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Marina Kanevskaya The Diary of a Writer from Teplyi Stan' The Beautifulness ofLife by Evgenii Popov Come up to the window, don't be afraid-at the black windowpanes of the nine-story high-rises of Teplyi Stan', the Russian writers are standing anxiously peering into space and time, progressive ones as well as reactionary, not only but also ... (syntax). Please understand: the writers, nervous , handicapped, drunk-they feel for Mother Russia. Don't be afraid. They are good writers. They all wrote well, and that's why all of them got stuck forever at the windows of their cooperative high-rises at the time of the July thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes and the approaching end of the world. -Evgenii Popov, Prekrasnost' THIS EPIGRAPH quotes a passage from Popov's The Beautifulness ofLife: Chaptersfrom "A Love Affair with a Newspaper" That Shall Never Be Started nor Finished [Prekrasnost' zhizni: Glavy iz "Romana s gazetoi," kotoroyi nikogda ne budet nachat ni zakonchenl (book publication 1990). In a 1988 interview, Popov describes his book in the follOwing way: "Recently I have finished a thing with a long title, The Beautifulness of Life: Chapters from 'A Love Affair with a Newspaper' That Will Never Be Started nor Finished, which is the most important thing for me, the synthesis of everything I was doing and am doing" (Taroshchina 6). On the one hand, I will analyze this "thing" (how else can one describe the genre ofThe Beautifulness?) as a conceptualist work ofart. On the other hand, I will trace the roots of Popov's writing in the Russian cultural tradition and compare The Beautifulness with F. M. Do~toevsky's A Writers Diary as a literary pretext.l While the Diary, however, is "naIve" in its ambition to be the diary of a writer, and where Dostoevsky set before himself to discuss current events and cultural and social issues with his contemporaries periodically and directly (not through the artistic medium), Popov's book is 193 Marina Kanevskaya a self-conscious text that mocks both the temporal pretext ofthe Diary to review the current flow of life, as well as its moralistic aspiration to explain this life. Popov exhumes the events of the histOrically "closed" period of 1961 to 1985. His contemporaries had already resolved their attitude toward this period, and their attitude had crystallized into late Soviet mythology. The agenda of Popov's book is not to comment on the events, and not to instruct his readers in some didactic, positive way, but to shatter this mythology. One could argue that such terms as "to compromise" and "to reveal" contradict the essence of the postmodern consciousness. I believe that the peculiarity of Russian postmodernism, with conceptualism as its most legitimate representative,2 consists in its predominantly ideological agenda. The Russian postmodernist view ofitselfas an ideologically charged artistic movement explains why the Russian postmodernists have called themselves "avantgarde ," even though they had little in common with the historical avant-garde at the beginning of the century. While Western postmodernism developed as a reaction to modernism in art, Russian postmodernism was histOrically cut off from modernism by the lengthy period of socialist realism. It is socialist realism, therefore, that serves as the object of reflection for Russian postmodernism. Evgenii Popov belongs to that part ofthe "formerlyyoung generation"3 that refused to follow the rules in the big game of socialist realism. This disregard toward the conventions of socialist realism was bound to the awakening of a new type of artistic worldview: postmodernism. In the situation of the 1970s, Russian postmodernism could belong only to the underground, where it created a radically new consciousness-not dissident, but "emigre." The "emigre" in this sense does not necessarily want to emigrate-i.e., to move to another country and "to shake the dust off his feet"-but rather to descend underground and associate only with a closed circle of like-minded people.4 The "emigre" consciousness, as opposed to dissident consciousness, does not strive to explain, prove, or change anything by "interfering actively with life." The "sixties generation" was still convinced that if, in response to every official "Hail to!" [Da zdravstvuetl], one yelled back "Down with!" [Ne zdravstvuetf] (as in the dialogue by Dmitrii Prigov), then the truth would be heard, and most importantly, it would be proven. By contrast, the "seventies generation" was the forerunner ofthe postmodern ideologyofnoninterference. Conceptualist noninterference manifests itself in a total immersion in a type of speech that is alien and hostile to the...

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