Routes of Passage: Essays on the Fiction of Vladimir Makanin

Joy in the GULag: Vladimir Makanin's "Bukva 'A'"

Joy in the GULag: Vladimir Makanin's "Bukva 'A'" Subhi Sherwell To write letters, you need to know whyl The form may have changed, the ideals of the collective m ay have changed, but the collective itself is still there, still keeping an eye on you, still ready to pounce on you.... It will take a long time for these people to become individuals. For the moment they're still a herd with the manners of the herd2 Vladimir Makanin's short story "The Letter 'A'" ("Bukva 'A''') is a deceptively simple work. On first reading it seems like little more than an uncompromisingly moralistic allegory of glasnost' invading the Soviet Union-aslabor -camp. Indeed this is the interpretation of the few critics who have reviewed it thus far3 Such a one-dimensional interpretation inevitably posits "The Letter 'A'" as the latest in a long line of literature employing the labor camp chronotope as a microcosm and metaphor for Russia as a whole-the key development here seeming to be that the tradition of using metaphor on a 1 Vladimir Makanin, "Bukva 'A,'" Novyi mil", no. 4 (2000): 7-35, here 21. Subsequent page citations to this work in this edition will be given in parentheses in the body of the article immediately following the quotation. 2 Sally Laird, Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999), 70-71. 3 Krylov has referred to it in glowing terms as a masterpiece "chess narrative," but sees it as no more than social allegory that ends up in a checkmate (Omitrii Krylov, "Algebra bez garmonii," hup:l/www.ng.ru/culture/2000-05-06/7_algebra .html). Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, with some vitriol, derides Makanin for being Chem yshevskian, stuck in the GULag, and being far too negative about post-Soviet society, while tentatively postulating that "The Letter 'N" might be more metafictional than it first seems (Kuritsyn, "Vladimir Makanin: Bukva 'A,'" http://www.russ.ru/krug/kniga/20000322 .html) So far only Natal'ia Ivanova has dared see it as a postmodern parody of GULag literature, but little more (Ivanova, "Zhizn' i smert' sirnulakra v Rossii," http://magazines.russ.ru/ druzhba/2000/8/ivanova.html). Routes of Passage: Essays on the Fiction of Vladimir Makanin. Byron Lindsey and Tatiana Spektor, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2007, 157- 70. 158 SUBHI SHERWELL general plane has developed and hardened into a supposedly specific allegory about the demise of the USSR.4 On closer analysis, however, all attempts to find concrete parallels with historical events and figures in this alleged allegory are frustrated by a deliberate vagueness of detail on the author's part. Most importantly, the actual meaning of the symbolic and eponymous letter "A" that the zeks sneak out of the labor camp at night to carve on a nearby hillside, is left open-ended. Equally valid interpretations of it could be freedom, democracy, language, consciousness of past history, and indeed, literature itself. All along, ambivalences such as those outlined above complicate attempts to find the clear "moralistic" messages that critics have discerned in Makanin 's earlier fiction. It is the striking elusiveness of this "social allegory" that hints at other more complex levels at which this povest' functions, and ultimately lead to the conclusion that it can profitably be interpreted as a significant new direction for Makanin- an innovatively ludic, parodic, postmodern, multilayered texte de jouissance, in Roland Barthes' phrase-a text whose aim is to frustrate readers' expectations of predictable plot lines, generic pigeonholing and simple allegorical parallels, to resist concrete interpretation, and to challenge preconceptions.5 This essay will consequently attempt to demonstrate that "The Letter'A'" is not just a simple "social allegory" of glasnost·, but that it functions on five linked yet distinct planes of discourse. First, it is a continuation of Makanin's explorations in his earlier fiction of ideas of freedom, belonging, leadership, and herd mentality- the complex dynamics of the interrelationship between the individual and the mass in the Russian context. Second, it transports these same concerns from the individual to the national plane to function as broad "social allegory" (i.e., the level on which critics have interpreted it thus far), documenting the consequences, and implicitly the causes, of glasnost' for Russia. Third, thematically and stylistically, it develops Platonov's6 concern 4 The most renowned examples of this tradition to a Western audience have been Dostoevsky 's Notes from the HOll se of the Dead (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma...