to chastise the “Great Writer of the Russian Land” for his sweeping indictment of “the Soviet system for giving rise to totalitarianism; Americans, for throwing out their refrigerators when they could get them fixed; and the new Russia for being in collapse.” Kuritsyn then embraces, with more than a hint of irony, this constructed image in all its essentialism: “We love [Solzhenitsyn] because he fought for necessary things, because he opened our eyes, because he’s an awesome writer, and just because he’s our Solzh and no one else has as awesome a Solzh as we do.”83 Andrei Zorin identifies Solzhenitsyn’s refiguring of his preexilic binary constructions after his return as responsible for such discourses: “The author, having structured his life’s work on a single opposition, now unexpectedly speaks in the voice of the majority of the unintegrated, the frightened, those who were not capable of accepting and recognizing the long awaited social changes.”84 In the state of cultural crisis Solzhenitsyn calls the “third Time of Troubles,”85 his writings and extratextual activity of return constitute an active cultural system in which the preservation of a threatened and marginalized Russian cultural tradition occupies a central position. This system is maintained through his recent writings, in particular, the prose poem “Miniatures” (“Krokhotki,” 1996–1999), which refigure the binary oppositions that organize the preexilic “Miniatures” (1958–1960) to call attention to threatened cultural discourses. The same objective also informs Solzhenitsyn’s considerable efforts to provide support to Russian artists


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and cultural figures through his Center for Russian Culture Abroad, an archive and cultural center opened in Moscow in 2005, and the founding of a literary prize in his name that is awarded to cultural figures whose work possesses “high artistic merit, promotes Russia’s self-understanding (samopoznanie), and makes a substantive contribution to the preservation and careful development of the tradition of Russian literature.”86 Since 1998, the Solzhenitsyn Prize has been awarded to contemporary prose writers and poets, the philologist Vladimir Toporov, and in 2004 to the director Vladimir Bortko and actor Evgenii Mironov for their work on the television adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. In Solzhenitsyn’s construction of return from The Little Grain to the “Binary Tales,” and from the prose-poem “Miniatures” to the television adaptation of The First Circle, marginality and preservation become more deeply encoded. Despite the overwhelming alienation of The Little Grain, which occasionally shocks in its overdetermined characterizations of entire nations, Solzhenitsyn avoids any association between the condition of exile and marginality, an association that, in his view, would render his life’s work meaningless.87 However, after briefly occupying the position of the traveler in his encounter with the small towns and cities of Russia’s center and east to experience their marginalization firsthand, Solzhenitsyn begins to speak on their behalf in the “Miniatures.” Similarly, the serialized television adaptation of The First Circle, like other teleserialy that preceded it, emerges in response to the marginalization of literary discourses, including Solzhenitsyn’s own.

From Subjective History to Collective Story It is in the “Miniatures,” the prose poems composed between 1996 and 1999, that Solzhenitsyn establishes a situated, if marginalized, point of enunciation for his writing of return.88 Returning to the genre he last practiced from 1958 to 1960, Solzhenitsyn here addresses present concerns in a way he could not in the “Binary Tales.” The 1996–1999 “Miniatures” are notable for their relationships to previous works,

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including the earlier “Miniatures,” but also the more recent “Binary Tales.” The contextual forces that mediate them are evident, given their autobiographical elements, references to post-Soviet conditions and intertextual allusions, along with Solzhenitsyn’s admission that he “could not write them there.” They anticipate certain readings derived from their literary and historical context and “family resemblance” to earlier works,89 but also recontextualize previously employed motifs within a confined textual space to represent the struggle of localized practices and traditions against contemporary economic and cultural developments. The 1958–1960 “Miniatures” center upon binaries of physical and cultural space and the dichotomy of body and spirit.90 Open spaces contrast with closed ones (“Lake Segden,” “Breathing,” “Sharik”); holy spaces contrast with secular, Soviet ones (“The Poet’s Ashes,” “Travels Along the Oka River”); and weak, helpless beings display a vigor for life (“The Elm Log,” “A Bonfire and Ants”) that, in contrast with human activity, makes the advances of industry and technology appear foolish (“The Duckling”). In nearly every short prose poem, restricted access to nature, the desecration of holy spaces, and emphasis on material achievement over spirituality is presented as the result of decades of Soviet rule. The historicity of the texts and their depiction of a violent confrontation between disappearing traces of a past, “authentic” culture and Soviet modernization place them squarely within the frame of Solzhenitsyn’s preexilic writing.91 In reading the 1996–1999 “Miniatures,” one is struck foremost by the recurring motif of the author’s advancing age and mortality (“Aging,” “The Curtain”), and closer inspection reveals how this theme relates to the collection’s overall recasting of the binary structures of the 1958–1960 prose poems. In the 1958–1960 collection, one encounters “a Manichean struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’” and an unambiguously anti-Soviet stance on the part of the writer.92 The 1996–1999 “Miniatures” speak on behalf of localized or threatened voices becoming pushed to the margins by more dominant contemporary discourses. We may thus


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read “Remembrance for the Departed” as a refiguration of the early prose poem “We Will Never Die,” a cry of protest against cemeteries becoming overrun with exhortatory Soviet placards or bulldozed to make way for stadiums or amusement parks. The denunciatory tone of “We Will Never Die” gives way in “Remembrance for the Departed” to a meditative commemoration of the dead that acknowledges prayer as a discourse that exists outside of polemical structures and the general discourse of contemporary society. Rather than challenge conventional binary structures, as did the “Binary Tales” and The Little Grain, the 1996–1999 “Miniatures” orient the opposition of good/evil toward the territory of cultural geography, creating oppositions such as dominant/marginalized, national/local, and global/ national, with the writer identifying with the latter set of values in each binary and arguing for its wider representation.93 The dividing slash in Solzhenitsyn’s refigured binaries is dynamic; it elicits a nudge, or even a forceful push toward initiating change at the same time the prose poems advocate for the preservation of past tradition. Nature, ruins, and other threatened sites typically provide the locus for this movement, illustrating the fragility of these spaces and the traditions associated with them. In this way the prose poem “The Rooster’s Song” functions as a companion to “Zheliabug Settlements” in its extension of the traveler’s malaise to entire generations. The narrator of “Zheliabug Settlements” hears a rooster’s crow, which is “always succulent, joyful, and promises life, no matter what else is happening around,” as he recounts his conversation with the old woman he recalled from his past. The rooster’s exuberant song, however, is evoked to create contrast with the heartache the narrator feels upon having to leave the woman and continue on his way. The prose poem “The Rooster’s Song” describes the collective sickness of generations who have never heard the rooster’s “bright, vibrant, succulent cry” due to “the depopulation, desertion, and extinction of our villages.”94 It concludes with the sentiment that Russians should live an untroubled

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existence like the rooster, that is, as if the nation were not in crisis, a condition that both texts indicate is nearly impossible in Russia’s present state. Similarly, the prose poem “The Larch” can be read together with the binary tale “It Makes No Difference.” In “It Makes No Difference,” the captain of a ship carrying a visiting official from Moscow notes that larch logs do not stay afloat, and ten years after the trees were felled in the perestroika era with no barges to carry the logs downstream, the logs remain in the river. “You try lying around like that,” the captain says, as the ship passes a barren slope once thick with growth.95 “The Larch” recalls this motif (the wood is “too dense to drag and float downstream”), but also notes the tenacity of the tree, which “abandoned in water does not rot, but hardens ever closer to the eternal quality of stone.” Noting that in spring the tree returns to life with silky new foliage, the poet observes that “there are people like this too,” illustrating the hope that a dormant source of strength might be regenerated after the current crisis has passed.96 Elsewhere in the 1996–1999 “Miniatures,” culturally privileged sites are in ruins and disappearing along with the nation’s conscience. “Pernicious weeds” threaten to dominate “good plants” (“Pernicious Weed”), women launder clothes in the Volga River along a “false embankment” in a nearly submerged city (“The Belltower”), even the “nervous, fleeting whirlwind of contemporary life” threatens to take over the calm just before sleep (“Nocturnal Thoughts”).97 As in “The Rooster’s Crow” and “The Larch,” the poems alternate between hope—emblematized in the persistence of these privileged sites or human will to preserve them—and the retribution of conscience for those responsible for Russia’s collapse. The latter impulse is especially evident in “Pernicious Weed,” and “Lightning,” in which a tree split in two by lightning reveals a mind divided, and destroyed, by conscience. The national allegory is put forward most explicitly in the prose poem “Shame” (“Pozor”), in which the “Motherland” is overrun by corruption and the population reduced to unbearable economic and spiritual poverty. The question of


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Russia’s complete disappearance is raised (“it has happened, nations of the earth have entirely perished”), then countered with the writer’s observations of “those two dozen regions I visited” where “living, generous of heart, native people” live.98 The 1996–1999 “Miniatures,” with their motifs of regeneration and gaping wounds of fractured conscience, argue for the persistence of cultural forms that will uphold spiritual life in contemporary Russia and the status of Russian culture in the world while deeply implicating those responsible for economic and cultural corruption and producing the arrogant, duplicitous, and trite image of Russia that is projected to the world outside its borders. The binary constructions of place in these “Miniatures” constitute rhetorical markers of return that simultaneously advocate for preservation and reform. The image of the fragility of the nation they endorse reflects the situated, rather than fluid or hybrid, rhetorical position they enunciate. In this connection, it is important to note that many of the “Miniatures” are set in the garden of Solzhenitsyn’s Troitse-Lykovo home on Moscow’s outer edge. We may recall that Vassily Aksyonov placed a late example of his writing of return in the Stalin-era Moscow apartment building where he lived to explore certain nostalgic discourses and critique others. The complex project of Solzhenitsyn’s return reveals that the stable point of enunciation, his rhetorical “home” in his allegorical construction of his homeland, balances on fragile structures threatened with extinction, as well as on textual precursors such as the 1958–1960 “Miniatures” and the more recent “Binary Tales” whose figure of the traveler and attendant narrative structures require active revision. The “Miniatures” assume stable positions that perhaps not all readers will claim as their own, but will recognize as a stance central to Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return and critical to the formation of a national narrative. *

*

*

The television adaptation of Solzhenitsyn’s 1968 novel, The First Circle (2006), is the author’s response to diminished

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public engagement with literary texts. It is moreover a revisitation of the goals Solzhenitsyn set in exile for his historiographical writing, that is, to draw attention to its own textuality—in this case, the medium of the teleserial—to articulate a way of approaching historical narratives from a present-day perspective. The director Gleb Panfilov drew heavily on Solzhenitsyn’s participation in the project: Solzhenitsyn wrote the screenplay for the series, provided the narrative voiceovers, and served as a consultant during the filming to advise the crew on details of life in the camps and the Marfino research institute staffed by prisoner-scientists. Viktor Moskvin, director of the Center for Russian Culture Abroad, described the screenplay as a distinct new work,99 which in effect approached the adaptation the way one might a new edition of the novel as a companion to its two existing print variants.100 Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna’s observation that the serial’s attention to detail is such that it could be used as a pedagogical tool about the period in which the story takes place similarly accords the serial its own status alongside the novel, while acknowledging that there was likely little overlap between audiences.101 Some reviewers who recalled reading samizdat editions of The First Circle as their introduction to the work questioned whether a widely advertised production for state television could reproduce the novel’s oppositional structures.102 In this view of the adaptation, opposition became recoded as appropriation, so that Solzhenitsyn’s novel became co-opted, along with other works by once-banned authors adapted for television, as “signs of national conciliation and imperial revival.”103 The appropriation of oppositional writing by post-Soviet television represents an uneasy form of reconciliation, a means of filling the representational gaps in an empty post-Soviet national narrative with images, themes, and even heroic models of opposition, drawn from the Soviet past. Others acknowledged that the intended audience of the serial included those who neither knew the novel nor the historical conditions that gave rise to it. “I was watching the film per the novel,” one critic writes, “whereas they were


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watching a movie about life.”104 Perhaps for the benefit of the latter audience, the film’s promoters relied on name and face recognition: billboards advertising the program featured close-up photographs of Solzhenitsyn and the lead actors Mironov and Dmitrii Pevtsov, with the latter two portrayed in character, but identified by name. The accompanying texts on each poster read, “Solzhenitsyn wrote the screenplay”; “Mironov is under guard”; “Pevtsov declassified the agent.” The strangely literal equation of the writer and actors with fictional characters based on real historical figures carries over to the production itself. All convey the message, “this is history,” referring to the television production itself as well as the events it portrays. The serial’s conflation of its own historical value with that of the novel is reflected in the publicity statement released by the television channel “Rossiia,” which simultaneously acknowledged the serial’s intention to rehabilitate a neglected literary tradition, akin to Solzhenitsyn’s efforts on behalf of the crumbling cultural sites memorialized in the “Miniatures.” “We are obliged to enlighten and educate,” the statement predictably begins, then continues, “in Russia we have a twofold attitude to the classics—they are revered, but little read. We hope that this adaptation will be for many Russians a discovery of Solzhenitsyn.”105 Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna’s speech on the occasion of awarding the Solzhenitsyn Prize to Bortko and Mironov for The Idiot similarly emphasized this intent of the teleserial when she emphasized the value of watching a Russian classic that helped “Russia forget about how ‘The Rich Cry’”—a reference to the Mexican soap opera that dominated Russian television in the mid1990s—and stimulated a return to Dostoevsky’s novel.106 The serialized production of The First Circle, in the paradox David MacFadyen has described, promotes literary value at the same time it performs its own methods of historical representation, and in this way, shares the approach of other recent teleserialy. In its relocation of the critical discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s novel to the local sphere, however, it is consistent with Solzhenitsyn’s reconsideration of the goals

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of historiographical writing and its desire for community. Solzhenitsyn’s novel traced the ethical development of its protagonists and the actions that communicate their growing resistance to the state apparatus that enlists their cooperation by employing the oppositional strategy of subverting the conventions of Socialist Realism. He rewrote the conventional negative character type of the saboteur, and in the figure of Innokentii Volodin, made him one of the novel’s positive heroes.107 Such constructions are absent from the adaptation, which replaces the subjective and questioning voice of the narrator with the authoritatively situated voice of the novel’s author. The novel is oppositional in its very construction; the serial valorizes opposition. Viewers are encouraged to turn to the novel to produce individualized readings, however, those who exclusively tune in to the serial need not actively construct the world of the prisoners, but can glimpse within its filmic representation an ideal of redemptive constructions of ethical behavior.108 Solzhenitsyn’s return entails advocating for disappearing sites of cultural meaning, including his own literary works. This interdiscursive struggle is reflected in the serial in a scene of jarring temporal displacement. To emphasize the contemporary relevance of the story to viewers, an ideological debate between two of the prisoner-scientists, which in the novel takes place in the research institute’s only private space—the restroom—is relocated to the present day, to the Sofiiskaia embankment alongside the Kremlin. The sight of two uniformed prisoner-scientists locked in ideological debate against the backdrop of contemporary Moscow’s billboards and traffic illustrates the conflict of revisiting narratives whose ethical imperatives of opposition are historically determined. Panfilov noted that Solzhenitsyn initially disputed the shift in location for this scene as “too postmodern,”109 perhaps for its suggestion that the ethical choices made by Solzhenitsyn’s protagonists, and indeed himself and his colleagues, and that carried the risk of imprisonment and the camps, would become the stuff of conventional plots, a generalized portrait of “being true to oneself” divorced from historical context.


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Despite the conflicts raised by such interventions, or perhaps because of the newfound sense of contemporary relevance generated by them, The First Circle was the highest rated program in the nation on the first day of its broadcast, and even a week later continued to attract 15 million viewers a night.110 Moscow bookstores were stocked with new editions of the novel, billboards advertising the serial lined the city’s main roads, and the popular reception of Solzhenitsyn was effectively changed one household at a time. One reviewer even referred to the serial as “Solzhenitsyn’s return to dialogue with the people.”111 In the self-constructed creative arc Solzhenitsyn has always envisioned for his work, he had long foreseen return as the destined resolution to exile.112 However, his refigurations of the structures of his work in exile and return point to a series of adaptations in his modes for narrative construction. In shifting from historiographical discourses that instruct the reader in how to write about history, to adopting the position of a traveler in a familiar, yet profoundly changed homeland, to a return to familiar genres that advocate for highly marginalized, situated but threatened, spaces and discourses, Solzhenitsyn’s example parallels the critical movement from a broadly humanistic “literature” toward specific national “literatures.” This movement naturally creates its own conflicts of reception. For those who idealize a single, global canon or transnational discourses of transaction, the local and national subjects Solzhenitsyn addresses following his return reflect the inscrutable position of the national writer undaunted by bearing this mantle. For a local readership negotiating the tangled coexistence of cosmopolitan and national discourses, Solzhenitsyn’s contributions toward the construction of national identities and values raise important and complex issues of identification and affiliation. These complexities were illustrated by the writer Liudmila Ulitskaia’s comments during a discussion of her work at the Moscow State Library’s Center for Eastern Literature in April 2006, when she reiterated her personal conflict with Solzhenitsyn’s characterization of a close friend in The Little Grain while expressing

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her admiration for Solzhenitsyn’s accomplishments on behalf of Russian literature.113 While conflicts of identification may emerge at the level of individual engagement with Solzhenitsyn’s national ideals, his ideology of resistance to cultural distortion and extinction and commitments to social and cultural philanthropic projects resonate deeply. Responses to Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return such as Ulitskaia’s reflect the broadly shared sense of the fragility of the national values his writing epitomizes. In provoking mediating voices of critique as well as enjoying critical and mainstream popularity, Solzhenitsyn’s “emplacement” sustains the tension inherent in the returned exile’s task of writing national narratives amid heterogeneous cultural impulses.

Chapter 4

4

Authenticity, C a mera, Act ion

For Eduard Limonov, the “stolid, bourgeois, fat-assed word

‘exile’”1 summed up the world of Russian literature abroad in the years following his departure from the Soviet Union in 1974. Convinced that the success of his contemporaries, including such figures as Joseph Brodsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, could be attributed to Western readers’ antiSoviet sentiments and pedestrian tastes, rather than to the writers’ literary achievements, Limonov took pains to disassociate himself from personal and semantic associations with exiles of any kind.2 The émigré literary milieu was for him itself a “kind of exile,”3 and throughout his six years in New York (1974–1980) and ten in Paris (1981–1991) Limonov worked establish himself outside of its circle. In presenting himself as an antipode to Brodsky, estranged from Russians abroad and American society as a whole, Limonov implicated himself in modernist formations of exile that privilege detachment and alienation as conditions for legitimating his art. Emphasizing his efforts to learn English and French, insisting that he was a “normal writer” read by “normal people” (read: nonémigrés), and boasting that he lived exclusively on the royalties he earned from the sales of his books,4 the Limonov of the 1970s and 1980s sought recognition in his identity as writer, free from any (acknowledged) literary influences, and without national or political affiliation. Fast-forward to 2001: Limonov has been living in Moscow exclusively since 1994, the year he founded his radical nationalist National Bolshevik Party. Arrested on suspicion of

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smuggling weapons in a plan to forcefully take a region of northern Kazakhstan populated largely by ethnic Russians, he spent his first days in Lefortovo prison repeating the names of, and affiliating himself with, the “great prisoners” who preceded him: “Sade, Jean Genet, Cervantes, Dostoevsky . . .”5 In his March 2006 public lecture “Russian Literature and Russian History,” he enumerated another list of writers, those he felt had fundamentally changed Russia’s literature and history. Beginning with the seventeenth-century Archpriest Avvakum (“our first author, rebel, and first writer of the Russian land”), he went on to discuss works by Aleksandr Radishchev and Nikolai Novikov (both “great Russian rebels” during Catherine the Great’s reign); Nikolai Chernyshevskii, author of the didactic novel What Is to Be Done?; the anarchist theoretician Mikhail Bakunin; Vladimir Lenin; Evgenii Zamiatin, author of the antiutopian novel We; and lastly, Limonov.6 From embracing his social and literary displacement to integrating himself into particularly defined canons, Limonov moved from an exilic state of homelessness to stable, situated spaces within selected communities and narrowly defined national traditions. This transition accompanied a change of profession, which in turn required a shift in rhetorical strategies. In his pre-exilic period, Limonov utilized descriptions of his clothing, and his ability to make his own clothes in particular, as a metaphor for his facility in learning to write and adeptly fashion his image into that of the writer as “national hero.” In exile, self-fashioning continued to function as the overriding principle that organized Limonov’s creative activity. Dismissing other writers as created by their circumstances rather than by their acquired skills and talents, Limonov continually redefined his persona, creating himself anew by entangling myths with autobiography and changing “masks” from one novel to the next.7 Following a brief transitional period when he traveled between Paris and Moscow, he then became shaped by his wartime experiences as a volunteer soldier in Bosnia from 1991 to 1993, and finally, accepted the title of “Leader” in 1994 following his return. Along the way, the self-made writer gave way to a political figure whose


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abilities were “genetically” inherited from his “mother and father”8 and who affectively proclaimed, “There is no doubt that I know my fate. That is in itself evidence of a miracle . . . I must continue and fulfill my fate.”9 In moving toward a construction of authenticity predicated upon notions of preordained heroism and greatness, Limonov’s narratives of return generate a nationalist imaginary in which he, like the self-defined “heroes” before him, is destined to become inscribed into subjectively organized histories and canons. His emplacement following his return entails the continual revelation of an authentic self, and his numerous recent autobiographical accounts of his political awakening in various media exploit this mediated process for all it is worth. Limonov’s construction of exilic authorial identities and his subsequent rejection of them to reveal an ostensibly authentic self announces a crisis in the writing of exile and return and its study. It has been evident from the outset of the present study that the homeward movement of return may lead to the exploitation of certain originary constructions of national identity. Limonov’s example foregrounds such concerns in his efforts to consolidate power through violence and hegemonic discourses of patriarchy and misogyny, as well as the highly regimented discourses of biography and canon formation. Limonov presents a compelling study of return, and the number of recent studies devoted to his trajectory attests to his intrigue. To study Limonov’s ideological positions within the context of his return, however, is it is necessary to engage them reflexively: when return arrives at highly reactionary formations, even when they are arrayed in opposition to certain reactionary state positions as Limonov’s are, to what extent are these constructions merely a reflection of what he purports to overthrow? Does the study of return reach an impasse when foundations and origins are invoked to discredit exile and authenticate projects of self-mythologization? Having disaffiliated himself from quasi-autobiographical exilic identities constructed upon practices of selffashioning—including his down-and-out, bisexual, exilic protagonist Eddie—Limonov now asserts his “inherited”

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and “authentic” qualities, among them, an exaggeratedly heteronormative sexuality, which he defines in narrative forms that exploit hierarchical and patriarchal structures. Limonov’s aggressive refiguration of his sexual identity is a compensatory gesture through which he strives to make up for his exilic lack from all directions at once. The exile whose woman was stolen from him and who sought love in sexual liaisons with men can, following his return to Russia, claim to have an excess of women, but at the same time, he debases women to construe them exclusively as man’s Other—creatures existing solely for the sake of being exploited by patriarchal regimes of power. Limonov’s superabundance of success, his “victories” in diverse cultural arenas achieved after his return, similarly compensate for other exilic losses. Lack in the arena of literary celebrity, acknowledged in Limonov’s 1986 poem “Envy” directed to Brodsky, is recompensed through the discursive violence of biography in the reimagining of the late Brodsky in Limonov’s most recent memoirs. Limonov’s acts of refiguration after his repatriation, then, posit violence as a necessary feature of his return. In this chapter, I look to how Limonov’s project of autobiographical self-imagining, begun before his emigration and continued productively throughout, reflects this shift toward narrative violence following the transitional period from 1991 to 1993 when Limonov literally took up arms in an act of self-redefinition. The criminal charge on which Limonov went to prison emblematizes the cultural trope of abduction I will use, following William H. Epstein, to elucidate Limonov’s forcible takeover of his past authorial personae, and the subsequent involvement of the writing of the politician Limonov with certain hegemonic cultural practices, such as canon formation and biography (as distinct from autobiography).10 His tactics of female subordination are shown to be entwined with rationales for narrative and national domination. Limonov’s faithfulness to narrative function and self-emplacement within such hegemonic discursive structures reveals an overdetermined


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narrative subject who becomes bound to these formations. In conclusion, I address Limonov’s recourse to nostalgia as the self-censorship of violence, a maneuver that conflicts with the primordial arguments of his rigid politics and narrative structures and at strategic moments allows Limonov access to his former exilic selves.

