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Chapter Seven OVERKILL Bespredel and Gratuitous Violence Rita once again examined the premises where this woman had decided not just to live, but to live in harmony with herself and with the whole world. There was nothing pathetic or wretched in what she saw there—the pathetic or wretched remained up there, where Rita had come from. Here the usual standards didn’t work—this must be how the different understandings of life and death, of good and evil, of beauty and ugliness, fall apart, when a person steps over the borders of earthly existence and the real essence of life opens up before him. But can this essence really open up to a person only in a forgotten sewer, on a pile of filthy rags and old cardboard Coca Cola boxes, ten meters from a pipe pouring out a turbid stream of shit and fuel oil, infecting the atmosphere with miasmas? —Sergei Pugachev, You’re Just a Slut, My Dear! (Ty prosto shliukha, dorogaia!) In 1999, the reading public was treated to a new addition to the emerging canon of Russian pulp fiction: a potboiler by Sergei Pugachev entitled You’re Just a Slut, My Dear! Even in a market where lurid paperback covers are taken for granted, You’re Just a Slut, My Dear! stands out for its explicit sexualized violence: a man smiles as he holds a beautiful woman by the hair and forces her to suck on the barrel of a gun. When the novel begins, a young woman, Rita Prozorova, has just been fighting with her mother, whom she holds in utmost contempt. So naturally Rita kills her with a blunt object, slaughters a nosy neighbor who stumbles upon the scene, and sets fire to her apartment, all in the first chapter. The body count does not stop there; if anything, Rita becomes an even more prodigious killer as the novel wears on, leaving behind a trail of corpses stretching like breadcrumbs from her native provincial town of Pskov all the way to Moscow. Fairly early on, her long-lost fiancé’s criminal associates turn her into a heroin addict and gang-rape her, launching her on a quest for vengeance that culminates in a bloodbath. But the road to revenge is not easy: Rita is constantly obliged to avoid the many predators who want a piece of her— literally. When she arrives in Moscow, she barely escapes a ring of kidnappers who lure young provincial women to their home, drug them, and then sell their organs to rich Americans and Europeans who need transplants. At times, Rita wonders how such things can happen. After all, she has seen numerous films where justice triumphs and where legal procedure steps in to facilitate the determination of guilt and innocence. Then she remembers: “But that’s not how it is in our country. That’s what she saw on video. That’s in America. But we’re not America; we have no laws” (31). It is fitting that Rita compares her own lived experience to the stories about America that she has seen on TV, since You’re Just a Slut, My Dear! posits an imaginary Russia as a counterpoint to the hyperreality of nearperfect order embodied by American police procedurals. One of the most likely sources of her knowledge of the rights and privileges of American crime suspects is the long-running television show Law and Order, which Russian viewers could watch twice a day at the time that Pugachev’s novel was published . In its Russian translation, Law and Order (Zakon i poriadok) had the ring of a cruel joke, since domestic television and the print media were quite effectively constructing a crime-ridden Russia in which neither law nor order was anywhere to be found. In fact, the world in which Rita Prozorova fights for survival is defined precisely by their absence: the world of bespredel. Though the bloody backdrops of the detektiv and the boevik are evidence of each genre’s preoccupation with violent crime, neither of them can match bespredel for sheer sensationalism or pessimism. Even Konstantinov ’s multivolume saga of murder and betrayal allows for some hope that the forces of good can at least survive, if not triumph, while the forces of evil have the reassuring virtue of being understandable and even logical— nothing illustrates the economic doctrine of “rational choice” better than the self-interested actions of organized criminals. Indeed, the cardinal virtue of organized crime is the...

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