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Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Alexander Etkind
Alexander Etkind*
Affiliation:
history at Cambridge University and a Fellow at King's College.
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Abstract

Combining ideas from cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this essay proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the emerging field of post-Soviet memory studies. Sociological polls demonstrate that approximately one-fourth of Russians remember that their relatives were victims of terror, yet the existing monuments, museums, and rituals are inadequate to commemorate these losses. In this economy of memory, ghosts and monsters become a prominent subject of post-Soviet culture. The incomplete work of mourning turns the unburied dead into the undead. Analyzing Russian novels and films of the last decade, Alexander Etkind emphasizes the radical distortions of history, semihuman creatures, fantastic cults, manipulations of the body, and circular time that occur in these fictional works. To account for these phenomena, Etkind coins the concept “magical historicism” and discusses its relation to the magical realism of postcolonial literatures. The memorial culture of magical historicism is not so much postmodern as it is, precisely, post-Soviet.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , Fall 2009 , pp. 631 - 658
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2009

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References

For the opportunity to pursue this study, I am grateful to the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. Elizabeth Moore helped me to devise and improve this essay; our little sons, Mark and Micah, did not make this venture entirely impossible. Much appreciated are the comments and questions of Svetlana Boym, Caryl Emerson, Mischa Gabowitch, Igal Halfin, Eric Naiman, Dina Khapaeva, Piotr Kosicki, Mark Lipovetsky, Sergei Oushakine, Irina Paperno, Kevin M.F. Piatt, Gyan Prakash, Timothy J. Portice, Anson Rabinbach, Yuri Slezkine, Emma Widdis, Alexei Yurchak, and Eli Zaretsky. While struggling with previous versions of this essay, several anonymous reviewers helped me to shape it into a better work.

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5. Among Bykov's works of die recent decade are the historical novel Orfograftia (2003) set in 1918; a satire called Kak Putin stalprezidentom SShA: Novye russkie skazki (2005); a controversial biography of Boris Pasternak diat garnered two Russian literary prizes (“Great Book” and “National Best-Seller“) in 2006; and die shocking and-utopia, ZhD (2006).

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45. The variations on these themes are many. In Iuz Aleshkovskii's Kenguru (Moscow, 2000), Stalinist prosecutors accuse the protagonist of raping a kangaroo and in the process, turn him into a kangaroo. Pavel Krusanov's Ukus angela (St. Petersburg, 2000) presents an alternative history of the victorious Russian empire with a dictator of Russo-Chinese blood, a panoply of mages and miracles, a recognizable satire on “political technologists“ of Putin's era, and a cannibalistic hermaphrodite to boot.

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49. Oleg Kulik was Vladimir Sorokin's coauthor on certain projects. For analysis of this post-Soviet artist-dog, see Ryklin, Mikhail, “Pedigree Pal: Put’ k angliiskomu dogu,“ Vremia diagnoza (Moscow, 2003), 264-77Google Scholar.

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58. The name of this storyteller, Andrei Fedorovich Platonov, resembles the name of a Soviet writer whom Shalamov probably read or knew, Andrei Platonovich Platonov. “I loved Platonov,” writes Shalamov; his tale reads like an obituary of this author. Shalamov, , Kolymskie rasskazy, 124 Google Scholar.

59. For thoughtful readings of some of these authors, see Clowes, Edith W., Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia (Princeton, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wachtel, Andrew Baruch, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago, 2005)Google Scholar; Lipovetskii, Mark N., Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)-modernistskogo diskursa v russkoi kul'ture 1920-2000-kh godov (Moscow, 2008)Google Scholar. For a review of the latest trend in Russian fiction, which is more fearful of Russia's future than of its past, see Chantsev, Aleksandr, “Fabrika antiutopii: Distopicheskii diskurs v rossiiskoi literature serediny 2000-kh,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 86 (2007)Google Scholar.

60. For such understanding, see Jameson, Fredric, Archaeologies oftheFuture: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London, 2005)Google Scholar.

61. Sergei Sobolev compiled an interesting catalogue of Russian fiction of a genre he calls “alternative history“; many of these novels have been written in the post-Soviet decades and are “magical“; see Sobolev, S. V, Al'ternativnaia istoriia (Lipetsk, 2006)Google Scholar; see also Bykov, Dmitrii, “Drugoi alternativy u nas est'!” Vmesto zhizni (Moscow, 2006)Google Scholar. Many films of the last decade, such as Nochnoi dozor by Timur Bekmambetov (2004), 4 by Vladimir Sorokin and Il'ia Khryzhanovskii (2005), and Zhivoi by Aleksandr Veledinskii (2006) experiment with various combinations of the occult and the political. For a view of post-Soviet popular culture that emphasizes themes of sex and violence rather than history and magic, see Borenstein, Eliot, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca, 2008)Google Scholar.

62. Benjamin, , Origin of German Tragic Drama, 139 Google Scholar.

63. Ibid., 66.

64. Ibid., 53.

65. Ibid., 134.

66. Ibid., 135-36.

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70. Ibid., 113.

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81. Post-Soviet literature often plays with the idea of reincarnation. This idea is usually perceived as characteristically Buddhist; however, this idea was also central for Russian mystical sects such as the Khlysty; see Humphrey, “Stalin and the Blue Elephant,” for a fascinating analysis of reincarnation stories about Stalin, which are told by the Buddhist peoples of Russia, and Eddnd, Khlyst, for the reincarnadon mythology of traditional Russian sects.

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