Fa s h io ning the Nati onal H ero Limonov began his project of self-fashioning during his first, preexilic Moscow period (1967–1974), when he composed the poems he distributed in samizdat and eventually published abroad in the collection Russkoe (1979). The poems feature a nascent image of the author that becomes fully developed in the later works, and a number of themes that will become stable motifs in Limonov’s exilic writing— doubles and heroism among them—make their first appearance here. Most significantly, the motif of the young poet’s acquired skill as a tailor is introduced. His self-taught trade parallels his humble origins as a poet, and the modes of selfpresentation that allowed a fledgling poet from the artistic underground of Kharkiv, Ukraine, to relocate to Moscow and present his poetry on its own terms are grounded as much in the sartorial as they are in the lyrical. The metaphor of the tailor carefully wrought by Limonov in his early poetry is germane to an investigation of the construction of an exilic persona in Limonov’s biographical legend as it is encountered in his quasi-autobiographical narratives and in extratextual arenas. In his exilic texts and public self-presentations, Limonov fashions the persona of the self-taught writer who emerges ex nihilo: shunning the émigré literary establishment and tradition, claiming no literary influences, and striving for assimilation into the literary life of his adopted countries, he presents himself as an independent literary phenomenon. An early poem, “Three Long Songs” (“Tri dlinnye pesni,” 1969), features references to sewing as part of the poet’s quotidian existence:

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I set off to buy thread at the haberdashery. A crush. sweatiness. And all the women are old. ... I brought the fabric home. Laid it on the floor. Cut out from it a pair of trousers. And the sun went down long ago. Birds sing so quietly in the mugginess. ... To sew trousers requires patience. Length one hundred six centimeters. Now we separate the length of the stride. And I will get twelve rubles. Food for death. O, how I wish not to die! Зашел купить ниток в галантерею. Толчея. потность. и женщины все старые. ... Принес ткань домой. кладу на пол. Крою из ней брюки. А солнце давно взошло. В духоте пташки поют так покойно. ... Штаны шить нужно терпение. Длина сто шесть сантиметров. теперь откладываем длину шага. И получу двенадцать рублей. Это обеды для смерти. Как умирать будет не хочется!11

The descriptions of the appearance and smell of the crowd in the shop, the poet’s methodological approach to sewing, and his anticipation of monetary compensation all indicate that sewing is an occupation distinct from writing. The divided image of the poet as one involved with mundane activities (shopping, doing laundry, bathing, sewing) while composing verses as he walks through the woods does not achieve synthesis (“I’ve never composed in rooms”) despite the formal act of joining these two personae in verse. The struggle to fuse his two identities only draws greater attention to the separation between the two halves of his existence. Toward the conclusion of the poem, the poet bemoans his lack of viability in either realm, claiming he would exchange his ability to write verses for a stronger body.12 A later poem, “The noise of this ode is for fabrics” (“Tkaniam etoi ody shum,” 1973–1974), suggests that the poet has succeeded in fashioning a coherent image. Functioning as a metaphor for the poet’s aptitude for self-presentation,


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sewing is removed from its role in the poet’s everyday life to become a part of the overall conception of his artistic method. The poem exhibits the formal traits and solemn, bombastic tone characteristic of classical odes to celebrate the occasion of the poet’s creative awakening. The second stanza of the poem reveals that the poet’s identity is not yet formed: An ancient salesman. Gray streaks brings me a bolt of cloth Allow me? For a coat? I’m nervous—who am I—who? (Продавец старинный. Проседь мне рулон сукна выносит Разрешите? На пальто? Я волнуюсь—кто я—кто?)13

Having selected a bolt of cloth brought to him by a salesman, he nervously anticipates the act of cutting, as the raw form of the cloth approximates that of his persona: both require the expert hands of the salesman to take their first form. The elderly salesman’s role as a mentor who assists in the creation of the lyrical persona is continued in the third stanza, when his hands “mystically” locate the place to cut. Born from the cloth with the help of his mentor, the persona remains unformed (“He cuts the cloth / my scrap crawls off”; он сукно перерезает / моя тряпка отползает) but has acquired a specificity that is lacking in the previous stanzas. “I” finally stands apart from “he,” “them,” and the bolt of cloth. The next two stanzas depict the young poet clothed in the fabric that has been fashioned into a garment by his own hands (“It fits! / . . . / You looked him up and down / the Russian clothed in the narrow cloth”; Подошло! / . . . / взором меряли вы русского / в ткань завернутого узкого).14 The interface of cloth and skin is a creative birth celebrated with family and friends, in the mirror and in verse. By May 1974, when he wrote the epic prose poem “We Are the National Hero” (“My—natsional’nyi geroi”), Limonov’s self-tailored clothing has become an integral part of his literary persona. Amid stanzas hailing the appearance of the poet and

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his second wife, Elena Shchapova, in the West and their hyperbolic history-making accomplishments, Limonov includes a reference to his “Coat of the National Hero”: “The national hero loves form-fitting suits. Famed is Limonov’s remarkable coat, sewn together by the poet from pieces of cloth. The outer surface of the coat consists of 114 pieces of cloth. The coat is equipped with the initials of the national hero ‘L’ and ‘E.’”15 “We Are the National Hero,” although written in Moscow before Limonov’s emigration, first appeared in print in the West in the large-format album Apollon-77 edited by the émigré artist Mikhail Shemiakin. The young poet with an interest in the self-promoting potential of extraliterary materials found a compatible forum for his image and poetry in the collection, presenting himself and several other poets featured in the album as members of the poetry group “Konkret.” In fact, the photograph of the poets included in the album served as the very pretext for Limonov to fabricate the group’s existence and write a statement of its putative creative principles.16 This early attempt on Limonov’s part to manipulate his photographic iconography and augment his literary status through fabrication of the “Concrete movement” was easily unmasked.17 Unlike “Konkret,” which in Limonov’s words, “came together in order to come apart,”18 the National Hero would reappear in later works Limonov wrote abroad. A 1974 photograph taken in Moscow of Limonov wearing the handtailored Coat of the National Hero, standing with his hands in his pockets behind a nude Shchapova who sits on a silver tray on the floor, allows us to follow the trajectory of Limonov’s methods of personal mythmaking, in particular, his acknowledgement that when the signifying potential of the National Hero has been exhausted, an exilic authorial identity must be constructed in its place.19 In It’s Me, Eddie (1979), Limonov’s explosive novelmemoir written after his arrival in New York, a photographic self-portrait adorns the wall of the narrator’s cubicle in the Hotel Winslow: “On the walls . . . my own photograph against a background of icons and a brick wall, with me holding a thick volume, perhaps a dictionary or a Bible and


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wearing a 114-patch blazer tailored by me, Limonov, monster out of the past.”20 The iconic photograph of the “Hero” in his coat appears in Diary of a Loser (Dnevnik neudachnika, 1982): “To decorate the new apartment I hung on the wall among everything else an old photograph in which a nude Elena sits on a tray and I stand behind in the coat of the national hero.”21 In the photographs affixed to the poet’s own walls, the coat, as an emblem of masculine literary invention, becomes an object of self-reflection. The National Hero’s inability to circulate outside of the apartment and beyond the poet’s past is illustrated in a string of vivid obscenities in It’s Me, Eddie. “We Are the National Hero” has been translated into English and “published nowhere,” its sole reader the current lover of his now ex-wife Shchapova, an American economist who “could not have cared less about Elena’s ex-husband’s literary works,” who likely “preferred to fuck Elena rather than read her husband’s literary works,” and was the kind of person who “need[ed] literature like a cunt needs a door.”22 The National Hero is rendered sterile on exilic territory, relegated to photographs in the poet’s own room and an unpublished manuscript and contrasts with the productivity of the brash exilic protagonist “Eddie”—who dominates the quasi-autobiographical New York narratives It’s Me, Eddie, Diary of a Loser and His Butler’s Story—and with Limonov’s own act of self-presentation at a 1990 press conference in Belgrade. At the conference, in the course of enumerating the various jobs he held in Ukraine and Russia, he demonstratively declared that he “became a tailor, began to sew trousers”: “This fact Eduard visibly recalled with pleasure. At least, during the press conference he did not restrain from displaying his suit (‘Look, the lining is many-colored’), which he sewed for himself in Paris. To applause, someone in the audience asked, ‘Have you ever sewn for a Russian writer?’ I sewed for artists and journalists. I remember that I sewed trousers for Bulat Okudzhava, Ernst Neizvestnyi . . . The only official press about me in the Soviet Union appeared in Literaturnaia gazeta, where it stated that there is such a

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poet who also sews trousers.”23 The performative act of publicly exposing the lining of his self-made garment resembles Limonov’s autobiographical narratives of self-revelation, in that he appears to, and often does, reveal candid details of his private life, but only in carefully staged forums in which he is able to control the construction of his image. The performance also came at a transitional time in Limonov’s career: he had made his first return trip to Russia by this time and begun a regular regime of travel between France and Russia, but had not yet joined the Serbian volunteer army or announced his final repatriation. After 1991, the figure of Limonov the tailor, who sewed trousers and clothed himself in self-designed garments, no longer functioned as a productive metaphor for the writer’s work.24 When we next encounter the National Hero, his photograph, along with photographs of “Konkret,” “Eddie,” and “Oskar,” is catalogued in the album Limonov in Photographs, with Commentary Written by Limonov Himself! (Limonov v fotografiiakh s kommentariiami, napisannymi im samim! 1996), a photographic archive of the author’s Kharkiv childhood and literary past and visual document of his gradual evolution toward his political present as today’s “Leader.”25 Along with his sartorial self-presentations and other extratextual public forums that allow Limonov to control his identification, and later disassociation, with his literary protagonists, Limonov has collaborated with publishers to construct the paratextual frames for his work. During his exilic period he encouraged the conflation of his authorial persona and protagonists by entering into the zone of the peritext that is usually perceived as “the direct and principal (but not exclusive) responsibility of the publisher.”26 An example of Limonov’s involvement in peritextual forms is provided by the American edition of It’s Me, Eddie published by Grove Press (1983), which features a photograph of the author on its front cover. The likeness of the author featured below his name and the declamatory title It’s Me, Eddie, is additionally framed by the subtitle “A Fictional Memoir” visually reproducing the merging of autobiography and fiction that


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characterizes the narrative structure of the text. Similarly, a severely edited version of the novel that appeared in the Paris journal The Ark (Kovcheg) in 1979 features on its first page a photograph of Limonov wearing the enameled cross worn by his protagonist, a further example of how his manipulation of paratextual forms would encourage the reader’s conflation of author and hero, memoir and fiction. The Glagol Publishers edition of It’s Me, Eddie (1990), the first edition of the novel to be commercially distributed in Russia, recontextualizes the presentation of the author’s autobiographical and aesthetic intent, as it appears a decade after the events of the novel purportedly took place and the persona of Eddie was abandoned by the author. Aleksandr Shatalov, founder of Glagol Publishers and publisher and editor of Limonov’s literary works from 1989 to 1996, presents the edition as an opportunity to introduce the author and his novel to a Russian audience unfamiliar with his work.27 The blurb appended to the title page describes the work as an autobiography that brought Limonov “international fame.” The monumental image of the author as an established literary figure is carried over into the preface to the novel, written by Shatalov, which begins: “Limonov is called the enfant terrible of Russian literature.” The first pages of this introduction to Limonov suggest that he has secured a reputation and place within the Russian literary tradition while abroad, despite his never having been officially published in Russia. Shatalov also cites from reviews of the novel published in the Wall Street Journal and Publisher’s Weekly to introduce It’s Me, Eddie as Limonov’s “most popular novel.” Considering the function of the preface—“to get the book read and to get the book read properly”28—it is also significant that Shatalov notes, “I ask forgiveness in advance for making comparisons between the author of the book and its hero; only I am vindicated by the fact that Limonov himself leads his readers to such a comparison, though this practice is in essence both crude and false.”29 Shatalov advocates the separation of the author from his protagonist while revealing Limonov’s intent to conflate them, in effect, anticipating

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the Russian reader’s response to the text and issuing correctives to potential misreadings. In addition to suggesting a place for the novel and its author within the Russian literary canon, the preface moreover demands that readers recognize Limonov’s practice of inhabiting the persona of his protagonist through the process of writing and initial publication, then abandoning it in favor of another. The message to the Russian reader is clear: if Limonov was once Eddie, he is no longer. Limonov constructed his paratextual relationship to the protagonist of his later exilic novel The Torturer according to a similar pattern. The 1986 edition featured a photograph of Limonov posing as his protagonist Oskar, dressed in the leather and chains of a professional sexual sadomasochist and standing over a nude handcuffed woman. Limonov claimed that the picture was taken “for the hell of it” but nevertheless insisted upon its publication along with the other, more conventional portraits of émigré writers in A. Mirchev’s 15 Interviews.30 The post-perestroika Glagol edition of The Torturer (1993) excludes the photograph, and like the Glagol edition of It’s Me, Eddie, features a portrait of the writer contemporaneous with the date of republication, again with the intention of discouraging belated autobiographical readings. The blurb appended to the title page introduces The Torturer as “one of the novels by Eduard Limonov in which the protagonist is not the author, but an invented personage,”31 and the appendix written by Shatalov makes clear that Oskar “does not resemble Limonov in appearance.” Although Shatalov cites an interview in which Limonov claims the novel is a “variant of his own life,” he admits only that “the theme of emigration is favored by the author and thus we find many motifs that also refer to his other works.”32 The volume’s paratextual apparatus also includes Aleksandr Donde’s article “Eduard, Edik, i Edichka,” one of the first studies to separate Limonov from his autobiographical hero Eddie.33 Finally, two reviews of the novel from the Russian-language press— one positive, the other negative—are included. Published in Russia after Limonov’s emergence as a soldier and politician,


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the fragmented image of the author presented here attempts to perpetuate Limonov’s reputation as a writer and creative figure at a time when the author was working to abandon the profession once and for all. The most effective use of photographs as a means of narrating Limonov’s political development and discouraging outdated associations between the author and his literary protagonists is found in Limonov in Photographs. In its form and purpose, Limonov in Photographs can be said to resemble the poet Vladimir Maiakovskii’s 1930 photographic exhibition “Twenty Years of Work.” Maiakovskii’s influence on Limonov’s work has been noted frequently34 and Maiakovskii’s yellow tunic, which became an integral part of the poet’s image and work, can be viewed as a precursor to Limonov’s Coat of the National Hero. Calculated to produce an effect on the audiences at Maiakovskii’s readings, the striped yellow tunic, sewn by Maiakovskii’s mother at the poet’s insistence, “has been written about more than Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry”35 and is a powerful emblem of the poet’s integration of textual and extratextual strategies of self-presentation. A photograph from 1913 documents the appearance of the boldly clothed Futurist poet: Maiakovskii, hands in his pockets, looks straight into the camera lens, his frank gaze and the bright sleeves and collar of his shirt intended as an affront to the viewer.36 The garment also becomes incorporated into the poet’s work, in the 1914 essay “About the Various Maiakovskiis” and the poem “The Fop’s Tunic”: I will make myself black trousers Of the velvet of my voice. Yellow tunic of three yards of sunset sky.37

When the postrevolutionary Maiakovskii wished to present his new principles and image, he organized the exhibition “Twenty Years of Work,” which displayed his collections of Futurist poetry published from 1912 to 1914, notebooks of newspaper articles and reviews from 1926 to 1929 chronicling his reception, and posters and photographs, all

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intended to document his career in such a way that the image of the author as a Soviet poet for the masses would appear its apotheosis. At the opening of the exhibition, Maiakovskii announced his new orientation. “I am very glad that all those first-class, spit-soiled aesthetes are not here,” the poet declared. “There are no writers? Excellent! . . . I am happy that Moscow’s youth is here. I am happy that you are reading me!”38 In her study of the evolving significations of the yellow tunic in Maiakovskii’s strategies of self-creation, Svetlana Boym observes that “from a seemingly insignificant article of everyday life, the yellow blouse turns into a ‘literary fact’ and then into a cultural emblem which starts affecting the poet’s daily existence.”39 Maiakovskii’s tunic had become a “transgressive metaphor” in his biographical legend that served to “excessively personify,” and thus “depersonalize,” the poet despite his efforts to refashion his image in subsequent years.40 With “Twenty Years of Work,” Boym continues, Maiakovskii aimed “to present his new and distinctly Soviet iconography . . . he wished to author his own antiauthorial image, to impersonate the new myth and even document it photographically.”41 Limonov in Photographs and Anatomy of a Hero use photographs accompanied by self-authored inscriptions to document Limonov’s career and archive the various iterations of his literary personae in the biographical past. In contrast to Maiakovskii, Limonov reconfigures his authorial image not to satisfy the demands of the literary establishment, but to announce his departure from literature altogether. As the inscriptions to the photographs in Limonov in Photographs indicate, Limonov identifies himself over the course of his career as “poet”; “Edichka” (Eddie), the author “in the role of Oskar”; and finally as “the thinker and his AK-47,” and “volunteer in the order of military police.”42 The author’s literary personae give way to the soldier, journalist, and politician. In the later photographs that dominate the collection, Limonov poses variously with his then-girlfriend Liza, extremist political figures (among them Jean-Marie Le Pen, Vladimir Zhirinovskii, and Radovan Karadzic), and


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the Serbian paramilitary leader Arkan, among others. Interspersed among these snapshots are several professionally staged photographs that feature Limonov holding a small grenade known as a limonka (the diminutive form of limon, or lemon). The explosive device is an illustrative emblem for the writer. Limonka is the name of the National Bolshevik Party’s newspaper, and a play on the writer’s name; it simultaneously invokes the potential for real violence and the symbolic violence of Limonov’s incarnation of every level of his collective party at once.43 As part of his subordination of the literary to the political, or more accurately to “the people,” Limonov must destroy his past literary models. As Limonov tended to keep his preexilic and exilic literary influences for the most part unnamed, this process did not entail a prolonged and awkward renunciation of his literary idols. Given his postrepatriation interest in inserting himself into selected canons, however, it is telling that Limonov explicitly acknowledges Maiakovskii as a model in his first, provisional narrative of return in preparation for his unmasking and later destruction. In A Foreigner in the Time of Troubles (Inostranets v smutnoe vremia, 1992), the transitional novel-memoir that recounts his first return trip to Russia in 1989 and to his parents’ home in Ukraine, he states that he felt compelled to gradually “remove the masks from the faces” of the personages he depicted and “in the end throw out several of the masks altogether.”44 Along with the real friends and public figures Limonov portrays, he unmasks his admiration for Maiakovskii for the first time. His protagonist, loosely based on his earlier literary self, is keen to display himself to his audience at a poetry reading in Moscow: “Look at me as I am—at my full height,” he demands, and the expression he uses to refer to his stature (vo ves’ rost) parallels the title of Maiakovskii’s 1930 poem “At the top of my voice” (“Vo ves’ golos”). He considers showing off before the five thousand in attendance (“I present my compact form to them abroad in the finest way, no worse than Steve McQueen presented his. And I had no more opportunities than you did at birth, comrades!”) but decides against

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it. Instead, he greets the audience in the manner of his predecessor: “Hello, Russians!—he said, and stuck his hands in his pockets, as Maiakovskii used to do.”45 This step toward disassembling his literary persona was followed by a November 26, 1993, walk-in exhibition of Limonov’s life and work held at the Maiakovskii Museum, housed in Maiakovskii’s former apartment in Moscow. The Limonov on display at the temporary exhibit—and indeed, Limonov literally displayed himself reading a newspaper in a roped-off exhibition space—was another fleeting transitional figure, a temporary persona soon to catalogued among his past selves. The invitation to the exhibit announced a “memorial-literary exhibition, dedicated to the life and work of the writer . . . during his lifetime.”46 At the same time the exhibit was intended as a publicity heavy happening for the returned writer and Moscow’s bohemian set, it provided a deeply contextualized setting for Limonov to dismantle his authorial persona and mark the end to his creative method of appropriating identities and disaffiliating himself from them. Limonov figuratively kills his former literary self in the same apartment where Maiakovskii literally committed suicide. He even adopted a final, nonsignifying “death” mask: in the photograph of Limonov that accompanied one review of the exhibit, he has covered his face.47 He would reveal it the following year under the flag of his National Bolshevik Party. Having archived his literary personae and memorialized them in a photographic album and museum exhibition, Limonov announces his change in orientation. In the period following his return, the poem “We Are the National Hero” becomes refigured as a prophecy in which the young Limonov foresees his own biographical present. A number of the “heroic” achievements described in “We Are the National Hero” and Diary of a Loser, in his view, were prescient and programmatic statements, which “I, indeed, have fulfilled,” he proclaims in his 1998 memoir Anatomy of a Hero.48 “It is said that in moments of crisis Heroes hear ‘angels’ voices’ that advise them what to do next,” he intones. And in 1991, having reached middle age and acquired French citizenship,


