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The Hero in the Madhouse: The Post-Soviet Novel Confronts the Soviet Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Angela Brintlinger
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Abstract

Using Viktor Pelevin's Chapaev and Pustota and Vladimir Makanin's Underground or a Hero of Our Time, Angela Brintlinger explores the way contemporary fiction portrays the post-Soviet intelligentsia and its search for identity in postmodern Russia. These authors juxtapose contemporary heroes with literary and historical heroes of the Russian and Soviet past in a struggle to come to terms with Soviet experience and the intelligentsia's relationship to Russian literature. Both Pelevin and Makanin use the chronotope of the madhouse to examine the idea of the hero in Russian literature and history. In making such deliberate use of the Russian past, from its literary heroes to the insidious institution of the mental asylum, both authors force their post-Soviet readers to confront die fact that the flow of history is as much about continuities as it is about change.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , Spring 2004 , pp. 43 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2004

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References

This article has benefited from the advice of many people. In particular, I would like to thank audiences at Northwestern University, Bryn Mawr College, Columbia University, and Rice University as well as the anonymous Slavic Reviewreaders, Sara Dickinson, David Hoffmann, Elizabeth Kaplan, Galya Rylkova, Ilya Vinitsky, Andrew Wachtel, Lisa Wakamiya, and, of course, Steven Conn.

1. Pelevin was honored with the “Small Booker” for his debut collection of stories, The Blue Lantern, while Makanin won the main prize for his short novel Baize-Covered Table with Decanter.

2. Deming Brown, in his assessment of Makanin ten years ago, pointed out that Makanin had been identified with a number of literary trends—the “forty-year-olds,” “city prose,” and the “Moscow school“—and had been considered both an heir to the “confessional prose” of the 1960s and a kinsman of ‘Village prose.” See Brown, , The Last Years of Soviet Russian Literature: Prose Fiction 1975-1991(Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 102 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Viktor Pelevin's Chapaev i Pustotawas first published in Znamia, 1996, nos. 4 - 5, and as a book by Vagrius (Moscow, 1999). Andrew, Bromfield'stranslation was published as The Clay Machine-Gun(London, 1999)Google Scholarand as Buddha's Little Finger(New York, 2000). I quote from Bromfield's 2000 edition. Vladimir Makanin's Andegraund, Hi geroi nashego vremeniwas published in Znamia, 1998, nos. 1-4, and also by Vagrius (Moscow, 1999). Translations of Makanin are my own, from the Vagrius edition.

4. In my discussion, I will call the hero “Pustota,” his surname in Russian. Andrew Bromfield solves the punning problem in English by making him “Pyotr Voyd.“

5. See Alexander Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses: Viktor Pelevin in the Context of Post-Soviet Literature,” in Mikhail, Epstein, Alexander, Genis, and Slobodanka, Vladiv-Glover, eds., Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives in Post-Soviet Culture(New York, 1999), 216 Google Scholar.

6. Laura Engelstein, “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” American Historical Review (April 1993): 348.

7. Ibid., 353.

8. See Michel, Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception(1963; reprint, New York, 1994)Google Scholar.

9. Rawlinson, Mary C., “Foucault's Strategy: Knowledge, Power, and the Specificity of Truth,“ Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 12(1987): 371 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 My thanks to Ilya Vinitsky for this insight.

11 For a detailed description of the history of Soviet theories of schizophrenia, see Martin A., Miller, “The Theory and Practice of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union,” Psychiatry 48(February 1985): 16 Google Scholar.

12 Teresa, Smithwith Thomas, Oleszczuk, No Asylum: State Psychiatric Repression in the Former USSR(New York, 1996), 4-5 Google Scholar.

13 See Cornelia, Mee, Internment of Soviet Dissenters in Mental Hospitals(Cambridge, Eng., 1971), 6-10 Google Scholar, on the famous case of Major-General Petr Grigorenko. See also Smith with Oleszczuk, No Asylum, 7.

14 Smith with Oleszczuk, No Asylum, 1, quoting V. M., Morozovfrom Andre, Koppers, A Biographical Dictionary on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry in the USSR(Amsterdam, 1990), 36 Google Scholar. Smith also suggests tliat post-Soviet society will continue to turn to psychiatrists for aid with problems of state, unless new standards of professional conduct are developed to counter habitual connections between medicine and politics. Smith with Oleszczuk, No Asylum, 199.

15 Roy and Zhores, Medvedev, A Question of Madness(London, 1971), 200 Google Scholar. Incidentally, the public relations campaign did not work, and the World Psychiatric Association censured the Soviet psychiatric organization for their use of repressive psychiatric practices. Indeed, the Soviet professional society of psychiatrists was only provisionally readmitted to the World Psychiatric Association in 1989. See Smith with Oleszczuk, No Asylum, 28.

