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219 Dragan Kujundzič claims in his controversial “After”: Russian Post-Colonial Identity that Russia is “after” history in a sense that it is “outside history, before history occurred, in the realm where the temporality of World History has not even happened: in the realm of Messianic promise that will alone hurl Russia towards the historical, its full teleological fulfillment, ‘after’ it and beyond.”1 This claim, a part of the never-ceasing intellectual and literary debates on the meaning and structure of post-Soviet identity, is addressed by Tatyana Tolstaya’s post-apocalyptic The Slynx (2000). Tolstaya, one of the most renowned post-Soviet Russian writers, turns in this novel to issues of national identity reconstruction, in the vein of many post-Soviet texts that followed the traumatic rupture of historical linearity that the fall of the Soviet Union constituted for the narrative of Russianness. Susan Buck-Morss suggests that the post-Soviet crisis of national subjectivity , which is acutely felt on every level of post-Soviet cultural production , stems from the loss of the identifiable enemy that the end of the Cold War brought about. An integral part of the Soviet metanarrative, the idea of the country surrounded by external enemies, was lost for Russia together with the Cold War. Following Hegel, Buck-Morss argues that on the national scale defining an enemy is what brings a collective into being.2 While the enemy figure emerges from this line of thought as a variant of the other that is essential for symbolic identification, the end of the Cold War seriously diminished the potential of national identity being constructed along 12H theAnimAlwAtChesyOU Identity “After” History in Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx daria kabanova costlow nelson text4.indd 219 6/23/10 8:40 AM 220————dAriA kABAnOvA these lines. Therefore, many cultural texts that follow the collapse of the Soviet Union are actively searching for a new other (or others), against which a renewed national identity can be constructed. Options for creating new dichotomies abound; however, while cultures and communities conventionally choose to construct their others along the lines of race, gender, and/ or class, Tolstaya’s text is among those suggesting an extremely interesting way out of the identity crisis by turning to the ultimate other available to the human species, the animal. The animal figure in The Slynx provides an immense metaphorical potential for the textual tactics employed in overcoming the post-Soviet crisis of subjectivity. The Slynx is set in a folkloric space where historical time has come to a stop; this space is, paradoxically, the Russia of the future. This Russia barely exists as a nation-state, being just another “consequence” of the event that structures this space, the apocalypse (presumably, an atomic “Blast”). This catastrophic event, which catalyzes the mutation of the humans inhabiting this space and destroys civilization, throws them “back” in history, to the premodern realm of a magical fairy tale with all of its attributes: widespread superstitions, the existence of magical forest creatures, and personified forces of nature. This future that has become the Russian “historical” past paradoxically merges dystopia with fairy tale. The temporal tension between the easily recognizable parodic Russian “state” and the Slavic folkloric space it occupies is what makes The Slynx particularly pertinent to issues of national identity, history, and memory. The novel follows the protagonist Benedikt, a young, slightly neurotic, truth-seeking avid reader, as he discovers new, not necessarily pleasant truths about himself while developing relationships with a variety of “mutants”—most importantly, with the slynx, presumably a magical catlike creature that lives in the woods and seemingly reciprocates Benedikt’s uncanny attachment. The Blast, besides being an obvious reference to the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 and a conventional Cold War metaphor for the apocalypse, turns out to have more “consequences” than just the genetic mutations of the characters, as it can provisionally be read as a metaphor for the collapse of the Soviet Union: “I had a mirrored buffet. And a color TV with an Italian tube. . . . My brother-in-law managed to get a hold of a Yugoslav cabinet set, I had a separate bathroom and toilet, Golden Autumn wallpaper,” says one of the mutants, evoking easily recognizable late-Soviet dream possessions and uncannily reiterating the post-Soviet public discourse that lamented the fall of the socialist state in similar terms.3 Among important implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union for the Russian narrative of nation is the perceived “end of history...

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