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a new wife, and a measure of literary fame, Limonov would claim to hear those angels say, “There are magnificent opportunities for a hero there.”49 At that time, Limonov traveled to Sarajevo with a Serbian volunteer army, where he would be filmed shooting rounds from a machine gun into the city in the company of the Bosnian Serb war criminal Karadzic. Deliberately overlooking his previous trips to Russia between 1989 and 1992, he states that he returned to take his “first steps in the motherland” on March 26, 1994, as leader of his new party. The literary hero and memorialized transitional figure were on this day effectively relegated to the past. Having exhibited his own “Twenty Years of Work” and committed to the life of a national political hero, Limonov now calls Maiakovskii a “poseur”: “In Volodya’s life there was no emigration, no war, no jail—the most terrifying trials that can fall to a man’s lot. So I look upon him from a distance as upon a naïve child; from the height of my 58 years, upon him, fortunate, famous, and weak. His life ended at 37, and my literary strengths at that age were only beginning.”50 Limonov’s reevaluation of Maiakovskii is part of an extended project of recontextualizing his own literary past in which he subordinates his identity as writer to his current profession of “hero.” In claiming to overtake Maiakovskii, then taking over Maiakovskii’s life and work with a dismissive biographical sketch, Limonov removes the bases for comparison with his literary mentor in a bid to replace him in the canon of revolutionary poets. The prophetic mode Limonov adopts here is a transparent echo of what Pierre Bourdieu has called the “oracle effect.” Having understood that the posturing of his delinquent and transitory literary alter egos was not conducive to claims of authority that can speak on behalf of “the people” or “the nation,” Limonov abolishes the individual personality in favor of a transcendent and prophetic delegate of national interests. Bourdieu observes that the “ordinary individual must die in order for the moral person to come into being; die and become an institution. Paradoxically, those who have made themselves nothing in order to become everything

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can invert the term of their relation and reproach those who are merely themselves.”51 The violence that accompanies the oracle effect “destroys” Maiakovskii and legitimates Limonov’s claims about the prophetic nature of his earlier exilic narratives. As I will demonstrate in the remainder of this chapter, however, it cannot kill “Edichka,” the exilic protagonist-cum-autobiographical subject who established his reputation abroad. The bombastic “We Are the National Hero,” according to Limonov, prophesies a number of his future achievements, among them, his (unsuccessful) bid for a seat in the Duma in 1995 and his acquaintance with Salvador Dali in New York. The Diary of a Loser exhibits a “rehabilitated” Eddie, who in fragmented journal entries alternates between descriptions of his new social outlook (“the times when I fucked the male strangers I happened to meet . . . and lived on welfare—that time has passed”) and heroic calls for revolution. In these calls, Limonov audaciously claims, his younger self foresaw his later volunteer military activity in Sarajevo from 1991 to 1993 and the Georgian republic of Abkhazia in 1992.52 His Butler’s Story, his tale of working as a housekeeper for a wealthy entrepreneur, anticipated his need “to found a party or a religion if one wishes to write books.”53 In contrast, Limonov identifies It’s Me, Eddie, which has been called “the quintessential book of the third wave emigration,”54 only as a “socio-political novel” and claims not to have reread it, orienting the reader to his more recent prison writings instead.55 The question of why Limonov does not attempt to address the rupture between It’s Me, Eddie and the present, as he does with “We Are the National Hero” and all of other works set in New York—Diary of a Loser, His Butler’s Story, The Torturer, and 316, Point “B”—prompts a closer examination of the conflict between the opposition of violence and national interest that structures Limonov’s project of return. As the incarnation of the collective body of the National Bolsheviks, Limonov draws authority from the self-constructed hierarchies and emblems of his party. As such, his past is significant only insofar as it can prophecy the future. Limonov’s


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recuperation of past narratives thus becomes limited to those works that purport to destroy Eddie or presuppose a move from the individual to the collective. As I will demonstrate below, this recirculation of his literary past is distinct from the nostalgic appropriation of Eddie that makes it resistant to postexilic recontextualization and allows Limonov strategic access to his past selves.

Exc i s ing E x il e, Co nstruc ti ng Aut hen ti ci ty It’s Me, Eddie outraged nearly everyone who read it upon its release, and it continues to resist Limonov’s efforts to subdue it following his return. To undo its exilic constructs and transform its destitute and desperately lonely quasi-autobiographical protagonist into a monolithic and authoritative “hero,” Limonov strives to neutralize and gain control over his quasi-autobiographical protagonist’s “failures” and transgressive behaviors, namely, his failed marriage to Shchapova and his sexual encounters with men. It is through appeals to misogyny, extreme nationalism, heteronormative sexuality, and the literary canon that Limonov attempts to overtake “Eddie, a character in pink shoes with 13 centimeter-high heels, a white suit, a cross around his neck,” who, Limonov once wrote, “cannot be removed from literature.”56 In construing Limonov the political thinker as the biographer of Limonov the writer, it becomes possible to view the irreparable rupture between “Eddie” and today’s “hero” as, to cite Epstein, a “wound” that is “metaphorically associated with that which is repressed and excluded—woman in patriarchal culture, the racial subject in an imperialist society, the underclass in a capitalist economy, gays and lesbians in heterosexual culture.”57 By leaving the wound open—that is, by acknowledging (through omission) his difficulty in writing Eddie into his political biography—Limonov associates the novel and its past authorial alter ego with the pain of his wife’s betrayal, homosexual liaisons, and now-deceased friends, in particular, the late Brodsky—whose role in Limonov’s life and work, as Limonov has conceived it, is arguably greater several years after Brodsky’s death and Limonov’s political conversion

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than when the two poets were acquainted. Limonov revisits these episodes and the figure of Brodsky in his prison memoir In Captivity among the Dead (V plenu u mertvetsov, 2003) to recontextualize them within his present ideological positions and inscribe his present writings and behaviors within certain hegemonic cultural practices.58 By affiliating himself with social positions that contribute to the devaluation of women and leave no room for social difference, he strives to create the collective consensus that Edichka “has no relation to the grey-haired, honorable writer sitting before you.”59 In the exilic territory of It’s Me, Eddie, the narratorprotagonist Eddie considers “aliens”—that is, those whose “lives were not very settled”—to be his “comrades in misfortune.”60 Exile defines all the figures with whom Eddie associates: his fellow busboys at the hotel restaurant where he finds his first job; Chris and Johnny, the homeless African American men he seduces into sexual encounters; Carol, an avowed communist and student of Russian; his classmates, all fellow immigrants and students of English; and his few Russian friends, who live in conditions as meager as his own. Exile unites all the marginalized figures who populate the novel and the departure of Eddie’s estranged wife for an American man leads him to bury his sorrows and seek comfort in his fellow exiles and the streets of New York. “Treat Elena, Eddie-baby, as Christ treated Mary Magdalene and all women who sinned. No, treat her better,” Eddie says during a day of shopping with Elena after their divorce.61 His doting attention to her every whim yields the realization that despite his suffering, he can still love: “When Eddie fell apart he was nevertheless happy; though sick, he has within him Love. Envy him, gentlemen!”62 It’s Me, Eddie has been characterized as a novel about love, but it can also be brutal in its depictions of women. Eddie tried to strangle Elena in a blind rage following her infidelity and his friend Alexander approves of the violent act (“you strangled her, you should’ve finished her off”).63 Eddie’s desperate love, violence, and occasional moments of happiness, however, do not constitute grounds for common homosocial bonding of


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the sort that the postrepatriation Limonov requires for his “Civilization of Heroes.” A desperate search for a departed, beloved woman also drives the plot of A Foreigner in the Time of Troubles, the transitional first novel of return published before Limonov’s self-declared moment of political return in 1994. The protagonist of A Foreigner in the Time of Troubles is an “eternal traveler,” an unsettled figure staying in a hotel in his own homeland, an “alien among aliens.”64 Although named “Indiana Ivanovich,” a nod to the film hero Indiana Jones, traces of Eddie are discernable in the autobiographically based protagonist65 who once again experiences a woman’s infidelity and is driven to despair. He travels to Russia, not for glory, but to search for her after she disappears there without a trace. Upon seeing her engaged in sexual acts with her own brother, Indiana rushes to a restaurant for a drink. Forcing himself past the head waiter (“an Eastern type”) who asks for his last name, and confronted for not having a reservation, Indiana displaces his rage onto the “Eastern” waiter (“Stalin is my last name!”) and violently pummels him in the face using both fists. Passersby witnessing the scene, who “perhaps are also ready to vent their ill will on someone,” rush to stop him.66 The urge to commit violence in It’s Me, Eddie, the first novel of exile, and A Foreigner in the Time of Troubles, the first novel of return, emerges from what Limonov posits as a recurrent scene: one man losing to another in the battle over a woman. In his study of biographical narrative as abduction, Epstein observes that in the “recurrent generic scene” of two men competing “over the body of a woman,” the woman functions as “an excluded other, an abjected and abducted object of exchange whom they must defile and repress in order to repair the break between them and reinforce their homosocial bond.”67 This bond is never established in either It’s Me, Eddie or A Foreigner in the Time of Troubles and leaves both narratives untethered; the first leaves Eddie a marginalized outcast on the outskirts of society and the latter depicts the protagonist’s return to France with his love, able

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to articulate his heroic dreams only in a bedtime “fairy tale” in which a suffering nation “strove toward a sterile abstract notion of justice, not understanding that might is the highest form of justice.”68 In Anatomy of a Hero and the later prison memoir In Captivity among the Dead, Limonov revisits his failed marriage to rewrite his relationship with Elena following his adoption of patriarchal and misogynist discourses—recontextualizing their relationship to retroactively reclaim his masculinity. In Anatomy of a Hero he writes, “If twenty years ago I believed that Elena was a degenerate, that it was SHE who was a betrayer, that I had no luck with women, now I know that all women by nature are base and degenerate. There are many degenerate men, but if in men this is a defect, a genetic deficiency, in women, it is their essence.”69 His references to the work of the fascist philosopher Julius Evola reveal the basis for his reclassification of Eddie as a “socio-political novel” about the “treachery of women,” and become reflected in statements that retroactively sum up all the broken relationships Eddie chronicles. “It is sad and tragic to recognize that woman is . . . a creature with whom it is impossible to live equally,” Limonov opines, while going on to describe all women as belonging to a matriarchal tribe of pantheistic, chthonic, communally oriented creatures. When he makes reference to Elena again, it is to defile her by construing her as a woman with no social value or achievements to call her own. He recounts her January 1998 phone call from Rome, where she lived with her husband, the count Gianfranco di Carli. She allegedly begs Limonov to marry her in a call that came, in his words, twenty-two years too late: “Fuck, Lena, you’re no countess, but a woman who has accepted defeat, who only understood after twenty two years that the man who cut his veins on your account, the man who wrote a passionate book about you—a cry of pain and despair—was the only one, the most outstanding one.”70 Using terms that betray the patriarchal construction of Anatomy of a Hero, Limonov describes the scene as a “victory,” albeit a “late, unnecessary, unproductive” one.71 It’s Me, Eddie is overcome


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by reducing its object of desire to a recuperated, deflated, and ultimately defeated, middle-aged woman. Limonov revisits Elena again in his prison memoir In Captivity among the Dead, this time, to implicate all men in his attitudes toward her and toward women in general. In the chapter “My Penelopes,” he compares his past longing for her loyalty to that of an “officer toward his fellow officer.” When she left him, he “lost a brother.”72 Elena is consistently referred to as if male (“I was proud of her as a coarser brother is proud of his handsome, delicate, elegant brother”), and their past relationship is recast within explicitly military terms (with reason, Limonov claims, as both he and Elena were children of officers) to heighten their homosocial bond and appeal to the presumably male reader’s incomprehension as to how he could be betrayed by his “brother-officer.” Even their sexual activity, described in graphic detail in It’s Me, Eddie, is dismissed as “not the most important thing . . . I valued her friendship.” Then, in a final tale of comeuppance and dismissal, he describes an encounter with Elena at an exhibit of her artwork in Moscow in 1996, twenty years after the events depicted in It’s Me, Eddie. He sees her upon entering the gallery, “a fat, tall, swollen, appetite-driven, elderly woman dressed in poor taste.” Limonov arrives with his current girlfriend, twenty-three years old and “thin as a shoelace.” He further claims that in photographs taken at the event, he and Elena “look like mother and son.” “The idol that I myself created with my book It’s Me, Eddie has been toppled,” he writes.73 Overturning this idol serves a second purpose: to reclaim a heteronormative sexuality after the depictions of homosexual liaisons in It’s Me, Eddie led to speculation that Limonov himself was gay or bisexual. Andrei Rogachevskii concisely expresses how sexuality functions within the exilic constructs of It’s Me, Eddie: “He detests capitalist society for the hypocrisy of its moral values and denigrates them by saying ‘I am an outcast even sexually, because I do not want to have anything in common with your enslaving ethics.’”74 If the exilic Eddie sought, in part, to disrupt conventional social structures

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through relationships with men, the Limonov we encounter after his return will profess to extremes of heteronormative behavior to engage male collaboration in the denigration of the transgressive sexuality exhibited by his past literary self. In “My Penelopes,” he enumerates the age of every woman with whom he has had a serious relationship: “Anna,” his first wife, “was twenty-seven when [he] took her”; seven years later he “took” Elena at twenty-one; eleven years later he met the twenty-four old Natasha; Liza—who attended the gallery exhibition—was twenty-three; and Nast’ia was sixteen. “This means E. Limonov has done very well with the ladies,” he boasts.75 Recontextualizing the exilic thematics of It’s Me, Eddie within later writings that situate him firmly within the set of radical-nationalist social values he has established since founding his party, Limonov subjugates his persona’s sexual past to his present. He is further driven, however, to demonstrate his emplacement in structures of authority, in particular, Russian literary history and the literary canon. If in In Captivity among the Dead Elena functions as an abjected object, the late poet Brodsky emerges as a vindicator. Limonov’s appreciative comments about Brodsky in In Captivity among the Dead are surprising in light of Limonov’s numerous abusive public statements and publications about him, which were well documented in emigration and continued until Brodsky’s death in 1996, when the National Bolshevik Party newspaper Limonka published an unflattering obituary.76 During the discussion of Brodsky’s presentation “The Condition We Call Exile” (read in absentia) at a December 1987 conference of writers in exile, Limonov described Brodsky, who had recently received the Nobel Prize, as belonging to “the beginning of the twentieth century. That’s why he’s so prized, he’s so good, he’s a dead poet.”77 Limonov frequently characterized Brodsky as a modernist aesthete, and therefore “dead,” during Brodsky’s lifetime; in his prison memoirs Limonov resurrects the deceased Brodsky, and in his conversations with “Brodsky,” retroactively interpellates himself into the late poet’s legacy.


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Limonov’s unexpected praise for Brodsky centers around violence and the denigration of women. In his 2000 Book of the Dead (Kniga mertvykh), Limonov includes an appreciative essay in which he emphasizes, above all, the two poets’ affinity for one another. They bonded, he claims, when Brodsky invited Limonov to a restaurant to show him a highly critical article that attacked them both. Limonov, being quite used to criticism (and indeed, reveling in it after the publication of It’s Me, Eddie), was indifferent to the article, but Brodsky was visibly upset. “I’d give him one in the mug if I didn’t have a bad heart,” Brodsky allegedly said. Limonov promised, in the event of meeting the critic, that he would give him two good heavy blows, one on behalf of Brodsky. “When we parted on the street, I had the sense he didn’t want to leave . . . I think we even hugged,” Limonov claims.78 Limonov also alleges that he and Brodsky shared women while they lived in New York (on one occasion Brodsky purportedly sent over to him a “healthy, tall, big-assed girl” who “likes to fuck”). Limonov then mitigates his earlier criticisms of Brodsky (after, of course, reiterating them all in the essay): “Of all the writers of my time, he is the only one I ever competed with . . . I think it influenced me, that the poet Brodsky was writing in my time. I went into prose, where I didn’t have any competitors.” And although Brodsky’s dislike of It’s Me, Eddie and refusal to write a publicity blurb for it as it went into publication remained a sore point that Limonov would later turn to his own advantage by mocking the dated Petersburg slang Brodsky used in his critical evaluation of the manuscript, here Limonov regrets that Brodsky did not live to see him return to Moscow “to see [his] subsequent victories.”79 Limonov later “resurrects” Brodsky in his prison cell in In Captivity among the Dead to further establish a place for himself within Brodsky’s legacy. In the course of their dialogue, “Brodsky” states what Limonov cannot—that in Limonov’s current system of values It’s Me, Eddie remains a point of vulnerability that threatens to overturn his carefully reconstructed biographical legend:

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In your dossier it is written: “Author of It’s Me, Eddie, in which there is a scene of homosexual sex and the protagonist copulates with a Black man in a vacant lot. The best way to break the prisoner Savenko [Limonov’s given surname] is to constantly remind him of gays, of the theme of ‘gays in prison,’ about sodomizers and the sodomized. Savenko might be intimidated. Then in exchange for some kind of favor . . . he’ll admit his guilt, or partially admit it, in court.” [Your cellmate’s] role is to intimidate you by constantly reminding you of your Achilles heel.80

The novel, along with all literature, however, is eventually deemed irrelevant over the course of the conversation. Both Limonov and “Brodsky” agree that the writer is a “pitiful figure,” “archaic,” a “disgusting type.” “Brodsky” continues to defend poetry as an eternal form (“a pity you stopped writing verse”); Limonov declares his final departure from literature altogether. In agreement with a news correspondent’s earlier suggestion that “if Limonov and his National Bolshevik Party come to power, their first plan of action should be—on the basis of his program—to banish the writer Limonov from Russia,”81 Limonov declares at the conclusion of his conversation with “Brodsky,” “I am not a writer. I am a reporter of my own life.”82 Brodsky’s rejection of It’s Me, Eddie becomes an opportunity for Limonov to bond with no less of a figure than “Joseph Brodsky” to revisit, then discredit, the sexual and textual body of the exilic Eddie. If, according to Laurence Rickels, photography “shrinks and embalms” its subjects while monumentalizing them,83 biography can, following Epstein, “reaffirm cultural eminence” at the same time it inflicts “interpretive violence” upon lives.84 We have seen Limonov engage in the production of photo albums that catalogue and archive his past selves as a means of denying their present autonomy. With The Book of the Dead and Le monstres sacres (Sviashchennye monstry, 2004), Limonov turns to biography, a genre he had not practiced until his return, to deny several biographical subjects, including Maiakovskii and Brodsky, their status as autonomous subjects. As a genre that seeks to delimit the extradiscursive activity of others, biography—particularly in the hands of a practitioner like Limonov—functions as


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another controlling discursive regime. It wreaks “violence in the guise of interpretation,”85 allowing Limonov to determine the reception of It’s Me, Eddie after his return, recontextualize his relationship with Brodsky, and above all, assert his affiliation with hegemonic cultural practices and discursive formations that lend authority to his present positions. In this project, his work has been assisted by the biographical film Russkoe (dir. Aleksandr Veledinskii, 2004), based loosely on Limonov’s autobiographical works that chronicle his Kharkiv years, Memoirs of a Russian Punk (Podrostok Savenko, 1982) and The Young Scoundrel (Molodoi negodiai, 1986). As in the memoirs, the protagonist of the film, “Ed,” begins his adolescence as a budding young poet. In its deviations from its source texts, however, the film discloses its debts to historico-generic conventions as well as the biographical imperatives to which Limonov now subscribes. As concerns the former, the film follows a well-trodden plot: the writer is committed to a psychiatric ward. Ed escapes with the help of his petty criminal partners, but the film makes no effort to escape convention, with the anticipated gallery of characters in the institution performing their expected roles. As concerns the latter, not only does the young poet already foresee his need to transcend literature to become a legendary figure, but in a dream sequence his older self makes a brief appearance, wearing the characteristic goatee and darkframed glasses that distinguish Limonov’s appearance today. Set in a prison cell surrounded by characters from his past, the scene foreshadows the “extraordinary man” young Ed is to become. In another aggressive gesture of biographical revisionism, the film skips from Ed’s youth in Kharkiv to his adult self in prison and back, excising altogether Eddiebaby’s exilic adventures on the Lower East Side. *

*

*

Consistent with his current practices and Limonov’s selfproclaimed departure from literature, his antiutopian novel 316, Point “B” must be approached with an eye toward Limonov’s present agenda. The novel, set in the year 2015,

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was begun in 1982 in Paris and completed only in 1997 in Moscow, well after Limonov’s decision to pursue a nonliterary career. As such, it reflects Limonov’s transitional ambitions: its hero, Ippolit Luk’ianov, is a Russian émigré writer living in New York who eventually becomes one the most powerful political figures in the world. Luk’ianov physically resembles the “chief of the Department of Demographics,” Saul Jenkins, and is explicitly identified as his double.86 The motif of the double recurs throughout Limonov’s exilic poetry (“My negative hero,” 1981), short stories (“The Double,” 1985), and novels (The Torturer) and emerges from an autobiographical impulse that posits, as Robert Porter has argued, “the two possible resolutions of the riven personality that was Eddy.”87 Luk’ianov may be compared with other doubled protagonists in Limonov’s work, but it is particularly productive to note the characteristics of 316, Point “B” that distinguish it from the rest of Limonov’s fiction. First and foremost, it differs in genre, but Limonov violates the conventions of the traditional antiutopian novel to produce an ideological novel constructed according to his heroic-autobiographical principles that functions as a corrective to his previous exilic narratives and biographical legend. Ultimately, 316, Point “B” should not be read so much as a social commentary or literary response to earlier utopian visions as an ideological polemic with his former literary self. The novel begins seven years after a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, and Luk’ianov has just turned sixty-five years old. According to Demographic Law article number 316, point B, all citizens must voluntarily report for extermination at the age of sixty-five. Determined to live, and in constant fear of the patrols that randomly check citizens’ identity cards, Luk’ianov goes into hiding, but is eventually apprehended by a young lieutenant. To this point, the structure of the novel resembles that of traditional dystopian fiction. Set in a place and time far removed from the author’s own, the “deficiencies in the future” are intended as criticism of the “deficiencies of the present.”88 It is in this connection that Shatalov compares Limonov to George Orwell.


