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Mark Lipovetsky Vladimir Sorokin's "Theater of Cruelty" Translated from the Russian by Dianne Goldstaub SOTS-ART is such a characteristic phenomenon of Russian postmodernism that it is often substituted for Russian postmodernism as a whole (this sin is committed not only by such traditionalist critics as Stanislav Rassadin, but also by such postmodernist "gurus" as Boris Groys, Mikhail Epstein, and Aleksandr Genis). It is telling that the sots-artists themselves prefer to be called conceptualists, emphasizing that they work with not only with the languages of Soviet socialist ideology, but of every conceivable ideology in general. Originating in painting (Vitalii Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, Il'ia Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Grisha Bruskin) and in poetry (Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Timur Kibirov, and others ), sots-art culture in prose never became a widespread phenomenon. In essence, the only sots-art prose writer in the full sense is Vladimir Sorokin, although elements of sots-art poetics are quite important in the works of Evgenii Popov, Zufar Gareev (Park), Anatolii Gavrilov, Arkadii Bartov, Viktor Pelevin (The Life of Insects [Zhizn' nasekomykh]), and Sasha Sokolov (Palisandria). Sots-art is certainly neither an exception nor a substitute for all postmodernist literature. The creators of sots-art are consciously oriented toward working with a particular cultural context. This context in and of itself, however, is distinct from other kinds of contexts-the mythologies of creation or of history-that form the basis of work by other Russian postmodernists , from Tat'iana Tolstaia to Vladimir Sharov. It is quite obvious that the main context for the sots-art aesthetic is socialist realism. The conceptualists first immerse themselves in socialist realism and only much later bring into play any politicized mythology, any authoritarian idea (although, as a rule, even the most abstract idea is still marked by these authors with the distinct stamp of"Sovietness" [sovkovost']; see, for example, Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov's cycle Moscow and the Muscovites [Moskva i moskvichi]). There are several approaches to understanding tHe semantics of sotsart 's play with socialist-realist myths, language, structures, and motifs. Mikhail Epstein, the first to comment on sots-art (conceptualism), proposed in general a profoundly avant-garde interpretation. In his opinion, conceptual167 Mark Lipovetsky ism uses a device opposed to "making strange" [ostranenie], namely, the automatization of perception, the conscious stereotyping of entire worldviews. It is directed toward an effect similar to "apophatic theodicy": The debasement, the vulgarization of meaning is a way of pointing to a different , silent reality, for which there are not, nor can there be, any words.... Conceptualism clothes negation in such threadbare rags of triteness and meaninglessness that it negates itself. Nihilism confirms negation. Conceptualism negates confirmation [italics in original]. (Epstein 230) According to this interpretation, sots-art is nothing more than one of the variants of conceptualism as the latest avant-garde trend, distinguished only by the fact that, from among all ideolOgies, it is with socialist-realist ideology that sots-art chooses to play. Boris Groys views socialist realism as an extreme expression of avantgarde utopianism, and perceives in sots-art not the continuation ofthe avantgarde impulse, but rather its "removal." Thus, for example, in analyzing the poetics of Komar and Melamid, he demonstrates that they not only do not "expose" the Stalinist myth, but "remythologize" it, penetrating through the socialist-realist structure into the "Soviet unconscious," where Soviet myths fall into an associative network that unites them with other mytholOgies. Komar and Melamid, therefore, regard their Sots-Art not as a simple parody of socialist realism, but as a discovery within themselves of a universal element , a collective component that unites them with others, an amalgam ofindividual history and world history.... Using the devices ofStalinist ideological indoctrination, they have attempted to demonstrate the similarity of the socialist-realist myth to myths of the past and the present, in order to reconstruct a unified mythological network in which modern consciousness functions . (Groys 93, 95) The avant-garde pretense of expressing the inexpressible, of realizing the utopian project, of overcoming the power of tradition is inverted by the return ofthat very avant-garde project to the context ofworld mytholOgies and eternal archetypes, that is, of the most traditional of traditions. The result of this inversion, according to Groys, is "to achieve a state of indifference with regard to such questions as whether the individual's thinking can be completely manipulated ... or not, whether this thinking is authentic, whether any distinction exists between simulacrum and reality, and so on" (110). It...

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