16 Pravda, 24 May 1959, cited in Cornelia Mee, Internment of Soviet Dissenters, 1. There is some evidence that the diagnosis “creeping schizophrenia” was invented in response to Khrushchev's idea that only a madman could be critical of the socialist system. See George Windholz, “Soviet Psychiatrists under Stalinist Duress: The Design for a ‘New Soviet Psychiatry' and Its Demise,” History of Psychiatry10 (1999): 344.

17. The details of Stoppard's play, down to the address of the special psychiatric hospital in Leningrad in which his hero is housed, are based on the experience of dissident Vladimir Bukovskii, related in his memoirs, / vozvrashchaetsia veter …(New York, 1978, 1979). See Tom, Stoppard, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor and Professional Foul(New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

18 Indeed, in the United States political theater keeps these concerns relevant as well. Stoppard's play, with Andre Previn's original score, was revived in November 2002 by the Wilma Theater and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

19 Seth Graham, “The Chukchi in Russo-Soviet Popular Culture and Mass Media“ (paper, OSU-Pitt Graduate Colloquium, May 2001). Near the end of Pelevin's novel the patients tell each other Chapaev jokes—and Pustota “corrects” them, explaining the real event behind each anecdote.

20 For a discussion of the search for a “usable past” in these years, see Angela, Brintlinger, Writinga Usable Past: Russian Literary Culture, 1917-1937(Evanston, 2000)Google Scholar. The classic study of the socialist realist novel and its hero remains Katerina, Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual,3d ed. (Bloomington, 2000)Google Scholar.

21 For further analysis of the Buddhist logic inherent in the tide, see Aleksandr, Zakurenko, “Iskomaia pustota,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 3, no. 269(1998): 93-94 Google Scholar.

22 Citing Lucian's “Dialogues” (“Independence, every inch of him: he cares for no one. ‘Tis Menippus!“), Mikhail Bakhtin writes: “Let us stress in this Lucianic image of the laughing Menippus die relation of laughter to the underworld and to death, to the freedom of spirit, and to thefreedom of speech.” Bakhtin, , Rabelais and His World,trans. Helene, Iswolsky(Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 70 Google Scholar. In Pelevin and Makanin, the “underworld“ receives new metaphoric realization, but die principle of the relationship between independence, death, and freedom remains the same.

23 In fact, using a psychiatric diagnosis as a political instrument has a much longer history in Russia, dadng back to eighteenth-century rationalist philosophy as absorbed by Russian rulers from Peter the Great to Catherine the Great. See Ilya Vinitsky, “A Cheerful Empress and Her Gloomy Critics” (unpublished paper).

24 Makanin, Andegraund, Hi geroi nashego vremeni, 343.

25 Pelevin, Buddha's Little Finger, 105.

26 For Russian criticism on Pelevin and this novel, see Pavel, Basinskii, “Iz zhizni otechestvennykh kaktusov,” Literaturnaia gazeta 22, no. 5604 (29 May 1996): 4 Google Scholar; Dmitrii Bykov, “Pobeg v Mongoliiu,” Literaturnaia gazeta22, no. 5604 (29 May 1996): 4; Andrei Nemzer, “Kak ia upustil kar'eru” (May 1996), reprinted in Literaturnoe segodnia. O russkoi proze. 90-e. (Moscow, 1998), 313-15; Irina Rodnianskaia, ”… i k nei bezumnaia liubov',“ Novyi mir9, no. 857 (1996): 212-16; Karen Stepanian, “Realizm kak spasenie ot snov,“ Znamia11 (1996): 194-200; Zakurenko, “Iskomaia pustota,” 93-96. See also the admiring profile by Jason Cowley, “Gogol a Go-Go,” New York Times Magazine, 23 January 2000, 20-23; Genis, “Borders and Metamorphoses“; and Marina Kanevskaia, “Istoriia i mif v postmodernistskom russkom romane,” Izvestiia AN, seriia Literatury i iazyka 59, no. 2 (2000): 37- 47. Gerald McCausland looks at Chapaev and Pustotain the context of Pelevin's other work in his “Viktor Pelevin and the End of Sots-Art,” in Marina, Balina, Nancy, Condee, and Evgeny, Dobrenko, eds., Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style(Evanston, 2000), 225-37Google Scholar.

27 Baron Ungern, like Pelevin's fictional creation, was famous for his interest in Buddhism. Ungern fought against the Reds in Siberia and then in Mongolia during the civil war.