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If, Shatalov argues, Orwell’s novels were a warning against the threat of a newly wrought totalitarianism in the Soviet Union, Limonov’s response to Orwell, an essay titled “Disciplinary Sanatorium” (“Distsiplinarnyi sanatorii,” 1989), indicates that in the present day Russia could fear the same threat from America.89 “Disciplinary Sanatorium” is a feeble critique of Orwell’s 1984 that primarily provides a platform for Limonov’s revisionist historical views and nationalist ideology. It begins with an attack on 1984: “Its plot is stupid,” its protagonists “lack ambition,” and its author is “insufficiently talented” to present a compelling vision of the future.90 The goal of Limonov’s essay is to present a “more accurate” sociological study of the Western world and the Eastern bloc countries through the analogy of the sanatorium, whose inhabitants correspond to social groups found in contemporary society. The doctors and nurses in power keep their patients in a medicated, controlled state either by force (as in the former Soviet Union) or by providing them with an endless chain of material goals toward which the patient must continually strive (the West). The lowest in the social hierarchy of Limonov’s sanatorium is the “victim,” whom, he believes, Orwell and all “sanatorium countries” have chosen to valorize.91 From this outline of Limonov’s “sociological study,” it is clear that the ideological aims of 316, Point “B” will contradict the exilic narratives that chronicled the experiences of social outcasts and outsiders, including Limonov’s own exilic alter egos. Consequently, many of the motifs traditionally associated with the antiutopian novel have been considerably distorted in 316, Point “B” as their function becomes adapted to autobiographical myth, rather than exclusively social or political correctives. The protagonist is saved from immediate execution by the young lieutenant, who recognizes Luk’ianov’s resemblance to Jenkins. After the assassination of the president of the United States, the lieutenant kills Jenkins, the favored candidate to occupy the Oval Office, and replaces Jenkins with his double, Luk’ianov, who is concerned only with the opportunity to live past sixty-five. In

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the end, the Russian émigré Luk’ianov (masquerading as Jenkins) is elected president of the United States. One of the most important source texts for antiutopian literature since the end of the nineteenth century has been Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,”92 which the atheist Ivan Karamazov relates to his devout and saintly brother Alyosha. In the legend, Christ reappears on Earth during the Inquisition, only to be imprisoned by the Grand Inquisitor, who visits Christ in his cell and explains to him why his reappearance will destroy all the work of the church for the previous fifteen centuries. The Grand Inquisitor states, “We corrected your deed and based it on miracle, mystery, and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep . . . Have we not, indeed, loved mankind, in so humbly recognizing their impotence[?] . . . Why have you come to interfere with us now?”93 The Inquisitor then reveals that for eight centuries the church has forsaken Christ, and that its leaders have proclaimed themselves the “sole rulers of the earth.” In doing so, they have convinced men that “they will only become free when they resign their freedom to us, and submit to us.” Men, he argues, do not want freedom, but happiness, “and we shall give them quiet, humble happiness, the happiness of feeble creatures.”94 The “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” has been described as “probably the most important text for the genre” of antiutopia in that its “allegorical form gave it a universality which permitted a selective and flexible application to a wide variety of targets.”95 The meetings between D-503 and the Benefactor in Evgenii Zamiatin’s We, the Controllers and the rebels in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, O’Brien and Winston Smith in 1984, and in the context of contemporary Russian literature, the delayed memory of the conversation between Colonel Urchagin and Omon Krivomazov in Viktor Pelevin’s Omon Ra (1993), all reflect the influence of Dostoevskii’s allegory. The similarly staged meeting between Luk’ianov and Jenkins invokes, but does not follow, this tradition. Jenkins, the author of article 316, point “B” that has condemned Luk’ianov to death, meets


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with Luk’ianov to reveal the nature of his power: “I am the author of article 316, point ‘B.’ And this law forced you out of your cockroach’s crevice . . . if you look honestly at the last days of your life, you’ll see that they’ve been brighter, stronger, more intense, than all the sixty five years you lived in a daze.”96 Jenkins argues that the law has improved the quality of Luk’ianov’s life, that “the government is sacred,” and the Nietzschean superman is in fact the state itself. Although the monologue ends without further elaboration, Jenkins’s speech (and much of “Disciplinary Sanatorium” as well) is clearly intended as an elaboration of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thesis that the “meaning of all culture is the reduction of the beast of prey ‘man’ to a tame and civilized animal.”97 Unlike the novels of Zamiatin and Orwell, in which the protagonist speaks against the tyranny of the status quo imposed by the state, Limonov does not provide his protagonist with a voice of protest against his interrogator; on the contrary, Luk’ianov says only, “Do what you will with me” and “I do not argue with you.”98 Limonov also violates the conventions of the antiutopian novel by eliminating Jenkins at this stage in the narrative so that Luk’ianov may take his place. Assuming the role of Jenkins, Luk’ianov is not only elected president, but encouraged to tighten the yoke of discipline that controls the populace. By the end of the narrative Limonov’s work hardly resembles an antiutopian novel at all, but an assortment of motifs familiar to the reader from Limonov’s exilic writing. In those works, Limonov used the motif of the double as an emblem of the dual nature of the exilic condition. In The Torturer, two émigrés are revealed to be the two hypostases of a single subject, a situation resolved when one murders the other. In the short story “The Double,” the writer “Eduard Limonov” meets his double, a pedophilic priest, in New York City. In 316, Point “B,” the émigré hero ultimately is not threatened by the presence of his double; on the contrary, the presence of a double allows him to live. Moreover, if Luk’ianov assumes his double’s place, it is not in a social hierarchy determined by poetic talent, material wealth, or

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sexual prowess; eschewing any celebration of the marginal status of the émigré, Limonov instead relocates him into the highest ranks of the political hierarchy. The reinvention of the exile in 316, Point “B”—from social outcast and marginal figure to political leader and champion of national security— is an effective allegory for Limonov’s self-constructed fantasy of his own development. Over the course of this chapter I have illustrated the various strategies by which Limonov disposed of his exilic personae and recreated himself as a political leader. Being an inexperienced political newcomer with a larger reputation as a literary provocateur, Limonov initially presented himself as an oppositional figure who challenged the status quo. The reduction in linguistic capital that accompanied his change of profession demanded his further reliance upon publicity stunts that communicated his political dispossession at the same time they acknowledged the power of the elected officials they targeted. He embarked upon a twofold strategy that balanced disorder and provocation, expressed in the form of public demonstrations that targeted selected political “enemies,” and strict control of his image intended to promote and sustain his heroic persona among his young followers. He appeared, on the one hand, to have transposed the creative tactics of self-presentation characteristic of his exilic period into a professional sphere bound by strict social protocols, and on the other to have stifled his writing persona into a limited repertoire. While this strategy generated precisely the two sets of responses he intended—denunciations of his controversial political positions and activity, and servile devotion from his young acolytes—it is simultaneously a difficult balancing act and a creative deadlock. In concluding my treatment of Limonov’s constructions of exile and return, I wish to call attention to the impasse that Limonov’s own tactics of opposition create for his work. Bound to essentializing hegemonic discursive structures of prophecy, biography, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, Limonov’s narrating self is overdetermined and unable to remove itself from its limited sphere. On occasion, however,


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Limonov finds refuge in nostalgic reveries that move beyond his rigid rhetoric of return and seek to emplace his narrating self in its former exilic literary contexts. Through these reminiscences, Limonov maintains the viability of his exilic alter ego Eddie to retain access to the more universal reach of the literary identities that he can no longer inhabit within his regimented practices of return.

Conventions of Opposition Limonov is aware that by integrating himself into his chosen social and discursive hierarchies, he is literally and figuratively putting his life at risk. He has predicted that a bullet, not a pen, will write the “epilogue of [his] life.”99 At public events he surrounds himself with tracksuit-clad young men from his National Bolshevik party who serve as his bodyguards. Along with Limonov, these men felt the ire of a hostile audience during Limonov’s 2006 lecture “Russian Literature and Russian History,” and together with the special police forces patrolling the lecture venue, they acted to scatter the crowd and hurriedly push Limonov into a waiting car when a sudden series of explosive sounds erupted on the street as Limonov left the building. Limonov now sees himself as Jenkins, the eliminated leader, not Luk’ianov, his fortunate émigré lookalike.100 In his conversation with “Brodsky,” Limonov’s body is in the process of being transmuted into bronze, simultaneously killing him and rendering him immortal.101 He participates in the construction of his own monuments: he has penned the introduction to his three-volume collected works (in which he envisioned his life’s “epilogue”), collected and published his albums of photographs, and concluded My Political Biography—his 2002 account of his political awakening—with a conventional “scene from a classic novel” consisting of his first steps into his prison cell. This infatuation with biography and self-monumentalization does not allow for the interpretive spaces of agency, only genetic and generic inevitability. Such imperatives may lead to the interpretation of his work exclusively within the institutional boundaries of biography, as is the case with

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Veledinskii’s 2004 film. Like Limonov’s politics, biographical imperatives also situate Limonov within the dynamic interplay between institutionalized forces and their opposition. Limonov’s trajectory from writer to politician, exile to emplaced, calls to mind the opposition between absolute agency in his project of self-fashioning and his acceptance of his allegedly inevitable fate. As long as Limonov remains the author of both of these projects of self-mythologization, he will continue his autobiographical reconstructions of the past from the perspective of the present. In disclosing his need for an exilic past to juxtapose to his present, constructing an antipode in Brodsky—international man of letters and exile of no return—and juxtaposing agency to essentialized inevitability, Limonov implicates himself in his need for opposition, even if he generates the opposition himself. The titles of his book-length political tracts, Limonov versus Zhirinovskii (1994) and Limonov versus Putin (2006), are emblematic of this need, as is his development of the “self-interview” (interv’iu s samim soboi), a genre he practices when he “want[s] to answer particular questions and no one poses them to me . . . or when I need to curse my enemies.”102 It is also revealed in his avowed problematic relationship with online forums, where diverse communities of forum contributors hiding behind user names and avatars prove too diffuse and anonymous an antagonist to attack.103 Limonov directly engages the responses his online publications generate, and just as the political discourses of those in power are necessary for him to produce his own oppositional writings, he takes refuge in his own hegemonic discourses when online readers post their attacks. Examples of his replies show him taking recourse in his inherent talents (“nobodies, young and old, all despise genius”)104 and ascribing his critics’ hostile comments to sexual inadequacy. “Is it jealousy? Do you also want such a biography and wives, such talented and tragic beautiful women?” he responds to one.105 Limonov’s current writings and activities ironically demonstrate that they are often merely an expression of those very discourses he claims to oppose. As of yet, Limonov has not


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devised a way out of this impasse, but continues to assert his position within the conventional political and cultural hierarchies of gender, genealogy, and canon. There are times, however, when one senses that Limonov wishes he could embrace the extraordinary otherness that was Eddie, and the rigid positions of narrative control that he now espouses are occasionally interspersed with nostalgic fantasies of the marginal or unfulfilled status of the past. The voluminous prison writings—Limonov claims to have written eight books during his two and a half year long incarceration—are rife with reminiscence and speculation as to what might have been. Had he married the woman he lived with during the summer of 1981 he spent in California, he muses, he may not have found himself in prison (“I would have published, written books in English about people like Limonov”).106 Elsewhere, he acknowledges that his commitment to the political sphere, however much notoriety it might generate, excludes him from enacting the universalizing cultural border crossings of exile that characterized his literary production and provided potential access to international fame. Limonov’s symbolic violence, for all of its purported authority and institutional power, is challenged by the author’s nostalgia. Nostalgia emerges precisely when one can’t go home again, and the endlessly desiring Eddie, with his ability to shift from marginal to marginally empowered by constructing and subverting his identity at will, constitutes a highly performative identity to which Limonov—having exhaustively documented his return on his own terms—can no longer access in life, but only in narrative. Nostalgia, according to John J. Su, “encourages an imaginative exploration of how present systems of social relations fail to address human needs.”107 While it may seem unlikely, Limonov’s nostalgic imaginings emphasize a spirit of accommodation and reconstruct a history effaced of the institutionalized Sovietera dictates that led to his exile and the subsequent violence of his return. The ethical commitment that Su associates with nostalgia—the creation of stable communities among

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the dispossessed—helps to elucidate Limonov’s resurrection of Eddie. In the impossible transposition of Eddie’s years in exile, the 1970s and 1980s, onto an imagined and idyllic 1960s, Limonov’s nostalgic vision puts forward a universal narrative of idealized self-creation, in which diverse figures share the dream of becoming transcendent national heroes of international renown without recourse to violence. In My Political Biography, Limonov outlines a primordial model of nation formation to argue that transnational relations and cultural exchanges are an artificial invention that contradicts human nature. “Cosmopolitanism in the contemporary world is a fiction,” Limonov asserts, citing the prevalence of war and the venality of market capitalism in support of his views. “Only in the highest echelons, in the world of industry or in the cases of musicians with names of world-renown is cosmopolitanism possible. At the level of simple, everyday life, nations regard each other, at best, with wariness.”108 As is evident, however, Limonov does not see himself or his activities as ordinary or on the level of everyday life. Having described himself rubbing shoulders with Truman Capote, Richard Avedon, Dali, Andy Warhol, and The Ramones in New York and having erected textual monuments unto himself following his return, he cannot now be content to portray himself as any less important than those renowned industrialists, musicians, and celebrities. Although he excludes politics and literature from his list of cosmopolitan cultural arenas, perhaps due to his belief that commitments in these realms should be exclusively national and divorced from the world of commerce and the arts, he is acutely aware that his name only entered into international cultural circulation through his literary past. Les monstres sacres, the collection of biographical sketches he wrote in prison, concludes with a revealing passage. “The blessed 1960s!” he exclaims—Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, and Elvis Presley are still alive, Iurii Gagarin has just orbited the earth, it is the era of Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard, of hippies and communes, and “on 30 September 1967, Limonov arrived in Moscow with a


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large wooden suitcase, ready to conquer the city.” In keeping with the discursive institutionalization of biography, he concludes the passage with a description of a painting of his now-deceased idols. A smiling Elvis serves coffee to Marilyn and Bogie. Another personage is sitting with them; Limonov does not recall who it is, but suggests that Gagarin would fit right in. “And in so far as I am an artist, the author of the many-personaged canvas Les monstres sacres, I have the right . . . to inscribe myself—Eduard Limonov—next to the Russian general,” he proclaims.109 In what is yet one more dramatic biographical revision, Limonov reidentifies himself as an artist to insert himself into the company of those who transcended the banality of the institutions that generated or commemorated their international fame. Limonov may believe that he has now transcended the limits of literature to achieve a place of greater cultural importance. But sitting next to Gagarin and sharing coffee with Marilyn could not be the newly arrived Kharkiv poet with so much yet to prove, nor the grey-haired goateed National Bolshevik leader who prefers to be canonized alongside Chernyshevskii, Lenin, and Bakunin, but only Eddie-baby, who having changed from his many-colored coat of the National Hero into his best white suit and black lace shirt, stopped to pose for posterity before returning to Moscow where his future was unfolding.110


Chapter 5

4

The End of Ex ile— The End of R etu r n?

In her discussion of Joseph Brodsky’s refusal to return to

Russia, Susan Sontag described where the poet chose to live as “elsewhere” and Russia as “the great elsewhere to which he could not, would not, out of pride, out of anger, out of anxiety, ever return.”1 At home between two elsewheres, Brodsky’s determination to remain in a home situated out of place may be construed, in part, as his unwillingness to unravel his hard-won exilic discourses and construct a rhetoric of return. To return is to confront issues of home and exile, familiarity and difference, and belonging and displacement all over again. It entails the arduous task of discursively reconstructing the narrativizing self and the grounds for its existence. It also entails subjecting one’s work to cultural processes that organize the rhetorical structures of the writing of return in ways over which one may have little control. The narratives of return treated in this study stimulate an awareness of the contingency of claims to representing national identity. These claims are entangled within strategies of self-presentation and cultural positioning, as well as within broader cultural dynamics and power structures that in themselves are involved in shaping identity and culture. If efforts to reduce the state’s role in defining the terms of exile by emphasizing the individual exile’s agency in creating, or even escaping, his own exilic condition have been the subject of much scholarly attention, it is fair to say that

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return is no more the exclusive domain of the writer’s agency than it is subject to other processes of cultural production. What I hope to have demonstrated over the course of this book is that while physical and narrative returns intended to dismantle exilic modes and reorient the repatriated writer to new strategies and audiences are initiated and shaped by the writers themselves, the patterns inherent to the rhetorical refiguration of narratives of exile into those of return locate it among the organizing structures that give shape to cultural products. The awareness that writing practices associated with return are embedded within such organizing structures guides the reader toward an understanding of their doubly constructed character. On the one hand, we have seen in each case that transitional narratives of return that center upon tropes of travel and dislocation eventually give way to representations of a stable and rooted identity affiliated with notions of home and nation. On the other hand, as the variety of narratives of return in this study has illustrated, whether and how the repatriated writer resists or complies—or is made to comply—with narrative outcomes for return that affiliate the writer with certain national discourses reflects the writer’s construction of his own power as well as his location within the historical and cultural moment. In her examination of stories of return, Amy K. Kaminsky cites the postexilic writer José Donoso and his need to write about the conditions of his repatriation. The return of exiles to Chile preceded the end of dictatorship, and Kaminsky observes that Donoso “complains of feeling compelled to write about that reality even though he would, artistically, rather be elsewhere.”2 In a 1987 interview, Donoso describes his predicament: “It is impossible to write about anything else. We are all condemned to this. I cannot stand writing about it, but nonetheless I cannot write about anything else. I find myself so completely obsessed by this problem that I have no other option. May it be damned! But what other option is there?”3 Donoso’s response resonates with the persistent and ongoing structuring demands of homecoming. It presents a familiar disjuncture, one that is encountered


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in Vassily Aksyonov’s regime of travel between Moscow and Biarritz, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s blistering criticisms of Russia’s state of collapse, in Eduard Limonov’s observation upon returning for the first time in 1989, that he “didn’t like Russia at all.” To commit to return, as Donoso’s remarks make clear, and as Aksyonov, Solzhenityn, and Limonov all acknowledged after their initial provisional narratives of return, is to continually confront one’s writing predicament. Along with these rhetorical structures, the processes by which Aksyonov’s cosmopolitan strategies of multiple positioning begin to intermingle with increasingly local constructions of home, Solzhenitsyn’s figuration of return comes to advocate for threatened national discourses, and Limonov’s political opposition becomes a form of self-othering that is in fact dependent upon reigning ideologies, are simultaneously an effect of agency and the ideological limits imposed upon narratives of return. Such limits are often imposed from outside of literature and constitute a regime of interpretive regulation in relation to which narratives of return must be construed. Current cultural dynamics, such as nostalgia for the prerevolutionary and Soviet eras and the attendant weakening of Russia’s civil society, contribute perspectives that may inflect readings of narratives of return and the motives of their authors. It has become commonplace to invoke nostalgia as one of the dominant symbolic practices in post-Soviet Russian culture, and while there has been much scholarly emphasis on the strange comforts and unrealizable potentials of today’s nostalgic longing for a glorious Soviet past, it is also the case that contemporary echoes of exilic voices of dissent can be heard in response to such nostalgic formations. Aksyonov’s 2004 novel Voltairians and Voltairiennes offers a fictionalized representation of Voltaire as an advisor to Catherine the Great, with the philosopher hoping to modulate the empress’s enlightened despotism by assisting her in the construction of a “liberal empire.” When asked about his hopes for the novel, Aksyonov responded, “If people cannot be saved from their imperial complex, then perhaps together with this complex a dose of the idea of

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liberalism can be administered.”4 In other words, having perceived the popular nostalgia for the Soviet era and more distant imperial past, Aksyonov drew upon traditional methods of resistance by invoking the social role of the author in both eras: as a voice of protest against an authoritarian state, and a gentle advisor who uses the public medium of literature to espouse both praise and counsel.5 The return of such authorial strategies indicates that nostalgia seeks to reinstate not only institutional histories but the methods of opposition that rose against them. By repositioning literature as a medium for generating social reform, the author locates himself against—and within—the frame of the imperial novel to dictate its reception. In promoting such a reading, however, there is a danger that both the frame of the novel and the author figure considered responsible for its construction can become appropriated into structures conducive to an inescapable cycle of nostalgic reconfiguration. If the author becomes entirely subject to nostalgic reading strategies, he risks becoming romanticized along with the social agenda that the explicitly nostalgic frame of the novel was intended only to embellish.6 In contrast, Limonov institutionalizes himself by taking on the title of “leader” and “hero.” These titles, and the attendant notions of authority and greatness they evoke, are accompanied by an awareness of lack. Limonov’s “victories” inevitably bear the rhetorical traces of an absence of power. Still, his sizable and undeniable popularity among disaffected youth, along with Garry Kasparov’s invitation to unite the National Bolshevik Party and Kasparov’s own anti-Putin campaign to form the alternative party the Other Russia, demonstrates that his interrogations of existing power structures are not only the product of evolving methods of self-presentation, but a response to the increasingly institutionalized ideas of nation that emerged under the Putin administration. Youth organizations founded in a show of support for Vladimir Putin, such as Ours (Nashi) and Young Guard (Molodaia gvardiia), function as a direct descendant of the Komsomol in that they offer future careers within the political establishment.7 Meanwhile,


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Limonka features the regular column “Our Political-Prisoner Brothers,” a list of all party members currently serving prison terms. It is perhaps inevitable given such a comparison that categories of exclusion endow Limonov with authority among youth whose unfulfillable desires lead to romantic self-identification with a movement entirely predicated upon opposition. Limonov’s occasional nostalgic escapes to his years of exile in New York constitute a form of individualized resistance against institutionalizing forces of his own making, as well as against a nationalism that has appropriated all but the most private forms of nostalgia to its own ends. His case exemplifies the complex trap of weaving an “authoritative” narrative of return in response to powerful external institutions of ideological regulation. Solzhenitsyn articulates the rhetorical limits of the narrative project of exile when he ceases to write novels. His narratives of return have been associated with dominant figures of power and location, but their difficult reception reveals that they remain a locus for competing constructions of identity. An example of the contentious relationship between narratives of return and the extraliterary reception imposed upon them can be found in the recent news. In December 2008, Russian president Dmitrii Medvedev renamed Moscow’s Great Communist Street in honor of Solzhenitsyn. There are many who consider the renaming an appropriate restoration of national pride and identity. Many others challenge the state’s appropriation of Solzhenitsyn’s legacy. Still others, such as the street’s elderly residents, complain that the renaming requires them to reregister their passports before they can collect their pensions. Communist groups have taken issue with the commemoration of an avowed anticommunist. During the years Solzhenitsyn spent in exile, no one could have imagined that a street in Russia’s capital would one day be named in his honor. But the renaming raises questions about how Solzhenitsyn’s resistance during critical moments of Russia’s history and, somewhat more ironically, how his recent advocacy for marginalized places and values, can be compatible with such restorative gestures. This conflict is only accentuated by the fact that just two

