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152 Chapter Four Russia’s Orgasm, or Marrying Putin: Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture W H E N I N T E RV I E W E D I N 1 9 9 1 , the writer Vladimir Sorokin wondered why he was always asked about ethical and social dimensions in his work: “I don’t understand . . . aren’t those just letters on a piece of paper?”1 His remark, which implies total indifference to any type of social engagement, represents a giant leap from the attitude of distress that authors like Blok and Pasternak conveyed when writing about the fate of Russia. Sorokin’s statement appears less radical, however, when viewed as part of a tendency that had gained substantial ground in the decades preceding the interview in question, and that is generally known as the Russian variant of postmodernism. In keeping with international trends, from roughly the late 1960s on—and earlier, according to some—a new cultural-philosophical mentality began taking shape in (mainly underground) Russian intellectual circles.2 The exact nature of this “postmodern” mentality is debated to this day, but scholars more or less agree on what has become a well-known collection of its distinctive features: the conviction that all ideologies and hierarchies are relative, which has led to the constant blending of cultures traditionally labeled “high” and “low”; the pursuit of semantic pluralism, transgression, play, and intertextuality (or an awareness that all has been said, that is, “everything is quotation”); theoretical self-reflection on one’s work; a distrust of metanarratives or master narratives; and a tendency toward the demythologization or deconstruction of cultural myths and stereotypes.3 When interviewed in 1991, Sorokin was a major and self-conscious representative of the Russian pendant of this new mode of thought. It would be an exaggeration to label all the works discussed in this chapter postmodern to the bone or to try fitting them neatly into theoretical postmodern paradigms. Yet each author involved incorporates “bride Russia ” metaphors into work that, in some way or another, displays several of the features mentioned in the preceding paragraph. Chapter Four 153 The incorporation of these metaphors occurs in a Russian context where, as scholars have shown, postmodernism takes on a slightly different guise than it does in western-European-cum-American spheres.4 One difference that has implications for “our” metaphor is the totalitarian context within which Russian postmodernism arises. If American postmodernism reacts in part to the commercial mass culture of late capitalism, Russian postmodernizm is born in a society that generates ideological content rather than consumer satisfaction. As a result, more than its American pendant, Russian postmodernism is “politicized,” since one of the key languages to be deconstructed is that of socialist realism.5 Not coincidentally, a recurring (postmodern) literary motif in the 1980s and 1990s, the decades pertinent to most of the texts discussed here, is that of “evaluating Soviet history, refracted through the prism of cultural history.”6 In general, Russian postmodernists are keen to travesty concepts that involve Russian history and national identity—the same concepts that have haunted Russian philosophers and writers from the outset.7 As one might expect, the vision of Russia as unattainable bride is among their favorite objects of parody, and in 1990, when the Soviet Union collapses and censorship is abolished, gendered representations of Russia, intelligentsia, and state reemerge in literary and intellectual culture in unprecedented quantities. For contemporary writers and thinkers, however, the metaphor no longer refers to political ideals in which they genuinely believe. It has become more of a cultural-literary cliché that begs to be unmasked. Never averse to relativistic play, postmodern authors have a particular appetite for “bride Russia” metaphors. The political factors that feed this appetite include the shift in sociopolitical categories that began influencing the metaphor in 1917. In late- and post-Soviet Russia, the state-intelligentsia-people tripod has lost its topicality even more than in the early Soviet years. Neither in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union nor in post-Soviet Russia can an intelligentsia in the classic sense of the term be discerned. In late Soviet Russia, the group that identifies most strongly with “the intelligentsia” is the dissident movement , but this movement can hardly be said to share the “gnawing sense of moral obligation” toward “the dispossessed (the ‘people’)” that typified the traditional intelligentsia.8 Russian dissidents concentrate more on exposing the crudities of the Soviet regime than on any personal relationship with “the people.” In addition...

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