28 According to Miller, the favorite modes of psychotherapy in die Soviet Union were “hypnosis, ‘culture-therapy’ (using art, music, etc.), and work therapy.” Miller, “Theory and Practice of Psychiatry,” 17. In Chapaev and Pustotawe see examples of both hypnosis and “culture therapy.” Miller goes on to state that in Soviet psychiatry “there is an assumption … that psychotherapy is a process in which the patient overcomes his disorder through a realization of the facets of the disorder,” a description that closely matches Kanashnikov's theories.

29 Pelevin, Buddha's Little Finger, 38.

30 Several Russian critics have identified these patients as representatives of contemporary Russian types. For example, Rodnianskaia calls the patients “four modes of the 'Russian soul': the man of the people, the bum/dreamer [mechtatel'nyi bosiak], the ‘new Russian’ and, of course, the Russian intellectual with his ‘split false personality’ and his call to free ourselves from ‘so-called inner life.'” Rodnianskaia, ”… i k nei bezumnaia liubov',“ 214. Nemzer argues that die illnesses of Petr's three fellow patients are “built on the stereotypes of contemporary mass culture.” Nemzer, “Kak ia upustil kar'eru,” 314.

31 Pelevin, Buddha's Little Finger, 282.

32 See Sally, Laird, “Viktor Pelevin,” Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers(Oxford, 1999), 181 Google Scholar. Rodnianskaia has argued that the novel takes place both in postrevolutionary and post-Soviet times and that “these two epochs ‘rhyme,'” while Stepanian contends that “the entire narrative follows the stylistics of a dream.” Rodnianskaia, ”… i k nei bezumnaia liubov',” 214, and Stepanian, “Realizm kak spasenie ot snov,” 195.

33 Pelevin, Buddha's Little Finger, 104.

34 Ibid., 220. Iungern officially “heads up one of the branches of the afterlife“; Zakurenko characterizes him as a “contemporary colleague of Woland's.” Zakurenko, “Iskomaia pustota,” 94.

35 Pelevin, Buddha's Little Finger, 223.

36 Ibid., 270.

37 Ibid., 323-24.

38 Ibid., 324.

39 Ibid.

40 Pelevin, Buddha's Little Finger, 324, paraphrasing Fedor, Dostoevskii, Prestuplenie i nakazanie,in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsali tomakh(Leningrad, 1973), 6:14Google Scholar.

41 Aleksandr, Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh(Moscow, 1960), 3:37Google Scholar.

42 This is what has made the novel controversial in Russia: if the pseudo-Buddhist message of this and some of Pelevin's other works really is “check out of reality, find your own Inner Mongolia,” just as Gus Van Sant's characters dreamed of doing in the 1991 American film My Own Private Idaho, then certainly Pelevin is an anti-prophet for the new Russia, a writer promoting the further disengagement of already disaffected youth.

43 For further scholarship on Makanin and his novel, see Aleksandr, Arkhangel'skii, “Gde skhodilis’ kontsy s kontsami: Nad stranitsami romana Vladimira Makanina Andegraund, Hi Geroi nashego vremeni,” Druzhba narodov 7(1998): 180-85Google Scholar; Nemzer, “Kogda? Gde? Kto? O romane Vladimira Makanina: Opyt kratkogo putevoditelia,” Novyi mir10, no. 882 (1998): 183-95; Stepanian, “Krizis slova na poroge svobody,” Znamia8 (1999): 204- 14; G. S. Smith, “On the Page and on the Snow: Vladimir Makanin's Andergraund[sic], Hi Geroi nashego vremeni,” Slavonic and East European Review79, no. 3 (July 2001): 434-58. Peter Rollberg has argued that Makanin's fiction stems from “his idea of the outsider, whose social marginality results from his transcendence of a prescribed worldview.” See Rollberg, , Invisible Transcendence: Vladimir Makanin's Outsiders(Washington, D.C., 1993), 38 Google Scholar(emphasis in the original). See also Alia, Latynina, “Autsaidery: Spor vokrug ‘lishnikh liudei’ sovremennosti,“ Oktiabr’ 7(1987): 178-84Google Scholar. Interestingly, the novel's publication in Znamiaprompted the editors to convene a roundtable of writers, artists, and art theorists to discuss the idea of “underground” as a culture and as a behavioral strategy. See “Andegraund vchera i segodnia,” Znamia6 (1998): 172-99.

44 Smith, “On the Page and on the Snow,” 447, 454.

45 Makanin, Andegraund, Hi geroi nashego vremeni, 261.

46 V. Bibikhin has argued that Petrovich has no personal name and no personal living space but that he lives everywhere and nowhere. See Bibikhin, “Ex libris,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 13 May 1998, quoted in Stepanian, “Krizis slova,” 207. There must also be a Gogolian connection to the choice of the name Petrovich; not only is Gogol“s tailor in “The Overcoat” known by his patronymic, Petrovich, but many of the details of Petrovich's life seem a parody of Gogol“s: the burnt manuscripts, his prophetic tone, his role as “priestconfessor,“ and so on.