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months prior to the installation of the new signs on Solzhenitsyn Street, a proposal to reinstate the toppled and vandalized statue of Felix Dzerzhinskii, founder of the secret police, was being discussed in the Duma.8 It has been my contention throughout this book that the returned writer generates narratives of return in the interest of constructing a stable collective history and identity. The case studies demonstrate, however, that the writing of return can be subjected to readings originating from a position of “belonging” as well as of dislocation. The writing of return also proposes besieged constructions of the author and the nation, constructions that may themselves harness nostalgic forms toward achieving an established cultural location from which questions of national belonging can be addressed. John S. Su has argued that nostalgia “has provided a means of expressing resistance for individuals who otherwise lacked the power to change their circumstances more directly.”9 If for Su, nostalgia can facilitate a discussion of “ethical ideals in the face of disappointing circumstances,”10 for the writers treated in my study it is a strategy for the creation of community that can be appropriated by any individual or institutional producer or consumer of cultural products. The degree to which narratives of return are subject to structuring forces and constant reassessment also raises the question of when and how the writing of return will end. To pose this question is to consider how to responsibly discuss the contingencies of biography and their relationship to the writer’s body of work. Aksyonov passed away on July 6, 2009, after suffering a severe stroke in January 2008. Collections of his recent work are in production and will be published posthumously, and while future receptions of his work remain as yet undetermined, his narratives of return as yet continue to travel from reader to reader. Solzhenitsyn’s death on August 3, 2008, has not resulted in the codification of his reception. The question of who defines the nation and how is ongoing. Returning exiles, along with emerging literary voices, continue to have their say in the process. I have tried to present the positions the returned exiles have


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articulated through their writing of return, and in so doing, addressed their relationship to the writing of exile as well as to their historical and cultural context. With the cultural moment and interpretive context of the writing of return still in progress, and the study of exile and diaspora still a nascent and growing field, it is not yet the time to subjugate the writing of return to the chronology of biography or vice versa. In exploring the relationships between them, I have tried to show that narratives of return are as valid and significant a creative impulse as narratives of exile, that the double nature of their constructedness reveals the potentials and limitations of agency, and that their study can generate a kind of criticism that foregrounds reading and comparative literary and cultural study as means of facilitating interdisciplinary communication. As an interstitial mode of production, the writing of return coincides with the end of exile and other processes associated with lives being lived and adapting to change. It necessitates a reconsideration of the boundaries of exile, agency, and literature. As long as these complex interactions are open to discussion, the modes of writing, reading, and living that inform narratives of return will orient readers toward critical and creative engagement with its texts. The academic response to this emergent modality may take the form of performative criticism, as practiced by Svetlana Boym, as a means of moving away from the privileging of the “death of the author,” and by Lynne Huffer as a challenge to nostalgia and a way to stimulate ethical models of social and discursive activity.11 It may stimulate further study of the affinities between biography and theory in what Vitaly Chernetsky has called the “new ‘autobiographical turn’” in contemporary Russian and Ukrainian letters.12 The examples I have discussed in this study, for all their specificities, nonetheless have relevance to the exploration of return in other contexts. As other scholars have demonstrated, when exile ends and its writing goes home, we do not suddenly drop our engagement with it. On the contrary, our investigations may be as varied as the lived and narrated

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experiences of return that we encounter. The diachronic frames, rhetorical structures, and cultural mechanisms that contribute to the construction of return in the Russian context and impose certain limits upon it are accompanied by cultural studies that see not only the writer, but readers and other agents and venues of cultural production, as capable of generating meaning. If the former frames and practices suggest that there is an end to return, the latter continue to open its disciplinary and conceptual boundaries and contribute to its vitality as an object of study.

Notes Chapter 1 1. On the discursive rupture that accompanied the Soviet collapse, see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006). 2. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993). 3. Chow refers more specifically to “a deeply ingrained Orientalism in the field of East Asian studies” when she defines “Orientalist melancholia,” that is, the sense of loss and anxiety some scholars have associated with the emergence of contemporary Chinese literature that, in their view, does not “rise to the grandeur of [its] cultural past.” Chow identifies this phenomenon with the twofold marginalization of Asian studies—the evaluation of classical Asian literature as an arcane “specialty” and the concomitant disregard for contemporary Asian literature. See Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), 3–4, 124–27. 4. John Glad identifies Valery Tarsis as the first writer to be deprived of his citizenship upon deportation to the West in 1966 and the theatre director Iurii Liubimov among the last in 1984. See John Glad, ed., Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993), 21; and John Glad, Russia Abroad: Writers, History, Politics (Washington, DC: Birchbark Press and Hermitage Publishers, 1999), 394. This wave of emigration is traditionally designated as the “Third Wave,” with the First Wave coming in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the Second Wave after the Second World War. 5. See Arnold McMillin, “The Effect of Exile on Modern Russian Writers: A Survey,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 34 (1991), 20; and Glad, Russia Abroad 383–94.

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Notes

6. See Elena Tichomirova, ed., Russische zeitgenössische Schriftsteller in Deutchland. Ein Nachschlagewerk, vol. 367 (München: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1998); Martin C. Putna and Miluše Zadražilová, Rusko mimo Rusko. Dějny a kultura ruské emigrace 1917–1991, 2 vols. (Brno: Petrov, 1994); Martin Tucker, Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991). 7. Examples of such collections include Wolfgang Kasack, “Lexikon der russischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Vom Beginn des Jahrhunderts bis zum Ende der Sowjetära,” Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik (München: Verlag Otto Sagner im Kommission, 1992); Wolfgang Kasack, Die russische Schriftsteller-Emigration im 20. Jahrhundert. Beiträge zur Geschichte, den Autoren und ihren Werken, Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik, ed. Wolfgang Kasack, vol. 62 (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner in Kommission, 1996); Peter Vail’ and Aleksandr Genis, Sovremennaia russkaia proza (Ann Arbor, MI: Ermitazh, 1982); Boris Lanin, Proza russkoi emigratsii (Tret’ia volna): Posobie dlia prepodovatelei literatury (Moscow: Novaia shkola, 1997). 8. Examples include John Glad, Literature in Exile (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1990); Olga Matich and Michael Heim, eds., The Third Wave: Russian Literature in Emigration (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1984), V. P. Skobelev, Vasilii Aksenov: Literaturnaia sud’ba (Samara: Samarskii universitet, 1994); N. A. Skobelev, ed., Literatura “Tret’ei Volny.” Sbornik nauchnykh statei (Samara: Samarskii universitet, 1997); William Phillips, “Writers in Exile III: A Conference of Soviet and East European Dissidents,” Partisan Review 51.1 (1982); William Phillips, “Writers in Exile,” Partisan Review 50.3 (1983); William Phillips, “Intellectuals and Social Change in Central and Eastern Europe,” Partisan Review 59.4 (1992); Georges Nivat, ed., Odna ili dve russkikh literatury? Mezhdunarodnyi simpozium, sozvannyi fakul’tetom slovesnosti zhenevskogo universiteta i shveitsarskoi akademiei slavistiki (Geneva: L’Age d’Homme, 1978); “Diapazon,” Von! Izgnanie kak iavlenie literatury XX veka, vol. 1 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Rudomino,” 1992); and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Iz putevykh zapisei, 1994,” Mezhdu dvumia iubileiami, 1998–2003 (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2005), to name only a few. 9. See Glad, ed., Conversations in Exile; Feliks Medvedev, Posle Rossii (Moscow: Respublika, 1992); A. Mirchev, 15 interv’iu (New York: Izdatel’stvo im. A. Platonova, 1989); and Iaroslav Mogutin, “Amoral’nyi moralist,” 30 interv’iu (St. Petersburg: Limbus Press, 2001).

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10. Other journals established abroad include Vremia i my (Tel Aviv/ New York), Grani (Frankfurt am Main), Dvadtsat’ dva (Tel Aviv), Kovcheg (Paris), Novyi zhurnal (New York), Tret’ia volna (Paris), and Ekho (Paris). 11. Hamid Naficy, “Framing Exile: From Homeland to Homepage,” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, ed. Hamid Naficy (New York: Routledge, 1999), 4. 12. Zinovy Zinik, “Anyone at Home? In Pursuit of One’s Shadow,” Eurozine 2007 http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-10-31 -zinik-en.html. 13. Aksyonov was in Moscow when he suffered a debilitating stroke in January 2008. He remained in treatment there until his passing in July 2009. 14. In this respect, my study works alongside Nico Israel’s Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000) as an exploration of rhetorical representations of place. Israel identifies shared rhetorical practices that contribute to a “rhetoric of displacement” in the works of Joseph Conrad, Theodor Adorno, and Salman Rushdie. 15. Nico Israel uses the term “exilic emplacement” to refer to the “double movement” of “setting-up and up-setting—that applies to both the question of the displaced subject and to the writing of displacement.” As “displacement begs the question of emplacement,” I have used the term “emplacement” to refer specifically to the narrative constructs of return that undo exilic writing (Nico Israel, Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora [Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000], 15. 16. Seidel uses the subjunctive “if” as a rhetorical marker of exile, noting that exile “names a figure and establishes a narrative ground” (Exile and the Narrative Imagination [New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1986], 1). 17. Kaminsky, After Exile, xi. 18. Kaminsky, After Exile, 29 19. To include diasporic writers, as well as to account for a condition in which “exile itself . . . is marked by notions of home,” Amy K. Kaminsky refers to “postexiles” and a literature “after exile.” See Amy K. Kaminsky, After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999), 2–3. As the writers I treat do not figure their condition as diasporic or displaced, I do not refer to their work as postexilic, although their writing of return might be included, along with diasporic writing, under the broader rubric of postexilic literature.

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Notes

20. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006), 9, 11, 7. 21. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006), 219. 22. Ella Shohat, “By the Bitstream of Babylon: Cyberfrontiers and Diasporic Vistas,” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, ed. Hamid Naficy (New York: Routledge, 1999), 225. 23. Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 63. 24. Yurchak, Everything was Forever, 8. 25. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf. Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union, trans. Harry Willetts (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 444. 26. Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination, xi. 27. The phrase is taken from the title of Modest Kolerov’s collection of interviews with Russian cultural and social analysts about the new images of power and stability that emerged under Vladimir Putin’s rule (Modest Kolerov, Novyi rezhim [Moscow: Dom intellektual’noi knigi i Modest Kolerov, 2001]). 28. See Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism, especially chapter 2, for a discussion of the ramifications of these changes for Eastern European literature. 29. On the emancipatory potential of nostalgic writing, see John J. Su, Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005).

Chapter 2 1. From the introduction to an interview with Aksyonov (Igor’ Shevelev, “Legkaia popytka nebesnogo chuvstva,” [2001] http://ishevelev.narod.ru/int2001.htm). The interview was reprinted without Shevelev’s introduction, “Normal’naia zhizn’, delennaia na dva,” in Zenitsa oka (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005, 432–46). 2. These works include The Egg Yolk (Zheltok iaitsa, 1991), Generations of Winter and The Winter’s Hero (the trilogy Moskovskaia saga, 1991–1994), The New Sweet Style (Novyi sladostnyi stil’, 1997), Caesarean Illumination (Kesarevo svechenie, 2001),

Notes

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

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Voltairians and Voltairiennes (Vol’ter’iantsy i vol’ter’ianki, 2004), American Cyrillic (Amerikanskaia kirillitsa, 2004), A Decade of Slander (Desiatiletie klevety, 2004), The Pupil of the Eye (Zenitsa oka, 2005), Moskva kva-kva (2006), and Rare Earths (Redkie zemli, 2007). The announcement was made by Leonid Shkurovich of Eksmo publishers at a March 14, 2006, reception celebrating the publication of the novel at the Russian Cultural Foundation in Moscow. Peter Vail’ and Aleksandr Genis, Sovremennaia russkaia proza (Ann Arbor, MI: Ermitazh, 1982), 81. See also Sergei Kuznetsov, “Obretenie stilia: Doemigrantskaia proza V. Aksenova,” Znamia 8 (1995), 206–10. Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998), 250. Cheryl Walker describes persona criticism as a “form of analysis that focuses on patterns of ideation, voice, and sensibility linked together by a connection to the author . . . that allows one to speak of authorship as multiple, involving culture, psyche, and intertextuality, as well as biographical data about the writer (“Persona Criticism and the Death of the Author,” Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism, ed. William H. Epstein [West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1991] 109). Anatoly Gladilin describes himself writing such narratives when he was a young man with “typically Soviet brains,” (Anatoly Gladilin, The Making and Unmaking of a Soviet Writer: My Story of the “Young Prose” of the Sixties and After, trans. David Lapeza [Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1979] 32). Viktor Erofeev, Muzhchiny (Moscow: Zebra E, 2001), 144. Vassily Aksyonov, “Half-way to the Moon,” Half-way to the Moon: New Writing from Russia. Eds. Patricia Blake and Max Hayward (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965), 86. Similar journeys of self-discovery characterize other works that depict travel within Russia’s borders, such as “Surplussed Barrelware” (“Zatovarennaia bochkotara,” 1968) and In Search of a Genre (V poiskakh zhanra, 1978). I am grateful to Konstantin Kustanovich for pointing out to me the confluence between the works of this period. Kustanovich identifies three “transitional periods” that define the narrative techniques encountered in Aksyonov’s works:

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12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

Notes

1960–1963, 1963–1979, and 1979 to the period of glasnost (The Artist and the Tyrant, 16–43). Konstantin Kustanovich, The Artist and the Tyrant: Vassily Aksenov’s Works in the Brezhnev Era (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1992), 24–27. Though emphasis is no longer on romantic reading practices but the shift in perspective, some readers continued to emulate Aksyonov’s protagonists. One reader states, “In my youth Aksyonov’s story ‘Little Whale, Varnisher of Reality’ made a great impression on me. I wanted to have such a child and communicate with him in the same way . . . I had many children for that reason . . . Thank you Vassily Aksyonov!” (Nina Gorlanova, “Ob intelligentsii, strategii uspekha i literatury,” Vremia novostei 11 [Jan. 26, 2005, http://www.vremya.ru/print/116876.html]). Marina Balina identifies the critical role of subjective passages in travel prose of the 1960s and 1980s (“A Prescribed Journey: Russian Travel Literature from the 1960s to the 1980s,” Slavic and East European Journal 38.2 [1994] 261–70). Balina, “A Prescribed Journey” 261. Gladilin, The Making and Unmaking of a Soviet Writer, 72–77. Balina, “A Prescribed Journey” 262–63. D. Barton Johnson, “Aksënov as Travel Writer: ‘Round the Clock, Non-Stop,” Vasiliy Pavlovich Aksënov: A Writer in Quest of Himself, ed. Edward Możejko (Columbus: Slavica, 1986), 182; Kustanovich, The Artist and the Tyrant 28, 31, 34. The playwright Viktor Slavkin expressed a similar sentiment during a 2006 television interview, when he revealed that the tie he was wearing was one Aksyonov had brought back as a gift from one of his many trips abroad as a young man. While acknowledging that the tie itself was not particularly noteworthy, Slavkin observed that the words “Made in Scotland” on the label brought a rush of associations with them that could only emerge in the Soviet context (Viktor Slavkin, Apokrif, rec 31 May 2006, Kul’tura, St. Petersburg, 2006). Balina, “A Prescribed Journey” 263. Balina, “A Prescribed Journey” 263. Johnson, “Aksënov as Travel Writer” 37. Vasilii Aksenov, “Iaponskie zametki,” Na polputi k lune (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1966), 98; Vassily Aksyonov, “Japanese Jottings,” The Steel Bird and Other Stories (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1979), 108.

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24. Aksenov, “Iaponskie zametki.” 106; Aksyonov, “Japanese Jottings.” 108. 25. Vassily Aksyonov, “Lungs and Gills,” Salmagundi 72 (Fall 1986): 206, 208. 26. Vassily Aksyonov, “Lungs and Gills,” Salmagundi 72 (Fall 1986): 209. 27. Vasilii Aksenov, “Pod nebom znoinoi Argentiny,” Zhal’, chto vas ne bylo s nami (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1968), 279. 28. Vassily Aksyonov, “Residents and Refugees,” Under Eastern Eyes: The West as Reflected in Recent Russian Émigré Writing, ed., Arnold McMillin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 42. 29. Aksyonov, “Residents and Refugees,” 42. 30. Aksenov, “Pod nebom znoinoi Argentiny,” 264, 279. 31. Aksenov and K. P. Piotrovskii, Zaiavka na literaturnyi stsenarii po odnoimennomu rasskazu V. Aksenova, RGALI f. 2453 Mosfil’m, op. 1 ed. khr. 751, p. 1; Aksenov and K. P. Piotrovskii, Avtorskaia dogovor s Aksenovym, V.P. na ekranizatsiiu rasskaza, RGALI f. 2453 Mosfil’m op. 1 ed. khr. 755, p. 3. 32. At a 1 August 1962 meeting to discuss a plan to film Aksyonov’s story “Halfway to the Moon,” one member of the screenwriting and editing committee referred to Aksyonov as “not only a prose writer, but a screenwriter” (Iu.V. Trifonov, Stenogramma zasedaniia khudozhestvennogo soveta ob”edineniia po obsuzhdeniiu zaiavki A.I. Ladynina na postanovku rasskaza V.P. Aksenova “Na polputi k lune,” RGALI, f. 2453 Mosfil’m, op. 5, ed. khr. 1259, p. 5). 33. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 3. 34. Kaplan, Questions of Travel, 28. 35. Kustanovich, The Artist and the Tyrant, 42. 36. Vasilii Aksenov, “Kruglye sutki non-stop,” V poiskakh grustnogo bebi (Moscow: Konets veka, 1992), 51. 37. See Kustanovich for a discussion of despair and conformity in relation to the quasi-autobiographical protagonist of The Burn (The Artist and the Tyrant, 92–101). 38. Vassily Aksyonov, The Burn, trans., Michael Glenny (New York: Vintage, 1985), 405. 39. Bill Thomas, “My Dinner with Vassily and Tatyana,” Los Angeles Times 27 Sept. 1992, 26. 40. Vassily Aksyonov, In Search of Melancholy Baby, trans., Michael Henry Heim and Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Random House, 1987), 188.

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41. Vassily Aksyonov, In Search of Melancholy Baby, trans., Michael Henry Heim and Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Random House, 1987), 78. 42. Aksenov, In Search of Melancholy Baby, 145. 43. Aksenov, In Search of Melancholy Baby, 152–53. 44. Vasilii Aksenov, “Kapital’noe peremeshchenie. Vystuplenie v SpasoKhaus, Noiabr’ 1989,” Voprosy literatury. August (1990), 73. 45. Vassily Aksyonov, “The Stepson of Capitalism,” trans., John Kendal, The Louisiana Conference on Literature and Perestroika, ed., Märta-Lisa Magnusson (South Jutland: South Jutland UP, 1989), 42. 46. Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl,” trans., Paul Blackburn, The Slaying of the Dragon: Modern Tales of the Playful Imagination, ed., Franz Rottensteiner (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 23. 47. Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl,” trans., Paul Blackburn, The Slaying of the Dragon: Modern Tales of the Playful Imagination, ed., Franz Rottensteiner (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 26, 27. 48. Priscilla Meyer, “Aksenov and Soviet Literature of the 1960s,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 6 (1973), 573. 49. Vassily Aksyonov, The New Sweet Style, trans., Christopher Morris (New York: Random House, 1999), 194. 50. Vasilii Aksenov, Redkie zemli (Moscow: Eksmo, 2007), 21, 43. 51. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Cosmopolitics, eds., Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998), 97–98. 52. William Phillips, “Writers in Exile III: A Conference of Soviet and East European Dissidents,” Partisan Review 51.1 (1982), 11–12, 24, and passim. 53. Olga Matich and Michael Heim, eds., The Third Wave: Russian Literature in Emigration (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), 31. 54. Vasilii Aksenov, “Luchshee sostoianie literatury—emigratsiia,” Sem’ dnei, 1984, 21. Aksyonov eventually begins to disassociate himself from the term “dissident” by demonstrating that the dissident, like the exile-astronaut, has limited resources in the West. Dissidence is “a literary phenomenon rather than a political one,” he asserts, “the dissident as literary hero is within the framework of classical drama: deprived of his negative antipode, he loses all his strength. He collapses.” A similar image of the Soviet writer-dissident as classical hero is evoked in the 1992 essay “A Winged Endangered Species,” in which Aksyonov regards his earlier self as Laocoon, fighting a constricting

Notes

55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60.

163

monster. When he found himself in the West, he “kept performing the same motions, stretching the same, now-absent snake monster” until he took stock of his new situation. Aksyonov redefines and broadens the semantic range of a seemingly familiar term to reveal that its conventional connotations do not apply to the once-known, now unknown writer. Moving from imposed, Western journalistic constructions of identity to literary emblems of exilic alienation to structure the reception of his cosmopolitan persona in the West, Aksyonov shifts strategies again when his exilic works begin to appear in Russia. Vasilii Aksenov, ““My—Shtatniki!” Kul’t Ameriki v Sovetskom Soiuze,” Krokodil 1 (1988), 14. In 2004 Aksyonov reexamined the Krokodil incident and cited a number of occurrences that suggest the letters may have been commissioned by the Party and written in imitation of public denunciations that regularly appeared in Soviet print publications (Vasilii Aksenov, Desiatiletie klevety [Moscow: Izografus/ Eksmo, 2004], 8—10). Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1996), 58, 61. Aksyonov acknowledges other difficulties that emerged from the republication of his earlier unpublished work in Russia following the reforms of perestroika. In February 1991, when the tumultuous events leading toward Boris Yeltsin’s election and the attempt to oust him out of office occupied newspaper headlines, Aksyonov’s 1979 story “Quest for an Island” appeared in print for the first time in the February 27, 1991 issue of Literaturnaia gazeta (The Literary Gazette). The story was prefaced by an introduction in which Aksyonov commented upon the gap between his concerns at the time of writing and the historic events taking place at the time of publication. By publishing the story now, he noted, “I hope to turn the attention of the reader to matters of literature” (Vasilii Aksenov, “Pravo na ostrov,” Literaturnaia gazeta 27 Feb. 1991, 11). Vassily Aksyonov, “Not Quite a Sentimental Journey,” The New Republic. 16 April 1990, 22. Vassily Aksyonov, “Not Quite a Sentimental Journey,” The New Republic 16 Apr. 1990: 21. Aksyonov makes this statement in reference to the 2002 novel Caesarean Illumination (Shevelev, “Legkaia popytka nebesnogo chuvstva,” 439; Igor’ Shevelev, “Normal’naia zhizn’, delennaia na dva,” Zenitsa oka [Moscow: Vagrius, 2005], 458).

