Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture

5.Women Who Run with the Wolves

Chapter Five WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. —Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey SmartWomen,FoolishChoices At first glance, the blood-soaked landscape of 1990s popular entertainment would appear numbingly monotonous. How many different ways can people be beaten, assaulted, and killed in the course of fifty minutes or four hundred pages? The cultural hegemony of violent crime in virtually all media (prose fiction, television, and film) creates a self-perpetuating confidence in the corruption and criminalization of both the country and its representations, a hyperreal projection of a terrorized populace consuming narratives about their criminal state. However novel the myth of the criminal state might be in content, it is immediately familiar in form, replicating the false totality posited by socialist realist culture. In this case, all of society , from top to bottom, is mobilized by and for crime. But just as official Soviet culture could sustain its monolithic rejection of all things anti-Soviet only through a growing syncretism (Epstein, After the Future 156–61), the predominance of violent crime in 1990s Russian culture bred variety as well as conformity. No doubt the conditions of the new market economy were of crucial importance, for if post-Soviet readers and viewers had few alternatives to violent entertainments, they had far greater latitude in the kinds of violent entertainment available for consumption. These are the choices that commodity capitalism facilitates, and they arguably reduce freedom and initiative to insignificant options. But they are effective precisely because they build and reinforce a broad consumer trend through stratified niche marketing. If all the violent storytelling in Russia really had been the same, it could never have dominated the cultural scene as it did in the years immediately following the Soviet collapse. For violence to succeed, it had to come in different flavors. Violent entertainment in the 1990s quickly generated its own system of genres and modes, coinciding only in part with the products’ marketing. Roughly speaking, violent crime narratives can be sorted out across two different axes, according to gender and mode. By no means am I proposing a strict typology; the boundaries among the categories are far from distinct. Mode defines the kind of violent entertainment discussed in chapter 7: the amoral pessimism of bespredel crosses genres with impunity, with no fixed, recognizable position in the taxonomy of post-Soviet entertainment. The division according to gender is harder to ignore and has been successfully exploited by publishers and producers. Action tales of heroic melodrama and graphic violence are explicitly marketed for men, while the increasing feminization of the most popular fiction genre in the 1990s, the detektiv, was widely recognized. The detektiv’s role as a “female” genre gives it a unique status in a culture industry dominated by violent crime, resulting in a mutual accommodation between traditional feminine sensibilities and the harsh, masculine world of guns and grit. The women who write detektivy adapt crime for a female readership without challenging the hegemony of violent entertainment or irrevocably undermining established notions of gender. Quite to the contrary, the detektiv guarantees a predominance of violent entertainment that would have been impossible if half the population were absent from the target audience. The detektiv succeeds at being congenial to women readers, if not to all its female characters (who are just as likely to end up as crime victims in stories by women as they are in stories by men). Though women in the detektiv are constantly in danger, the genre pulls off a remarkable feat: the detektiv makes violence safe for women. No doubt there are numerous pitfalls in approaching the detektiv in terms of gender. As the functional equivalent of the Anglo-American murder mystery , the detektiv by rights should be conceived more broadly. The genre, which dates back to pre-Soviet times, was extremely popular during the Brezhnev years, with an established canon that did not include a single female author. Nor is there any evidence that women were a clear majority of detektiv readers in the sixties and seventies. Though the subject matter was decidedly masculine (involving the police, army, and intelligence services), 128 Overkill the genre itself was not marked as either masculine or feminine. The two best-selling foreign mystery writers of the perestroika era were a man and a woman...