Uncensored?: Reinventing Humor and Satire in Post-Soviet Russia

New Komiks for the New Russians

New Komiks for the New Russians Jose Alaniz, University of Washington at Seattle Alexander Alekseev-Svinkin's painting The New Russians (1998) depicts a group of portly, debauched but oddly saint-like arrivistes in the throes of a swank Moscow party. Champagne in hand, they gaze back from an ethereal sea of pastel reds, smudgy ochres, and warm flesh tones. The painting captures the soft-focus, mythical essence of that post-Soviet cultural mirage, the "New Russian" -a figure that uncannily combines innocence with viciousness. Dubbed the founder of "fairy-tale realism," the artist readily manipulates and reifies the popular image of the New Russian without moving all the way towards full-blown conceptualism; this is playful, "obvious" mythmaking. Much as Norman Rockwell managed to convey a simplistic, over-idealized yet somehow "authentic" vision of post-war America, Svinkin captures the kernel of recognizable "truth" behind the stereotype. And in both cases, the viewer's desire to "see" (read: "believe") lies at the heart of the artistic project. Yet it is Svinkin's more self-conscious postmodernist work-which so deftly "reads" and reproduces on canvas Russian presuppositions about its subject -that seems both funny and disquieting. Those angelic, tipsy roly-polys, they now rule the world? Svinkin's painting is therefore quite explicitly about the desire-borne limits of representation, of realism as fairy tale. We may liken the painting's Uncensored? Reinventing Humor and Satire in Post-Soviet Russia. Olga Mesropova and Seth Graham, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2008, 59- 77. 60 JOSE ALANIZ aesthetics to those of another, less-familiar medium in Russia, comics, whose representational modus operandi proceeds along similar lines; comics are also "about themselves." This essay examines the depiction of the "New Russian" in a "Western" art form, comics, that came onto its own in Russia only with the collapse of the USSR. How do these representations tie into-and subvert - popular perceptions of the New Russians and comics in post-Soviet culture? How do they "construct" their intended readership, drawn chiefly from the ranks of the New Russians themselves? How do these visual representations , like Svinkin, problematize both their own subject and viewer, exposing the myth of the New Russian as myth, in ways unique to comics? In a country where the medium itself-due to its "bourgeois" origins-had been "banned" and denigrated as mass culture trash until the Perestroika era, just what are "New Comics for New Russians"? Recent discussions of the New Russians-the presumably degenerate nouveaux riches of the early post-Soviet era - have highlighted both their "mythical" status and their precipitous slide (at least in their original form) into the dustbin of history. Mark Lipovetsky asks, "Are Those New Russians Real?" before ceding the question of their flesh-and-blood ontology to the social scientists and analyzing their very real presence in literary and cultural texts. Harley Balzer examines their representation in ironic pa/ekh boxes sold in New Russians' World stores (owned by Grigory Baltser, who also produced the parodic comics version of Anna Karen ina, discussed below), and emphasizes the fact that "New Russians are very much a product of the state of mind of Russians who perceive themselves as losers in the [economic] transition "l-a role played by many in the intelligentsia. The uncouth arrivistes therefore act as negative-attribute projections of those who sought to uphold humanist values in the Soviet era, only to lose out economically to the barbarians. What such accounts have in common is the role desire plays for the producers and consumers of humor lobbed in the direction of the "New Russians ," the need for them as a "shadow" category to contrast with/enhance the "cultured" standing of a post-1991 impoverished intelligentsia. But this only tells part of the story; the snide jokes and sneering dismissals reveal more than mere contempt. For the desire expressed in humor about the New Russians reflects not only ill wishes towards them, but positive wishes to be them: the masses and "cultured" intelligentsia see the brutish newcomers and feel rage, but also envy. Public fascination overcomes even what Caroline Humphrey calls the extraordinary success of the Soviet propaganda against profiteering speculators. (TIlis is the popular presumption of how the New Russians accumulate wealth, at least those who are not full-fledged mafiosi, thieves, and embezzlers.) In spite of such beliefs, and probably because of 1 Harley Balzer, "Routinization of the New Russians?" in The Russian Review, no. 62 Oanuary 2003): 15...