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Notes

61. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), 81. 62. Vasilii Aksenov, “Amerikanskim pisatelem ia ne stal,” Inostrannaia literatura 1 (2003), 282; Vasilii Aksenov, “A v Moskve menia bili stulom po golove,” Moskovskii komsomolets 15–21 Feb. 1999, 5. 63. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), 124–27. 64. John Glad, ed., Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1993), 70. 65. Philippe D. Radley, “Review of Moskovskaia Saga,” World Literature Today 69.2 (1995), 387. 66. Vassily Aksyonov, Generations of Winter (New York: Vintage, 1995), 5. 67. The Russian critic Natal’ia Ivanova alone mentions the role of irony in A Moscow Saga (“Kliukvennaia poliana. O teleseriale ‘Moskovskaia saga’ i ne tol’ko o nem,” Nevesta Bukera (Moscow: Vremia, 2005, 245). Irony is evident throughout the text, particularly in the self-referential narratorial digressions, as in “Not long ago, we were reading War and Peace—for the first time since childhood, we must admit, and not at all in connection with the beginning of War and Jail but for pure reading pleasure—and came upon a number of Tolstoy’s thoughts on the riddles of history, which sometimes touch us joyfully by their similarities with our own thoughts but which at other times lead into a blind alley” (294). 68. Aleksei Zverev, “Bliuzy chetvertogo pokoleniia,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 11–12 (1999), 17. See also Iurii Nikonychev, “Saga gogi i magogi. Chto poluchilos’ u kumira 60-kh: Legenda ili ‘myl’naia opera?’” Knizhnoe obozrenie 32 (1999), 8. Aksyonov discusses A Moscow Saga as a potential bestseller in “Vasilii Aksenov ob amerikanskoi tsenzure, avangarde, kino i namerenii izdat’ svoi bestseller,” Moskovskie novosti 3 Oct. 1993, B6. 69. David MacFadyen, “Literature Has Left the Building: Russian Romance and Today’s Television Drama,” Kinokultura 8, (2005) www.kinokultura.com. 70. Peter Finn, “A Small Window onto a Shadowed Past,” The Washington Post 2004, A25. See also, Igor’ Kamirov, “Televidenie ne zhaleet sebia dlia reabilitatsii Stalina,” Utro (2004). Aksyonov has said that he did not collaborate with the director on many aspects of the production (Iurii Stroikov, “Vasilii

Notes

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

87.

165

Aksenov: Ia pishu teper’ tolstye knigi, a chitaiut lish’ tonkie,” Komsomol’skaia pravda 29 Sept. 2004). Igor’ Shevelev, “V memuarakh rabotaet lozhnaia pamiat’ . . .” Zenitsa oka (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 461. Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination, 10. Vasilii Aksenov, Negativ polozhitel’nogo geroia (Moscow: Vagrius/Izograf, 1996), 142. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 58. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 58. Mark Zaichik, ed., V Izrail’ i obratno: Puteshestvie vo vremeni i prostranstve (Moscow: Vagrius, 2004). Vasilii Aksenov, “Foreword to Novyi sladostnyi stil’,” Znamia 5 (1997), 9. Also quoted in Andrei Vasilevskii, “Aksenov est’ Aksenov est’ Aksenov,” Novyi mir 1, January (1998), 206. Nico Israel, Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 83. Israel, Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora, 84. Aksyonov, The New Sweet Style, 213–14. Also noted in Lee Siegel, “Dante Parks Cars in Los Angeles,” New York Times 28 Nov. 1999, 9. Aksyonov, The New Sweet Style, 381. The Russian title Kesarevo svechenie is a pun on “caesarean section” (kesarevo sechenie), suggesting the difficult and rewarding, collaborative act of enacting the writer’s and reader’s rhetorical return. Natella Boltianskaia, “Interv’iu s Vasiliem Aksenovym,” (2002). Igor Shevelev, “Legkaia popytka nebesnogo chuvstva,” Zenitsa oka (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 439; Vasilii Aksenov, “Vasilii Aksenov: Russkie chasto khodiat mimo moego doma,” 2002. Pavel Basinskii, “Aksenov i aksenovshchina,” Literaturnaia gazeta 48, 1–7 Dec. 2004, 13. Vera Tsvetkova, “Vol’ter’iantsy, vol’ter’ianki i desiatiletie klevety,” Nezavisimaia gazeta (2003). Aihwa Ong, “Flexible Citizenship among Chinese Cosmopolitans,” Cosmopolitics, eds., Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998), 152. Vaksino’s patronymic is “Apollinarievich,” a reference to the five protagonists in The Burn, who all share the same patronymic, and the six protagonists in Our Golden Ironburg (1972), as well

166

88. 89. 90.

91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96.

97.

Notes

as the protagonist of In Search of a Genre (1978). On these works, see Kustanovich, The Artist and the Tyrant, 92–110. Vasilii Aksenov, Kesarevo svechenie (Moscow: Eksmo, 2002), 77. Vasilii Aksenov, Kesarevo svechenie (Moscow: Eksmo, 2002), 578, 583. Timothy Brennan, “Cosmopolitans and Celebrities,” Race and Class 31.1 (1989), 7. During a 1991 trip to Moscow, Aksyonov characterized himself similarly: “My arrival here is not merely a visit to an exotic country; every time [I return] it is a return to the self. I am in a somewhat inbetween state, but I think this is quite typical in the contemporary world. Millions of people live in this way these days, and I am one of these millions” (Vasilii Aksenov, “Chelovek, kotoryi vozvrashchaetsia k sebe,” Kuranty 4 Jan. 1991, 5). Vasilii Aksenov, “Legkaia popytka nebesnogo chuvstva,” Zenitsa oka (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 441. In a 22 January 2002 interview at the radio station Echo of Moscow, Aksyonov attributed the American book market’s lack of interest in translating and distributing Caesarean Illumination to the “crisis of the novel.” The critic Andrei Nemzer described The New Sweet Style and Caesarean Illumination as “ideally suited to [Aksyonov’s] beautiful agenda,” if somewhat inaccessible to the popular and critical reader alike (Andrei Nemzer, “Roman, eshche roman,” Vremia novostei (2002), vol. 175). Vasilii Aksenov, “Chudo ili chudachestvo?” Oktiabr’ 8 (2002). See also Aksenov, “Amerikanskim pisatelem ia ne stal,” Boltianskaia, “Interv’iu s Vasiliem Aksenovym.” Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” 259. The first event was a public reading at OGI on 21 February 2006 following the publication of an excerpt from Moskva kvakva in the journal October. The second commemorated the publication of the book edition and was organized by Aksyonov’s publisher Eksmo (see note 3). His response—an emphatic “no” in both instances—was defended at the second event by Aksyonov’s friend and former exile Vladimir Voinovich, who noted that removing all references to Stalin from literature would not resolve the problem of nostalgia in contemporary Russian society, but rather, these references, like the past itself, should inspire reflection. Voinovich’s own novel Monumental Propaganda (2000) addresses the problem of nostalgia in the comic, yet sympathetic, figure of an ardent Stalinist who discovers a life-like

Notes

167

statue of Stalin in a trash heap and brings it home, where it stands until the present day. 98. Mariia Sveshnikova, “Vasilii Aksenov: Eto naslazhdenie—pisat’ o Rossii,” Strana.ru (Moscow: 2006); Stroikov, “Vasilii Aksenov: Ia pishu teper’ tolstye knigi, a chitaiut lish’ tonkie,” (26). 99. Critics have pointed to historical inaccuracies in the novel, among them the anachronistic appearance of the towers of Moscow State University, which were not completed until September 1953, and have similarly noted Aksyonov’s pronouncements that such anachronisms are “unimportant,” as the novel is not a history book, but about urban myths (Galina Iuzefovich, “Literaturnaia kunstkamera,” Ekspert (2006), vol. 7; Vera Kopylova, “Kva-kva, Moskva,” Moskovskii komsomolets 28 Mar. 2006, 6; Igor’ Shevelev, “Ozhog zheltka,” Vzgliad (2006); Vadim Nesterov, “Moskvu zatovarilo,” Gazeta.ru (2006).

C hapter 3 1. Nina Khrushcheva, “Solzhenitsyn’s History Lesson,” The Nation, 3 May 1999, 33; D. M. Thomas, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life (New York: St. Martins, 1998), 484; Michael Nicholson, “Solzhenitsyn, Exile and the Genius Loci,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 33:2–4 (1999), 327; Aleksandr Sokurov, Uzel (Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn), (Russia, 1999). In response to suggestions that there was as yet no Russian reader for The Red Wheel (in Lev Pirogov, “Khozhdenie v narod,” Literaturnaia gazeta 24 [14 June 2000], quoted in Kathleen F. Parthé, Russia’s Dangerous Texts: Politics between the Lines (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 202; Solzhenitsyn states that “only time will tell, after my death, to what extent the primary work of my life—the epic work The Red Wheel—will have been read” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Interv’iu s Peterom Kholenshteinom,” Mezhdu dvumia iubileiami, 1998–2003 (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2005), 55–56). 2. Zhorzh Niva, Solzhenitsyn, trans., Simon Markish (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1992), 143. 3. David Gary Shaw writes, “Coming at the end of a long and powerful tradition of stressing the role of society over the individual, postmodernism attempts to undermine the relevance of the traditional subject, the substratum of the historian’s conventional individual agent. The relevance of historiography itself has been put into question because of its close connection with such old

168

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

Notes

paradigms” (David Gary Shaw, “Happy in Our Chains? Agency and Language in the Postmodern Age,” History and Theory 40, December (2001), 2. Shaw notes, “For many contemporary theorists agency is a term of the past, distinctly part of the problem, hooking into domineering solutions of modernity: bourgeois capitalism, imperialism, paternalism, sexism” (David Gary Shaw, “Happy in Our Chains? Agency and Language in the Postmodern Age,” History and Theory 40, December (2001), 2. For an extensive discussion of such claims, and Solzhenitsyn’s responses, see Ericson (Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World, [Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1993], 175–212). Stanley Fish, “Biography and Intention,” Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism., ed., William H. Epstein (West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1991), 13. For an example of an approach to Solzhenitsyn’s work that construes the author function as a set of modes that structure his works and endow them with intention—in effect inscribing the agency and intentions of these modes upon the persona of the author—see James M. Curtis, Solzhenitsyn’s Traditional Imagination (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1984). Curtis observes in Solzhenitsyn’s writing an oscillation between the metonymical and the metaphorical (pace Jakobson), a dialectic, he argues, that informs not only Solzhenitsyn’s works, but organizes his biography and is writ large, for example, in the writer’s vacillations between elitism and democracy. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006), 1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Tri otryvka iz ‘Dnevnika R-17,” Mezhdu dvumia iubileiami 1998–2003 (Russkii put’, 2005), 25, 26. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Postscript to the Russian Edition Abroad of August 1914,” Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed., Leopold Labedz (Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1973), 260. In his recent autobiography The Little Grain Fell between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn expresses concern upon arriving in Canada in 1974 that he “was already 56 years old, and the principal work on The Red Wheel had not yet begun” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov [Chast’ pervaia, 1974—1978],” Novyi mir 9 (1998), 111. Georges Nivat refers to the symmetry of Solzhenitsyn’s oeuvre, in which small forms, such as the prose poem “Miniatures” and

Notes

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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“Binary Tales,” bookmark the large forms (Zhorzh Niva, “Poetika Solzhenitsyna mezhdu ‘bol’shimi’ i ‘malymi’ formami,” Zvezda 12 [2003]). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Krokhotki,” Novyi mir 1 (1997), 99. Sokurov, Uzel (Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn). Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978), 169. David Simpson, Situatedness, or Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From (Durham: Duke UP, 2002). Simpson responds to the thesis of Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice with the observation that literature “may not necessarily make us more sympathetic to the situated lives of others” (141). While he notes that “it must seem churlish to dispute Nussbaum’s conviction that judges and juries would be assisted in their decision making by a good reading habit,” he also adds that “writers such as Stowe, Lawrence, and Solzhenitsyn among many others have effected powerful conjunctions between works of fiction and the events of national cultures, and we might do well to remember such moments in the context of our generally more negative current estimate of the power of the written word” (139). Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice. The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 12. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “One Book, One Chicago,” (Chicago: City of Chicago, 2006). The original Russian text reads, “Хотя нынешние времена располагают нас к легкому просмотру литературных произведений в экранной форме, ничто не может заменить чтение, ибо оно призывает усилию и душевному страданию, через которое мы выходим за рамки собственного опыта—в данном случае, шагая в сапогах наших замерзающих, изнуренных, голодных братьев” (Solzhenitsyn, “One Book, One Chicago”). Nicholson, “Solzhenitsyn, Exile and the Genius Loci,” 327. Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000), 196. Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors, 193, 194. For a brief account of the varied reception of One Day, see Ericson, Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World, 46–53. Solzhenitsyn, “Postscript to the Russian Edition Abroad of August 1914,” 260–61.

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Notes

23. Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984), 736. 24. In The Little Grain Fell between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn describes his exile as such a rift, one that could threaten his very creative existence: “It is a well known sentiment that many lose the ability to write when outside of their motherland. Will this happen to me? (Several western commentators have already predicted that a spiritual death awaits me in the west)” (Solzhenitsyn, “Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov [Chast’ pervaia, 1974–1978],” 58). 25. See Scammell, 982–83; Nicholson, 326–27; and Thomas, 478–88. 26. Ankersmit writes that “narrative coherence may guarantee the easiest access to the past but it obscures the authenticity of our experience of it. What has been appropriated and mastered narratively is no longer accessible to historical experience” (F. R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor [Berkeley: U of California P, 1994], 210). 27. Solzhenitsyn, “Tri otryvka iz “Dnevnika R-17,” 24. 28. Solzhenitsyn, “Tri otryvka iz “Dnevnika R-17,” 12. The subtitle to each knot is “A Narrative in Measured Periods” (Povestvovan’e v otmerennykh srokakh). 29. Linda Hutcheon describes such works as The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, among others in The Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988). 30. On Tolstoy and The Red Wheel, see Wachtel (1994). On Tolstoy, Dos Passos, and Hemingway in Solzhenitsyn’s work, see Curtis (1984). In the diary that accompanied the composition of The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn writes that even his method of designating with an apostrophe the numbers of the chapters that present a review of events (a device that is not retained in the English translations) was intended to distinguish his work from that of his American predecessors: “The review chapters need not be separated from the narrative ones: they are merely reinforced concrete beams affixed to the bricks, and all go into the same structure” Solzhenitsyn, “Tri otryvka iz “Dnevnika R-17,” 12. 31. Solzhenitsyn, “Tri otryvka iz “Dnevnika R-17,” 12. 32. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, trans., H. T. Willetts (London: The Bodley Head, 1989), 742. 33. Solzhenitsyn does not hold only Soviet scholars responsible, noting that “the distortion of Russian history began long before the

Notes

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

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Communists took power” (“Foreword to the Series ‘Research on Most Recent Russian History,’” Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii, 1762–1914, vol. 1 [Moscow: Russkii put’, 1995], 1). Edward E. Ericson refers to August 1914 as an “archive novel,” though he does not define the term (1993, 63). Andrew Baruch Wachtel likens this structure to that of the medieval chronicle, noting that in “reinvoking the chronicle form, Solzhenitsyn . . . hopes also to escape demands for either aesthetically balanced fictional texts or objective histories” (An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past [Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994], 215–18). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Author’s Note,” trans., H. T. Willetts, November 1916 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, 302. Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, 496. Solzhenitsyn does not agree with the view that the proverbs convey his own moral judgments of the depicted events (A. V. Urmanov, Tvorchestvo Aleksandra Solzhenitsyna (Moscow: Flinta, Nauka, 2004, 283–84). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Interv’iu s Danielem Rondo dlia parizhskoi gazety ‘Liberas’on.” Publitsistika, vol. 3 (Iaroslavl’: Verkhnevolzhskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1997), 206; Pearce (Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), 252. Solzhenitsyn used a similar device when writing his screenplay for Tanks Know the Truth, which concludes: “I couldn’t believe that this would ever see the screen, therefore I wrote it so that a future reader could become a viewer even without a screen.” Solzhenitsyn noted these qualities in Iurii Tynianov’s historical novel The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar (1927), which treats the life and work of the writer Alexander Griboedov. Solzhenitsyn cites the image of the “subterranean moan,” the “moans of the not quite dead, begging for graves” among the elements that help to convey the “truth” of Shmelev’s story (186). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Teleinterv’iu na literaturnye temy s N. A. Struve,” Publitsistika (Iaroslavl’: Verkhne-volzhskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1996), 429. Solzhenitsyn, “Teleinterv’iu na literaturnye temy s N. A. Struve,” 421; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Oktiabr’ shestnadtsatogo (Paris: YMCA Press, 1984), vol. 2, 587; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Avgust chetyrnadtsatogo (Paris: YMCA Press, 1983), vol. 2, 545. Solzhenitsyn, “Author’s Note.” He gave a similar version of this statement in a 1976 interview: “fiction (vymysel), for the

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46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

Notes

artist, is a means of concentrating reality. It helps to concentrate reality—that is its only role” (Solzhenitsyn, “Teleinterv’iu na literaturnye temy s N. A. Struve,” 426). Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, 65. We may also look to the fact that Solzhenitsyn did not only excerpt repetitive passages from historical documents, but effaced autobiographical episodes between the first and second editions of August 1914 in a process D. M. Thomas and Daniel Rancour-LaFerriere have identified with the self-censorship that accompanies condensation and displacement. See Thomas, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, 486–88; and Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, “Solzhenitsyn and the Jews: A Psychoanalytic View,” Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed., Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (Amsterdam: John Benjamins 1989), 143–44. See Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, 65. Ankersmit asserts that historians’ narratives, as representations of the past, cannot refer to the past, which is epistemically inaccessible (History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, 66). In this connection it is significant that the journalist who accompanied Solzhenitsyn during his stop in Blagoveshchensk shared with the author his story of navigating local bureaucratic channels to locate and open the archive of materials concerning the Bamlag, the Baikal-Amur railway camp in the Gulag system (Nikolai Belyi, “Na zemle Bamlaga,” Literaturnaia gazeta 15 June 1994, 3). One author notes with astonishment that Solzhenitsyn claimed the problems Russia faced in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union might have been avoided had The Red Wheel been published earlier (P. K. Chekalov, A.I. Solzhenitsyn: Strikhi k tvorcheskomu portretu [Nevinnomyssk: NGGTI, 2002], 143). Richard Bernstein, “Books of the Times: A Teeming Literary Palace in the Tolstoy Tradition,” New York Times 12 February 1999, 49. Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna, “Inoe vremia—inoe bremia,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as Writer, Myth-maker and Public Figure (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: 2007). Kalle Pihlainen, “The Moral of the Historical Story: Textual Differences in Fact and Fiction,” New Literary History 33 (2002), 56. Ankersmit’s elaboration of this idea takes into account the problem of referentiality as concerns The Red Wheel: “Insofar as historical writing wishes to remain as true as possible to the

Notes

54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

173

episodic character of historical experience, it will necessarily repeat at the level of historical representation the features of the fragmented, the contingent, and the isolated. No doubt the microstorie, the history of mentalities, and Alltagsgeschichte, with its interest in the insignificant details of daily life, best satisfy these requirements within the compass of postmodernist historiography” (1994, 211). It does not, however, account for its aims for public utility. Here we may note White’s assertion that no history is “found,” but rather, is created in the very processes of writing. Jürgen Pieters discusses this phenomenon in “New Historicism: Postmodern Historiography between Narrativism and Heterology,” 39.1 (2000), 28. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Na obryve povestvovaniia,” Aprel’ semnadtsatogo, vol. 2 (Paris: YMCA Press, 1991), 1. Such characterizations typically mention Solzhenitsyn’s twicemonthly television program “Meetings with Solzhenitsyn.” After several months on the air, the talk show was cancelled in September 1995 for “purely commercial reasons . . . too many people were bored with being harangued” (Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, 285–86; Thomas, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, 528). Thomas notes that some saw a political motive in the show’s cancellation. A press conference called by Liudmila Saraskina, Boris Mozhaev, Stanislav Kondratov, Semen Lipkin, Inna Lisnianskaia, and others accused the management at Channel One of suppressing free speech (Klarisa Pul’son, “Na ‘dikom pole’ i bez Solzhenitsyna,” Kul’tura 1995, 1). The critic Andrei Zorin saw a conflict between the goals of the writer (“an orientation to future generations”) and the instantaneity of television. Zorin describes tuning into the show with interest on one of the first days of the Chechen conflict only to encounter an academic discussion of labor conditions for rural teachers, not an unimportant topic in itself, but one that at the time was “fatally incompatible with the expectations, moods, and feelings of most viewers” (Andrei Zorin, “Vrach ili bol’?” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 1.3 (1999). Sergei Korolev, “Derrida i Solzhenitsyn: Dekonstruktsiia puteshestviia,” Donos v Rossii (Moscow: Progress-Mul’timedia, 1996); David Remnick, “Deep in the Woods,” The New Yorker 6 Aug. 2001, 33. The cover of the journal Stolitsa (1:1994) featured a photograph of Solzhenitsyn’s face superimposed on a costumed body next to the words, “Here comes the

174

59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

Notes

master . . .” (vot priedet barin). The phrase was repeated in the press frequently enough that Solzhenitsyn was compelled to respond, “They say ‘he’s arrived, like a master-landowner’! These are Moscow lies that some newspapers distribute!” (Irina Samakhova, “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn v Novosibirske,” Literaturnaia gazeta 1994, 3). Solzhenitsyn’s return was also likened to Tolstoy’s decision to leave his estate just before his death, and Chekhov’s journey to Sakhalin, in that the writers tended to Russia as if to a patient who is “seriously ill” (Konstantin Kedrov, “Put’ Solzhenitsyna,” Izvestiia 24 May 1994, 7). Nivat describes The Oak and the Calf as a “‘tactical’ masterpiece” (106). Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, 929–30. See Novyi mir 4 (1999; 226–27) and Novyi mir 3 (2001; 222– 24) for responses from Aleksandr Dol’berg, Richard Pipes, and others. The writer Liudmila Ulitskaia publicly expressed her disappointment in Solzhenitsyn’s characterization of the late Vadim Borisov, who was responsible for publishing the first print editions of Solzhenitsyn’s work to appear in Russia (Liudmila Ulitskaia, “Vozmozhno li khristianstvo bez miloserdiia?” Moskovskie novosti, 2003). Edward J. Brown, “The Calf and the Oak: Dichtung and Wahrheit,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ed., Harold Bloom (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001), 95, 96. Solzhenitsyn does not consider The Oak and the Calf an autobiography, but rather, a “report from the battlefield” (reportazh s polia boia). Noting that The Oak and the Calf left “scorched earth” behind, he writes of The Little Grain, “the second volume of these Notes probably will have to lay around for a while” (Vot nyneshnemu vtoromu tomu Ocherkov pridetsia, naverno, polezhat’ i polezhat’) (Solzhenitsyn, “Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov [Chast’ pervaia, 1974–1978],” 102). Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 5. Brown, “The Calf and the Oak: Dichtung and Wahrheit,” 109–12. Natal’ia Ivanova, “Sezon skandalov: Voinovich protiv Solzhenitsyna,” Znamia 11 (2002), 197–98. Andrei Nemzer, “Nakanune: Zavershena publikatsiia “Ocherkov izgnaniia” Aleksandra Solzhenitsyna,” Dnevnik chitatelia: Russkaia literatura v 2003 godu (Moscow: Vremia, 2004), 279–80.

