Routes of Passage: Essays on the Fiction of Vladimir Makanin

The Confession of an Underground Hero

The Confession of an Underground Hero Nina Efimov On that account, though anyone who likes is at liberty to laugh at me, yet with me true reason will carry more weight than the opinion of the common herd, and I for my part shall never say that anybody who has lost cattle or furniture has suffered a loss of goods. Bias, I think it was, who is reckoned as one of the Seven, when his native place Priene had been taken by the enemy, and the rest of the people while fleeing were carrying away many of their chattels with them, met somebody 's suggestion that he himself should do the same with the reply, "But I am doing so, for I carryall my belongings with me." Bias refused to think of these toys of fortune, which we actually call goods ... -Cicero, Paradoxa StoicorU111 In Vladimir Makanin's prose, the symbolism of subterranean tunnels, underground caves, and cells is juxtaposed to a spliced set of leitmotifs that include insanity, the individual's survival under a mob's pressure, a victim's and a victimizer's opposition/collaboration, and the writer's response to suffering. Makanin's novel Underground, or A Hero of Our Time, exemplifies how an aggregate of such symbolism is reactivated by the author. A narrative dialogue with the classics of Russian literature is reflected in the title. "Underground " refers to the complex cultural phenomenon present in the Soviet Union from the 1960s through the 1980s known in Russian as andegraund, an unofficial, all but hidden cultural life which reflected many writers' and artists ' reaction to the Soviet censorship, communist ideology, and the official aesthetics of socialist realism. It also alludes to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (Zapiski iz podpol'ia), but note that Makanin's word andegraund is not Dostoevsky's podpo/'e, a difference apparent to Russian readers if not English ones. The second part of the title, suggesting a similarity between Petrovich and Lermontov's Pechorin, applies to Makanin's protagonist the attributes of a "superfluous man" and thereby encourages us to contemplate him as a superfluous writer, if at the same time an "underground" one. Petrovich is a homeless man. He is also a murderer, a sexually promiscuous alcoholic, an outcast among outcasts, and aggressive toward his successRoutes of Passage: Essays on the Fiction of Vladimir Makanin. Byron Lindsey and Tatiana Spektor, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2007, 141 - 56. 142 N INA EFIMOV ful friends, but at the same time, he is a novelist of talent. His means of survival is to watch apartments in a former dormitory-an occupation that frees him from social and moral obligations. Indeed, besides an ancient typewriter chained to a dormitory bed, he has nothing but his ego-his proud and sensitive self harbored in a singularly individualistic personality which he fiercely protects from the slightest infringements, direct or implied. Although Petrovich has affairs with scores of women, the single person he loves is his brother Venedikt, an artist of genius with the ego of a small child-the remains of a personality "cured" to idiocy under forced treatment by Soviet psychiatrists. Petrovich's concern for affirming his individuality and his grandiose "self-respect" lead him to two murders and forced psychiatric treatment . In the end, doggedly fighting the system, he survives, and after throwing away his rejected manuscripts and quitting the pursuit of literature, he still preserves his fame as an underground hero and is accepted once again by the inhabitants of the dormitory, who, in the belief that as a writer he has the higher mission of reaching people's hearts, had confided to him their sorrows. Petrovich believes not in God, not in government, not in business-only in Russian literature -his last resort for spiritual salvation. His mythical trust in it brings him to helping the downtrodden and allows him to perpetrate his personal myth of being a writer without actually writing. The novel belongs to the genre of confession, one set in conditions of a brutal daily life. The logic of Petrovich's reinterpretation of his last thirty years wrestles with a succession of personal catastrophes which occurred repeatedly , it seems, and were isolated spatial-temporal frameworks. The underground mentality of Makanin's protagonist enables him to survive as an individual and formulate his philosophy of the "punch," an ideological weapon with which he addresses the public's hostility. Ultimately, it helps the reader absorb the tragic life of Venedikt Petrovich and...