47 Arkhangel'skii, “Gde skhodilis’ kontsy s kontsami,” 184.

48 Makanin, Andegraund, Hi geroi nashego vremeni, 135.

49 Ibid., 484.

50 In the context of the question of madness in Russian literature, Petrovich's statement reminds us of Chatskii's frustration with the Moscow society that declared him mad in Griboedov's Woe from Wit: “They sound the alarm … and public opinion is made! There's Moscow for you!” Griboedov, A. S., Gore ot uma, in Izbrannoe. P'esy. Stikhotvoreniia. Proza. Pis'ma(Moscow, 1978), 127 Google Scholar.

51 Makanin, Andegraund, Hi geroi nashego vremeni, 436.

52 The connection between Doktor Zhivagoand The Brothers Karamazov, pointed out by Igor’ Smirnov, creates an intertextual line from Dostoevskii through Pasternak to Makanin. Smirnov, , Roman tain: Doktor Zhivago(Moscow, 1996), 188 Google Scholar. Makanin's use of the Urals in the characterization of Petrovich, though drawn from his own biography, may have something in common with Pasternak's use of the Ural region in Doktor Zhivagoas well. See Smirnov, Roman tain, 95. On Undergroundand Dostoevskii, see Elena Krasnoshchekova's excellent unpublished paper “V prisutstvii Dostoevskogo (V. Makanin)“ (paper, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Crystal City, Virginia, 15-18 November 2001).

53 Epstein, , “Charms of Entropy and New Sentimentality: The Myth of Venedikt Erofeev,”in Epstein, , Genis, , and Vladiv-Glover, , eds., Russian Postmodernism, 423-55Google Scholar.

54 Ol'ga, Sedakova, “Neskol'ko monologov o Venedikte Erofeeve. Pechat’ minuvshego: Venedikt Erofeev (1938-1990),” Teatr 9(1999): 98-102 Google Scholar.

55 Makanin, Andegraund, Higeroinashego vremeni, 181, 182 (emphasis in the original).

56 Ibid., 184.

57 This is a reference to one of the central plot motifs: the novel is set at the time of privatization, when all Russian citizens had the opportunity to make their state-owned apartments their own. For the characters in the novel, and the residents of the obshchaga, this is a complex issue and a tense time. But Petrovich lives outside the system and thus is not touched by the anxieties of belongingsor belonging;as a member of the underground, he isa part of Russian society, stamp or no stamp.

58 Makanin, Andegraund, Hi geroi nashego vremeni, 203.

59 Ibid., 185 (emphasis in the original).

60 Ibid., 489.

61 Ibid., 417 (emphasis in the original).

62 We should note diat this empathy is expressed in a violent attack. As Petrovich says, “I was saved by a miracle; and the miracle could be called by that very same word of mine: a blow [udar].”Standing in the corridor, in line to get his shot, Petrovich sees two orderlies dragging another patient by the hair. With surprise Petrovich notices that he can observe without the slightest compassion, without any desire to protest the cruel and unfair treatment. Suddenly, one of the orderlies buries his fist in the patient's solar plexus, and Petrovich feels the pain: “They were dragging me. Having jabbed me in the plexus, they pulled me around the corner and into the ward. And I could hear the rough noise of my gray hair under their fingers.” Ibid., 408, 410. Thrilled that he has returned to the land of the living—“feeling!“—that he can again put himself in the place of another and feel his pain, Petrovich attacks the orderlies with a stray cane as they come past him. The injuries the orderlies inflict on Petrovich in response enable him to “check himself out” of the madhouse and into a regular hospital to recuperate.

63 Ibid., 457.

64 Ibid., 540, 551.

65 Ibid., 555.

66 Ibid., 556.

67 “la vdrug uslyshal Slovo, i eto Slovo bylo ia sam”(I suddenly heard the Word and the Word was /myself). Ibid., 554 (emphasis in the original).

68 Ibid., 556 (emphasis in the original).

69 G. S. Smith reads Petrovich as a “violent anti-social hero” and sees a “solipsistic sense of personal identity” as his central core. Smith, “On the Page and on the Snow,” 457. He also finds Venia's “ia sam” to be a mere “pathetic insistence on doing things for himself“ (457«44). In contrast, I argue that Petrovich learns two lessons in the madhouse. He discovers that the isolation that comes with murder, with transgression, can be overcome through human empathy. He also sees Venia's independence, his “ia sam,” as the words he has been waiting for, the clue to reentering a creative state that, perhaps, gives the reader this very novel.