Notes

175

66. Nemzer notes, it is “necessary to read the ‘sketches of exile’—especially its final part” (Nemzer, “Nakanune: Zavershena publikatsiia ‘Ocherkov izgnaniia’ Aleksandra Solzhenitsyna,” 280). 67. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Iz putevykh zapisei, 1994,” Mezhdu dvumia iubileiami, 1998–2003 (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2005), 30. 68. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 64. 69. See “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, ed., Daniel J. Mahoney and Edward E. Ericson Jr., (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2006). 70. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Zheliabugskie vyselki,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 505. 71. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Zheliabugskie vyselki,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 504. 72. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Zheliabugskie vyselki,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 511. 73. The BBC sponsored the trip and released its film as The Homecoming (1995). Iurii Prokof’ev organized the trip and recorded his film of it for the Solzhenitsyn family’s personal archive (Mikhail Zakharchuk, “Cherez vsiu Rossiiu proekhal vmeste s pisatelem Aleksandrom Solzhenitsynym kinooperator Iurii Prokof’ev,” Podmoskov’e 17 Sept. 1994, 4). 74. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov. Chast’ chetvertaia (1987–1994),” Novyi mir 11 (2003), 97. 75. Kaplan discusses the need for documentation in the context of tourism: “When tourists believe that they have found the ultimate ‘real’ . . . the need for proof is especially pressing” (61). Tourists, despite these encounters, go “home with the ‘old’ meanings confirmed” as a way of resolving “the crisis in determining reality” (60). Hannerz identifies tourists’ narratives as a similar broadening of “habitats of meaning” through firsttime experiences that also find pleasure “in reporting on what is familiar” (Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996), 26). 76. Solzhenitsyn, “Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov. Chast’ chetvertaia (1987–1994),” 92. 77. Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, 61.

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78. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1996), 182. 79. Vladimir Voinovich, Portret na fone mifa (Moscow: Eksmo, 2002), 62 and passim. 80. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rossiia v obvale (Moscow: Russkii put’, 1998), 7, 11. 81. While the “Binary Tales” have no precedent in Solzhenitsyn’s oeuvre, Russia in Collapse is “a continuation of the series” of works of historical and political analysis such as “Letter to Soviet Leaders” (1973), “Rebuilding Russia” (1990), and “The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century (1998) (Solzhenitsyn, Rossiia v obvale, backleaf page). 82. Elena D’iakova, “Zhizn’ s vlozhennoi tsel’iu,” Novaia gazeta 2008, http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/20/27.html. 83. Viacheslav Kuritsyn, “Solzhenitsyn posle vos’midesiati,” Russkii zhurnal, ed., Boris Kuz’minskii (Moscow: Rudomino, 1999), 148. 84. Zorin, “Vrach ili bol’?” 85. Solzhenitsyn draws a comparison between the smuta, or Time of Troubles (1605–1613) following the reign of Boris Godunov, with the 1917 revolution (in his view, the second Time of Troubles) and the era of perestroika. 86. Sergei Chuprinin, Russkaia literatura segodnia (Moscow: OLMA Press, 2003), 334–35. 87. Note, for example, his reasons for settling in the United States over Norway, a country that he had long admired but eventually considered too remote to support his work (“If you print something in the Scandinavian press, it might be just barely noticed in the world, or not at all”). 88. In his biography of Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Pearce writes that the postexilic prose poems were, according to Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna, “evidence that he was once more at peace with life. Some were directly inspired by events in their own garden, such as a storm that he had taken as allegorical inspiration for aspects of human behavior. Solzhenitsyn had finally come home, artistically as well as physically” (312). 89. Adrian Wanner, Russian Minimalism (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2003), 17. 90. Wanner identifies the binaries “new and old, body and soul, materialism and idealism” in the 1958–1960 “Miniatures” (149). 91. Michael Nicholson finds textual correspondences between the early “Miniatures” and the prose works “Matryona’s Home,”

Notes

92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103.

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The First Circle, and The Red Wheel (317–19). Wanner describes the early “Miniatures” as “a completely ‘monological’ genre . . . not meant to question or challenge the notions of poetry and narrative prose, but to mobilize their resources for his moral message” (149). Wanner, Russian Minimalism, 149. Nico Israel constructs a set of binaries (inside/outside, national/ extranational, center/periphery, West/East) to propose that the displaced writers Conrad, Adorno, and Rushdie align themselves with the “weaker” term, which in effect allows them to become “conceptual minus signs among a series of pluses or emblems of power and location” (Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora [Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000], 11). Solzhenitsyn’s overriding concerns with cultural degradation produce a different set of binaries, and more important, prevent him from accepting the marginal status of his terms, and drive him to argue for their dominance. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Petush’e pen’e,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 567. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Vse ravno,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 419. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Listvennitsa,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 555. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Likhoe zel’e,” “Kolokol’nia,” “Nochnye mysli,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 563, 559, 568. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Pozor,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 562. Steven Lee Meyers, “Toast of the TV in Russian Eyes: It’s Solzhenitsyn,” New York Times 9 Feb. 2006. James M. Decker approaches film adaptations of literary works as editions as a means of avoiding conventional analyses that present conflicting attitudes toward originality and fidelity to the text (“Literary Text, Cinematic ‘Edition’: Adaptation, Textual Authority, and the Filming of Tropic of Cancer,” College Literature 34.3 (2007). Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna, “Solzhenitsyna: Vazhno uvidet’ svoiu nedavniuiu istoriiu,” rec 26 Jan. 2006, BBC, Moscow, 2006. Revekka Frumkina, “Naivnyi zritel’,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 78 (2006). These include Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The citation is from Elena

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104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

Notes

Prokhorova, “Gleb Panfilov: The First Circle (V kruge pervom, 2006),” Kinokultura 15 (January 2007). Frumkina, “Naivnyi zritel’,” 28. See the official website for The First Circle http://www .vkrugepervom.ru/content.html?cid=8. “Idiotu ot Solzhenitsyna,”Argumenty i fakty, 2004 (15: 1224). Naum Leiderman, “Po printsipu antiskhemy,” Zvezda 8 (2001),193. In this the production was assisted by the direction of Gleb Panfilov, whose Soviet era films, particularly Theme (1979), treat the confrontation between a successful writer’s conventionality, another writer’s desire to emigrate to pursue artistic freedom, and a third figure whose cultural values derive from his immersion in national traditions. See Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 21–22. Gleb Panfilov, “Interv’iu,” Izvestiia 13 March 2006 http:// online.izvestia.ru/archive.pl?fl=a&id=235 Meyers, “Toast of the Television in Russian Eyes: It’s Solzhenitsyn.” Vera Maksimova, “Vozvrashchenie Solzhenitsyna k dialogu s liud’mi,” Radio Maiak, Moscow, 2006. Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, 852. After decades of heaping verbal abuse upon Solzhenitsyn, Eduard Limonov in March 2006 characterized Solzhenitsyn as “our great man” during his public lecture “Russian Literature and Russian History.” Admitting that he long subjected Solzhenitsyn to attacks, Limonov here acknowledges his appreciation for Solzhenitsyn’s work. Transcript of “Russian Literature and Russian History” available at http://www.polit.ru/lectures/ 2006/03/28/limonov.html.

Chapter 4 1. John Glad, Literature in Exile (Durham: Duke UP, 1990), 49. 2. Brodsky’s 1978 preface to a selection of poems published in the émigré journal Kontinent helped to establish Limonov’s name (Andrei Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian Writer Eduard Limonov, Studies in Slavic Languages and Literature [Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003], 153). Brodsky also helped him get his first collection of poems, Russkoe, published with Ardis Publishers in 1979

Notes

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

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and introduced Limonov to Alexander Liberman and Tatiana Iakovleva, the Condé Nast editorial director and his wife, whose apartment was a social hub for émigrés in the arts (Aleksandr Zholkovskii, “Bunt ‘malen’kogo cheloveka,” Ogonek 41 [1991], 17; Andrew Meier, “Putin’s Pariah,” New York Times 2 Mar. 2008). Rogachevskii notes that “it is quite possible that the proud Limonov could not forgive Brodskii precisely for this assistance” (Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian Writer Eduard Limonov, 135). In an interview published in 2005, Limonov stated “I had no need to envy [Brodsky’s] talent. I’ve always had my own . . . But without question I envied Brodsky’s fate . . . It is such an unusual story, so rarely had a foreign writer achieved such all-embracing, tremendous success. That success—I envied” (“Golos vozhdia,” Butyrskaiasortirovochnaia, ili smert’ v avtozeke [Moscow: Emergency Exit, 2005], 64–65). Eduard Limonov, “Thirteen Studies on Exile,” Literature in Exile, ed., John Glad (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1990), 53. Eduard Limonov, “Dialog s ‘normal’nym pisatelem,’” Ogonek 7.3264 (1990); John Glad, ed., Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1993), 259–60, 266. Eduard Limonov, Sviashchennye monstry (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2004), 6. Eduard Limonov, “Russkaia literatura i rossiiskaia istoriia.” March 23, 2006. Club Bilingua, Moscow. Transcript of lecture at http://www.polit.ru/lectures/2006/03/28/limonov.html. Aleksandr Shatalov, “Velikolepnyi mandarin,” Eto ia—Edichka, vol. 2 (Moscow: Glagol, 1990), 9. Limonov, “Golos vozhdia,” 64. Eduard Limonov, Anatomiia geroia (Smolensk: Rusich, 1998), 6. Epstein uses abduction as a trope to illustrate the violence inherent to the genre of biography and its association with dominant cultural practices in “(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical Subject,” Contesting the Subject, ed., William H. Epstein (West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1991), 217–36. Eduard Limonov, “Tri dlinnye pesni,” Russkoe (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 65–66. Limonov, “Tri dlinnye pesni,” Russkoe, 81. Limonov, “Tkaniam etoi ody shum,” Russkoe, 171–72. Limonov, “Tkaniam etoi ody shum,” Russkoe, 171–72.

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15. Eduard Limonov, “My—natsional’nyi geroi,” Apollon-77, ed., Mikhail Shemiakin (Paris: 1977), 60. 16. Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian Writer Eduard Limonov, 14. See Mikhail Shemiakin, ed., Apollon-77 (Paris: Les arts graphiques de Paris, 1977), 43–46 for Limonov’s statement about the members and doctrine of “Konkret.” 17. On the “‘Konkret’ hoax” see Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian Writer Eduard Limonov, 13–15. 18. Eduard Limonov, Limonov v fotografiiakh, s kommentariiami, napisannymi im samim! ego blizkie, ego roditeli, ego voiny, ego zheny (Moscow: Stompo, 1996), 27. 19. It appears in Limonov v fotografiiakh, s kommentariiami, napisannymi im samim! Ego blizkie, ego roditeli, ego voiny, ego zheny, 24; and Limonov, Anatomiia geroia, and can be accessed along with all the photographs collected in Anatomy of a Hero at http://www.nbp-info.ru/new/lib/lim_anatomy/pic.htm. 20. Eduard Limonov, It’s Me, Eddie. A Fictional Memoir, trans. S. L. Campbell (New York: Grove Press, 1983), 4, 218. 21. Eduard Limonov, Dnevnik neudachnika (New York: Index Publishers, 1982), 169. 22. Eduard Limonov, It’s Me, Eddie. A Fictional Memoir, trans. S. L. Campbell (New York: Grove Press, 1983), 233. 23. Eduard Limonov, “Eto ia—Edichka!” Komsomol’skaia pravda 3 (1990), 4. 24. Limonov still acknowledged his past work as a tailor during a televised “literary evening” held in Moscow in February 1992. While he reveled in the publicity offered to him by this public forum (“television is our friend, if we know how to use it”), at one point even encouraging the crowd to clap along as he sang a Soviet era march, he stated that he remained active as a writer, but no longer sewed his own clothes. 25. The same photograph appears in Anatomy of a Hero to the same end. 26. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Literature, Culture, Theory; 20 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 16. 27. Although It’s Me, Eddie is the first work to be published by Glagol publishers, its cover states that the novel is “Number 2” in a series. According to Shatalov, he adopted this strategy to avoid the risk of arrest and censorship in the early years of

Notes

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

181

glasnost’ by suggesting that issue “Number 1” was published without incident (Davrell Tien, “The Word According to Glagol,” Index on Censorship 22.10 [1993]: 35). The strategy is also reminiscent of Futurist publishing practice in its manipulation of publication dates to suggest earlier literary origins and thus, an established precedent. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 197. Shatalov, “Velikolepnyi mandarin,” 7 (footnote). The photograph appears in A. Mirchev, 15 interv’iu (New York: Izdatel’stvo im. A. Platonova, 1989) with the note: “The photograph is published at the request of E. Limonov.” In a separate interview, Limonov defends the photograph (“the book is truly the story of a Pole who makes a career in New York as a professional sadist”) and sarcastically responds to his critics: “of course, it [the photograph] has almost no relation to literature. The book was written at a desk after all” (Eduard Limonov, “Pablisiti-Foto,” Iskusstvo kino 7 [1992], 80). Eduard Limonov, Palach, vol. 16 (Moscow: Glagol, 1993), 4. Aleksandr Shatalov, “Prilozhenie,” Palach (Moscow: Glagol, 1993), 287. Aleksandr Donde, “Eduard, Edik i Edichka,” Palach, vol. 16 (Moscow: Glagol, 1993). See Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian Writer Eduard Limonov, 73–76, 77–118, for a survey of critical statements on Maiakovskii’s influence on Limonov and analysis of Limonov’s textual borrowings from Maiakovskii. Wiktor Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky (New York: The Orion Press, 1970), 54. Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, 68. Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, 68. Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, 499. Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, vol. 41 (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1991), 140. Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet,143–5. Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet, 145, 147. Limonov, Limonov v fotografiiakh, s kommentariiami, napisannymi im samim! Ego blizkie, ego roditeli, ego voiny, ego zheny, 12, 16, 29, 38, 42, 48, 57.

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43. Limonov identifies himself as the “editor of an explosive newspaper” in the inscription to a photograph published in Anatomy of a Hero. 44. Eduard Limonov, Inostranets v smutnoe vremia (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2007), 330. 45. Limonov, Inostranets v smutnoe vremia, 25–26. 46. I. Stomakhin, “Dzhinsy Limonova v Muzee Maiakovskogo,” Megapolis ekspress 48 (1993). 47. On the exhibit, see Viktoriia Shokhina, “Nice to Meet You!” Nezavisimaia gazeta 7 Dec. 1993. 48. Limonov, Anatomiia geroia, 4, 5. In turn, Limonov will later write that Anatomy of a Hero, the work in which Limonov makes these claims of prophecy, foresaw the death of his fourth wife Natal’ia Medvedeva (Eduard Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov [Moscow: Ul’tra Kul’tura, 2003], 317). 49. Limonov, Anatomiia geroia, 6, 8, 10. 50. Limonov, Sviashchennye monstry, 152. In a 2007 interview, Limonov reiterated the need for the writer to have endured precisely these trials—war, prison, and emigration—that is, his own experiences, to be a viable figure in today’s Russia. See Dmitrii Gordon, “Eduard Limonov: ‘Ia ne takoi, kak Edichka, da i on, estestvenno, ne podonok, prosto vozmushchennyi buntuiushchii . . .’” Bul’var Gordona 30 Oct. 2007. 51. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994), 211. 52. Limonov will also claim to have foreseen the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York (Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 110). Maintaining his military metaphors, he will state, “So many of the shots I fired in 1977 have been so close, that it is sometimes unpleasant to reread [Diary of a Loser] (Limonov, Anatomiia geroia, 6). 53. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 245. 54. Patricia Carden, “Limonov’s Coming Out,” The Third Wave: Russian Literature in Emigration, ed. Olga Matich and Michael Heim (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), 221. 55. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 257. See, for example, “Eduard Limonov: ‘Ia ne takoi, kak Edichka, da i on, estestvenno, ne podonok, prosto vozmushchennyi buntuiushchii . . .’” in which twice his interviewer mentions It’s Me, Eddie, and both times Limonov shifts the topic of discussion to his prison writings.

Notes

183

56. Eduard Limonov, “The Absolute Beginner ili pravdivaia istoriia sochineniia “Eto ia—Edichka,” Eto ia—Edichka, vol. 2 (Moscow: Glagol, 1990), 323. 57. Epstein, “(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical Subject,” 219. Epstein writes that “traditional biographical narrative habitually reenacts the scene of an abduction because, in order to discursively repair the biologically irreparable fracture (the alterity, the otherness, the discontinuity) between any two human individuals (reified generically as biographer and biographical subject), biography recesses the broken parts and causes the gaping of a wound” (218). 58. Eduard Limonov, “The Absolute Beginner ili pravdivaia istoriia sochineniia “Eto ia—Edichka,” Eto ia—Edichka, vol. 2 (Moscow: Glagol, 1990), 323. 59. Gordon, “Eduard Limonov: ‘Ia ne takoi, kak Edichka.’” 60. Limonov, It’s Me, Eddie. A Fictional Memoir, 25. 61. Limonov, It’s Me, Eddie. A Fictional Memoir, 237. 62. Limonov, It’s Me, Eddie. A Fictional Memoir, 251. 63. Limonov, It’s Me, Eddie. A Fictional Memoir, 72. 64. Limonov, Inostranets v smutnoe vremia, 5, 189. 65. Limonov will later note that he “powdered up the protagonist under the name ‘Indiana,’ but “later removed the powder from his face and laid myself bare,” (Moia politicheskaia biografiia (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2002), 18. 66. Limonov, Inostranets v smutnoe vremia, 278. 67. Epstein, “(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical Subject,” 219. 68. Limonov, Inostranets v smutnoe vremia, 329. 69. Limonov, Anatomiia geroia, 197. 70. Limonov, Anatomiia geroia, 433. 71. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 432. 72. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 325. 73. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 324. 74. Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian Writer Eduard Limonov, 31. See also 30–32. 75. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 329. 76. See Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian Writer Eduard Limonov, 135–38. 77. Glad, Literature in Exile, 111. 78. Eduard Limonov, Kniga mertvykh (St. Petersburg: Limbus Press, 2001), 148.

184

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79. Limonov, Kniga mertvykh, 161. 80. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 265. 81. Eduard Limonov, “Pridia k vlasti, lider Natsional-Bol’shevikov Limonov vyshlet iz Rossii pisatelia Limonova,” Knizhnoe obozrenie 10 May 1994, 5; Iaroslav Mogutin, “Amoral’nyi moralist,” 30 interv’iu (St. Petersburg: Limbus Press, 2001), 321. 82. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 270. 83. Laurence A. Rickels, Aberrations of Mourning (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988), 357. 84. Epstein, “(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical Subject,” 222. 85. Epstein, “(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical Subject,” 223–4. 86. Eduard Limonov, 316, Punkt “B” (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), 124, 173–76, 271–72. 87. Robert Porter, Russia’s Alternative Prose (Oxford/Providence: Berg, 1994), 170. On Limonov and doubles, see Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian Writer Eduard Limonov. 91–118. Rogachevskii describes Limonov’s short story “The Double” as the “disclosure of Limonov’s basic creative principles” (94). One reviewer cites typological similarities between Limonov’s nom de plume (limon = lemon) and the name of his protagonist (luk = onion) as further support for an autobiographical reading (Viktor Obukhov, “Sovremennaia rossiiskaia antiutopiia,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 3.269 [1998], 98). 88. Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991), 143; quoted in M. Keith Booker, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism, Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, vol. 58 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994), 19. 89. Aleksandr Shatalov, “Krushenie mifov,” Ischeznovenie varvarov (Moscow: Glagol, 1992), 5–6. 90. Eduard Limonov, “Distsiplinarnyi sanatorii,” Ischeznovenie varvarov, ed. Aleksandr Shatalov (Moscow: Glagol, 1992), 201, 204, 205. 91. Limonov dismisses all efforts to record the horror of the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges as contributing to a “cult of victims.” In “Disciplinary sanatorium” and in interviews Limonov has unapologetically described the era of Stalin and Hitler as a “great epoch.” See Mirchev, 15 interv’iu, 99. 92. On the influence of the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” on Zamiatin and Orwell, see Krishan Kumar, Utopia and

Notes

93.

94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

185

Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1987). Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1990), 257. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 258–9. Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, 122–3. Limonov, 316, Punkt “B,” 274. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 42. Compare with Limonov’s statement: “In short, the well-fed, cosy and conciliatory atmosphere the Western civilization has been striving for has killed the arts” (Eduard Limonov, “Edichka the Samurai,” Moscow News November 8 1992, 16). Eduard Limonov, 316, punkt “B,” (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), 272, 273. Eduard Limonov, “Chuzhoi pisatel’,” Eduard Limonov: Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), 12. Limonov, “Chuzhoi pisatel’,” 12. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 245. Eduard Limonov, “V spiskakh ne znachitsia,” Moskovskaia pravda, 3, 23 Oct. 1993. Other examples of this genre are collected in Eduard Limonov, “Ischeznovenie varvarov,” Ischeznovenie varvarov (Moscow: Zhurnal “Glagol,” 1992). Eduard Limonov, “Nenavist’ k Internetu,” Grani.ru 2005. Gordon, “Eduard Limonov: ‘Ia ne takoi, kak Edichka, da i on, estestvenno, ne podonok, prosto vozmushchennyi buntuiushchii . . .’” Eduard Limonov, “Zavist’ i psikhopatiia,” Grani.ru 17 June 2008. Eduard Limonov, Kniga vody (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2002), 58. John J. Su, Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 5. Eduard Limonov, Ubiistvo chasovogo (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2002), 34–35. Limonov, Sviashchennye monstry, 316. In his 2008 interview with the New York Times Magazine, Limonov states of his years in New York, “It was a great time, a legendary time. I have now a certain nostalgia . . . It’s exciting, and dangerous of course, what we’re doing now”—a reference to his National-Bolshevik Party’s activities—“but to have lived in the 70s in New York, it means a lot. Still.” See Meier, “Putin’s Pariah,” 37.

186

Notes

C hapter 5 1. Susan Sontag, “Joseph Brodsky,” Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 332–33. 2. Amy K. Kaminsky, After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999), 128. 3. Kaminsky, After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora, 128. 4. Aleksandr Shchuplov, “Borshch dolzhny varit’ slugi.” Rossiiskaia gazeta 3868 (8 Sept. 2005). 5. On Voltairians and Voltairiennes, see Vladimir Kirsanov’s review at http://az.gay.ru/books/fiction/aksenov.html and Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, “Nostalgic Imagining in Post-Soviet Narratives,” Love-sickness, Melancholy and Nostalgia, (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). 6. Serguei Oushakine discusses the purely formal character of post-Soviet nostalgia for the imperial era in, “‘We’re nostalgic but we’re not crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia,” The Russian Review: 66 (July 2007), 451–82. 7. Maria Sergeeva, a rising star in the Young Guard known for her incendiary blog that identifies “enemies of the nation” (including Limonov), holds ambitions of becoming “President, or at least Prime Minister” (Will Stewart, “Putin’s Poster Girl: PinUp Politician Who Hates the West, but Loves Thatcher,” Daily Mail [15 March 2009]). 8. On the renaming, see Luke Harding, “Signs of Dispute on Moscow’s Solzhenitsyn Street,” The Guardian (12 December 2008). On Dzerzhinskii’s statue, see Paul Goble, “Duma Deputies Applaud Proposal to Restore Dzerzhinsky Statue to Lubyanka Square,” Georgian Daily (22 September 2008). http:// georgiandaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&task =view&id=7701&Itemid=67. 9. John J. Su, Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 4. 10. John J. Su, Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 4. 11. Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 41 (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1991), and Lynne Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics and the Question of Difference (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). 12. Vitaly Chernetsky, Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal: McGillQueen’s UP, 2007), 267.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 15, 59–60, 157n14, 177n93 agency, 18, 20, 22, 23, 44, 50, 51, 53, 70–71, 72, 77, 78, 87, 90, 141, 142, 147–48, 149, 153, 168n4, 168n6 Aksyonov, Vassily Around the Clock Non-Stop (Kruglye sutki non-stop), 35, 36, 41, 42, 43, 44, 54, 160n18, 161n36 Burn, The (Ozhog), 34, 41–44, 52, 161nn37–38, 165n87 Caesarean Illumination (Kesarevo svechenie), 21, 58, 61–63, 65, 158n2, 163n60, 165n82, 166n92 Colleagues, The (Kollegi), 38, 39, 44 “Fundamental Displacement” (“Kapital’noe peremeshchenie”), 46–47 Generations of Winter, 21, 52, 158n2, 164n66 (see also A Moscow Saga; The Winter’s Hero) “Halfway to the Moon” (“Na polputi k lune”), 32–33, 36, 159n9, 161n32 In Search of Melancholy Baby (V poiskakh grustnogo bebi), 20, 29, 35, 36, 38, 41, 44–46, 49, 50, 54, 161n40, 162n41, 162n42, 162n43

Island of Crimea, The (Ostrov Krym), 27, 54 “Japanese Jottings” (“Iaponskie zametki”), 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 160n23, 161n24 Journey, The (Puteshestvie), film, 32 “Little Whale, Varnisher of Reality” (“Malen’kii kit, lakirovshchik deistvitel’nosti”), 33, 160n13 “Lunches of 1943” (“Zavtraki sorok tret’ego goda”), 33 “Lungs and Gills,” 38, 46–47, 171n25, 171n26 Moscow Saga, A (Moskovskaia saga), 21, 31, 52, 53–54, 55, 56, 58, 67, 158n2, 164n65, 164nn67–68; television adaptation, 4, 21, 31, 52, 54, 55–56, 164nn67–68 (see also Teleserial) Moskva-kva-kva, 22, 27–28, 66–67, 68, 159n2, 166n96, 167n99 Negative of a Positive Hero (Negativ polozhitel’nogo geroia), 56–57, 165n73 New Sweet Style, The (Novyi sladostnyi stil’), 21, 46, 48, 58–59, 60–61, 62, 65, 158n2, 162n49, 165nn80– 81, 166n92

202

Index

Aksyonov, Vassily (continued) “Not Quite a Sentimental Journey,” 51, 163nn58–59 Rare Earths (Redkie zemli), 48, 159n2 To Israel and Back (V Izrail’ i obratno) (anthology), 56, 57–58 “A Starry Ticket” (“Zvezdnyi billet”), 32 “Under the Sky of Sultry Argentina” (“Pod nebom znoinoi Argenitiny”), 35, 36, 38, 39, 41 Voltairians and Voltairiennes (Vol’ter’ianki i Vol’ter’iantsy), 149, 159n2, 159n5 Winter’s Hero, The, 21, 52, 158n2 Aleshkovskii, Iuz, 6 Ankersmit, F. R., 170n26, 172nn46–48, 172n53 Appadurai, Arjun, 51, 96, 163n57, 176n78 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 48, 162n51 “autobiographical turn,” 153 autobiographism, 20 in Aksyonov, 31, 161n37 in Limonov, 10, 11, 23, 110, 113, 117, 118, 119, 126, 127, 129, 135, 136, 137, 142 in Solzhenitsyn, 70, 82, 90, 94, 100, 168n9, 172n46, 174n61 Avedon, Richard, 144 Avvakum, Archpriest, 110 Bakunin, Mikhail, 110, 145 Balina, Marina, 35, 36, 160nn14– 15, 160n17, 160nn20–21 Bamlag (Baikal-Amur railway camp), 172n49 Basinskii, Pavel, 165n84 Belyi, Nikolai, 172n49

Bernstein, Richard, 172n51 biography, 9, 14, 24, 32, 71, 72, 111, 112, 127, 134–35, 140, 141, 145, 152, 153, 168n6, 179n10, 183n57. See also Limonov, Eduard; Les monstres sacres Boltianskaia, Natella, 165n83, 166n94 Booker, Keith, 184n88 Bourdieu, Pierre, 125, 182n51 Boym, Svetlana, 122, 153, 191nn39–41, 186n11 Brennan, Timothy, 16, 158n23, 166n90 Brodsky, Joseph, 6, 109, 112, 127, 128, 132, 133, 134, 135, 142, 147, 178n2, 179n2 “Brodsky” (as figured in Limonov’s In Captivity among the Dead), 132, 133, 134, 141, 152 Brown, Edward J., 174n61, 174n63 Capote, Truman, 144 Carden, Patricia, 182n54 Chekalov, P. K., 172n50 Chernetsky, Vitaly, 153, 186n12 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 110, 145 Chow, Rey, 3, 4, 53, 155nn2–3, 164n63 Chuprinin, Sergei, 176n86 Cortázar, Julio, 46, 47, 51, 162nn46–47 cosmopolitanism, 10, 16, 21, 22, 27, 29, 30, 31, 34, 38, 48, 52, 63, 64, 65–66, 144, 149, 163n54 Curtis, James M., 168n6, 1700n30 Dali, Salvador, 126, 144 Decker, James M., 177n100 deterritorialization, post-Soviet, 56, 97

Index diaspora, 15, 16, 17, 153 as critical modality, 15, 16, 17, 18, 153 diasporic writing, 12, 15, 17, 30, 157n19 displacement, 6, 12, 15, 16, 29, 31, 37, 40, 41, 46, 48, 51, 56, 73, 89, 110, 147 condensation and, 84, 172n46 discursive, 7, 12, 20, 31, 36, 38, 39, 42, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 56, 60, 67, 89, 102, 177n93 “rhetoric of” (see Israel, Nico), 157n14, 167n15 temporal, 116 Dol’berg, Aleksandr, 174n60 Donoso, José, 148, 149 Dos Passos, John, 80, 170n30 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 53, 55, 99, 105, 110, 138 Dovlatov, Sergei, 6 Dvadtsat’ dva, 157n10 Dzerzhinskii, Felix, 152, 186n8 Echo of Moscow (Ekho Moskvy), 166n92 Efimov, Igor’, 6 Ekho, 157n10 emplacement, 8, 23, 24–25, 28, 61, 74, 89, 108, 111, 112, 132, 141, 142, 167n15 Epstein, William H., 112, 127, 129, 134, 159n6, 168n6, 179n10, 183n57, 183n67, 184nn84–85 Ericson, Edward E., 168n5, 169n21, 171n34 Erofeyev, Victor, 32, 159n8 Evola, Julius, 130 exile and alienation, 162n54 and diaspora, 15, 16 end of, 28 exilic historiography, 11, 22, 69, 73, 77, 107

203

exilic writing, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 24, 25, 28, 70, 71, 113, 139, 157n15 and modernism, 4 and the novel, 151 physical, 19 and preexilic writing, 10, 11, 77 rhetorical constructions of, 2, 3, 14, 19, 24, 28, 36, 63, 71 and rhetorical movement toward return, 2, 7, 9, 10, 19, 24, 28, 33, 48, 67, 71, 91, 107, 157 Finn, Peter, 164n70 Fish, Stanley, 81, 168n6 Foucault, Michel, 71 Frumkina, Revekka, 177n102, 178n104 Glad, John, 155nn4–5, 156nn8–9, 164n64, 178n1, 179n4, 183n77 Gladilin, Anatoly, 6, 35, 159n7, 160n16 Gorbanevskaia, Natal’ia, 6 Gordon, Dmitrii, 182n50, 183n59, 185n104 Grani, 7, 157n10 Hannerz, Ulf, 175n75 home, 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 31, 54, 56, 58, 59–60, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70, 73, 88, 91, 103, 107, 111, 147, 148, 149, 157n19. See also homecoming homecoming, 8, 21, 51, 58, 59, 61, 65, 67, 148. See also home; Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Huffer, Lynne, 153, 186n11 Hutcheon, Linda, 170n29 Iser, Wolfgang, 75, 169n13 Israel, Nico, 15, 16, 59–60, 157nn14– 15, 165nn78–79, 177n93 Ivanova, Natalia, 164n67, 174n64

204

Index

Johnson, D. B., 160n18, 160n22 Kaminsky, Amy K., 11, 12, 15, 148, 157nn17–19, 186nn2–3 Kaplan, Caren, 16, 29, 40, 41, 57, 161nn33–34, 165nn74–75, 175n68, 175n75, 175n77 Karadzic, Radovan, 122 Kasack, Wolfgang, 156n7 Kashkarov, Iurii, 6 Kedrov, Konstantin, 174n58 Kenzheev, Bakhit, 6 Kolerov, Modest, 158n27 Kondratov, Stanislav, 173n57 Kontinent, 6, 7 Korolev, Sergei, 173n58 Korzhavin, Naum, 6 Kovcheg, 119, 157n10 Krokodil, 50, 52, 163n55 Krushchev, Nikita, 34, 45 Krushcheva, Nina, 167n1 Kumar, Krishnan, 184n92, 185n95 Kuritsyn, Viacheslav, 98, 176n83 Kustanovich, Konstantin, 33, 159– 60nn10–12, 160n18, 161n35, 161n37, 166n87 Lanin, Borin, 156n7 Lawton, Anna, 178n108 Leiderman, Naum, 178n107 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 122 Limonka, 123, 132, 151 Limonov, Eduard 316, Point “B” (316, Punkt “B”), 23, 126, 135–36, 137, 138–40, 184n86, 185n96, 185n98 Anatomy of a Hero (Anatomiia geroia), 122, 124, 130, 179n9, 180n19, 180n25, 182n43, 182nn48–49, 182n52, 183n69, 183n70 Book of the Dead, The (Kniga mertvykh), 133, 134, 183n78, 184n79, 185n106 Book of Water, The (Kniga vody), 185n106

Diary of a Loser (Dnevnik neudachnika), 117, 124, 126, 180n21, 182n52 “Disciplinary Sanatorium” (“Distsiplinarnyi sanatorii”), 137, 139, 182n48, 182n52, 182n43, 184n91 Foreigner in the Time of Troubles, A (Inostranets v smutnoe vremia), 123, 129, 182nn44–45, 183n64, 183n66, 183n68 His Butler’s Story (Istoriia ego uslugi), 117, 126, 183nn71–73 In Captivity among the Dead (V plenu u mertvetsov), 128, 132, 133, 183n75, 184n80, 184n82, 185n101 It’s Me, Eddie (Eto ia—Edichka), 10, 20, 23, 111, 116–17, 118, 119, 120 Les monstres sacres (Sviashchennye monstry), 134, 144–45, 179n5, 182n50, 185n109 Limonov in Photographs, with Commentary Written by Limonov Himself! (Limonov v fotografiiakh s kommentariiami, napisannymi im samim!), 23, 118, 121, 122–23, 180n19 (see also photography) Limonov versus Putin (Limonov protiv Putina), 23 Limonov versus Zhirinovskii (Limonov protiv Zhirinovskogo), 142 Memoirs of a Russian Punk (Podrostok Savenko), 135 My Political Biography (Moia politicheskaia biografiia), 23, 141, 144 “Russian Literature and Russian History” (“Russkaia literatura i rossiiskaia istoriia”), 141, 178n113, 179n6

Index Russkoe, 113, 178n2, 179nn11– 14; film by Aleksandr Veledinskii, 135 Torturer, The (Palach), 120, 126, 136, 139, 181nn31–32 “We Are the National Hero” (“My—natsional’nyi geroi”), 115–16, 117, 118, 124, 126; Limonov and “Coat of the National Hero,” 116, 117, 121, 145 Young Scoundrel, The (Molodoi negodiai), 135 Lipkin, Semen, 173n57 Lisnianskaia, Inna, 173n57 Liubimov, Iurii, 155n4 MacFadyen, David, 55, 105, 164n69 Maiakovskii, Vladimir, 121–22, 123–24, 125, 126, 134, 181n34 Maksimov, Vladimir, 6 Mamleev, Iurii, 6 Medvedev, Dmitrii, 151 Mozhaev, Boris, 173n57 Nabokov, Vladimir, 47 Naficy, Hamid, 157n11 National Bolshevik Party, 23, 109, 123, 124, 126, 132, 134, 135, 141, 145, 150, 185n110 Nekrasov, Viktor, 6 Nemzer, Andrei, 166n92, 174n65, 175n66 Nicholson, Michael, 167n1, 169n18, 170n25, 176n91 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 139, 185n97 Nivat, Georges, 156n8, 167n2, 168n10, 174n59 nostalgia, 2, 4, 7, 8, 11, 16, 17, 18, 24, 25, 28, 52, 55, 56, 65, 66, 67, 68, 103, 113, 127, 141, 143–44, 149–50, 151, 152, 153, 158n29, 166n97, 185n110, 186n6 Novikov, Nikolai, 110 Novyi zhurnal, 153n10

205

Nussbaum, Martha, 75, 76, 88, 169nn14–15 Ong, Aihwa, 29, 53, 62, 164n61, 165n86 online publishing, 4, 142 Panfilov, Gleb, 104, 106, 178nn108–9 Pearce, Joseph, 171n39, 173n57, 176n88 perestroika, 6, 27, 50, 52, 54, 89, 91, 120, 163n57, 176n85 photography, 10, 116–18, 119, 130, 121–23, 124, 131, 134, 180n19, 181n30, 182n43. See also under Limonov in Photographs Pieters, Jürgen, 173n55 Pihlainen, Kalle, 86, 172n53 Pipes, Richard, 174n60 Porter, Robert, 184n87 postexile, 8, 11, 12, 148, 157n19 Prokhorova, Elena, 177n103 Putin, Vladimir, 20, 150, 158n27. See also under Limonov versus Putin Radishchev, Aleksandr, 110 Ramones, The, 144 Remnick, David, 173n58 return end of, 152 from exile, 7, 8, 19, 24, 25, 157 and the novel, 67, 129 and postmodernism, 2 rhetorical constructions of, 2, 7, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 24, 25, 30, 33, 41, 58, 59, 61, 68, 71, 91, 103 writing of, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 30, 31, 33, 68, 71, 99, 153, 157n19 Rickels, Laurence A., 134, 184n83 Robbins, Bruce, 30, 159n5, 166n95

206

Index

Rogachevskii, Andrei, 131, 178– 79n2, 180nn16–17, 181n34, 183n74, 183n76, 184n87 Ross, Andrew, 184n88 Rushdie, Salman, 15, 157n14, 177n93 Samakhova, Irina, 174n58 samizdat, 40, 44, 45, 104, 113 Saraskina, Liudmila, 98, 173n57 Scammell, Michael, 79, 170n23, 170n25, 174n59, 178n112 Seidel, Michael, 10, 157n16, 158n26, 165n72 self-censorship, 113, 172n46 self-orientalization, 24, 53, 97 Shatalov, Aleksandr, 119, 120, 136, 137, 179n7, 180n27, 181n29, 181n32, 184n89 Shaw, David Gary, 167n3, 168n4 Shchuplov, Aleksandr, 186n4 Shemiakin, Mikhail, 116 Shevelev, Igor’, 158n1, 163n60, 165n71, 165n84, 167n99 Shohat, Ella, 15, 158n22 Shokhina, Viktoriia, 182n47 Simpson, David, 75, 169n14 Siniavskii, Andrei, 6, 24 Sintaksis, 6 Slavkin, Viktor, 160n19 Sokolov, Sasha, 6 Sokurov, Aleksandr, 167n1, 169n12 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr “Apricot Jam” (“Abrikosovoe varen’e”), 93–94 “At the Fractures” (“Na izlomakh”), 94 August 1914, 78–79, 82, 88, 168n9, 170n32, 171n34, 171nn36–37, 172n46 “The Binary Tales” (“Dvuchastnye rasskazy”), 10, 22, 74, 89, 92–94, 97–98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 169n10, 176n81. See also individual stories

“Ego,” 92–93 First Circle, The (V kruge pervom), 4, 77, 88, 104, 177n91; television adaptation, 21, 22, 76, 89, 99, 103–4, 105, 107, 178n105 (see also Teleserial) Gulag Archipelago, The (Arkhipelag Gulag), 69, 75, 76, 88 Homecoming, The, 175n73 Invisible Allies, 90 “It Makes No Difference” (“Vse ravno”), 94, 95, 102 Little Grain Fell between Two Millstones, The (Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov), 20, 89–91, 92, 99, 101, 107, 168n9, 170n24, 174n61 March 1917, 86 “Meetings with Solzhenitsyn” (television show), 173n57 “The Miniatures” (“Krokhotki”): from 1958–1960, 22, 74, 98, 100, 176n90, 176n91; from 1996–1999, 22, 74, 89, 97, 98, 99–100, 101–3, 105, 168n10 “Nasten’ka,” 93 Oak and the Calf, The (Bodalsia telenok s dubom), 90–91, 158n25, 174n59, 174n61 October 1916, 76, 84, 85 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha), 69, 76 “On the Extremes” (“Na kraiakh”), 92, 93 Red Wheel, The (Krasnoe koleso), 22, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76–77, 78–79, 80–88, 93, 94, 95, 97, 167n1, 168n9, 170n30, 172n50, 172n53, 177n91

Index “Reflections on the February Revolution,” 86 Russia in Collapse (Rossiia v obvale), 97–98, 176n81 Two Hundred Years Together (Dvesti let vmeste), 97 “The Young Generation” (“Molodniak”), 93 “Zheliabug Settlements” (“Zheliabugskie Vyselki”), 94, 95–96, 101, 175nn70–72 Solzhenitsyna, Natal’ia, 86, 104, 105, 172n52, 176n88, 177n101 Sontag, Susan, 147, 186n1 Stomakhin, I., 182n46 Strauss, Claude Lévi, 65–66 Strelets, 7 Su, John J., 143, 152, 158n29, 185n107, 186nn9–10 Tarsis, Valery, 155n4 Teleserial. See television adapations of literary works television adaptations of literary works (teleserial), 4, 10, 11, 21, 22, 31, 53, 54, 55, 68, 76, 89, 99, 103–5, 164n70. See also Aksyonov, Vassily; Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Thomas, D. M., 167n1, 170n25, 170n29, 172n46, 173n57 Tien, Davrell, 181n27 Toker, Leona, 77–78, 169nn19–20 Tolstoy, Leo, 53, 54, 80, 164n67, 170n30, 174n58 translation, 3, 4, 21, 40, 50, 59, 62, 116, 166n92, 170n30; cultural, 55 transnationality, 2, 3, 8, 10, 13, 29, 54, 63, 65, 107, 144 travel, 6, 10, 16, 27, 29–30, 31, 32, 33, 34–36, 37–38, 39,

207

41–42, 44–45, 50, 56–58, 63, 72, 74, 88–89, 92, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 103, 107, 110, 118, 125, 129, 148, 149, 159n10, 160n14 Tret’ia volna, 153n10 Trifonov, Iurii, 42, 43 Tsvetkov, Aleksei, 6 Tsvetkova, Vera, 165n85 Tvardovsky, Aleksandr, 90 Ulitskaia, Liudmila, 107, 108, 174n60 Urmanov, A. V., 171n38 Vail’, Peter and Aleksandr Genis, 156n7, 159n4 Voinovich, Vladimir, 6, 97, 166n97, 176n79 Vremia i my, 157n10 Wachtel, Andrew Baruch, 11–12, 13–14, 16, 158nn20–21, 158n28, 168n7, 170n30, 171n34 Walker, Cheryl, 159n6 Wanner, Adrian, 176nn89–90, 177nn91–92 Warhol, Andy, 144 White, Hayden, 84, 173n54 Yeltsin, Boris, 59, 96, 163n57 Yurchak, Alexei, 17, 155n1, 158n24, 174n62 Zamiatin, Evgenii, 110, 138 Zhirinovskii, Vladimir, 122 Zholkovskii, Aleksandr, 179n3 Zinik, Zinovy, 6, 157n12 Zorin, Andrei, 98, 173n57, 176n84 Zverev, Aleksei, 164n68

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