Komiks: Comic Art in Russia

7. Autobiography in Post-Soviet Russian Comics: The Case of Nikolai Maslov

180 7 Autobiography in Post-Soviet Russian Comics The Case of Nikolai Maslov God have mercy on us all. How agonizingly difficult it is being Russian. — M axim Gork y The genre of autobiography, a staple of Western comics—especially of the underground and alternative persuasion—has been slow to develop in postSoviet Russia. This chapter will explore some of the reasons for why this is the case, through a reading of Nikolai Maslov’s comics memoir work and the scandal it provoked among komiksisty upon its publication in 2004 France. The scandal did not register among the Russian public at large, which had never heard of Maslov, nor in the Russian literary scene, as the work has to this day not been published in Maslov’s own country. The contretemps erupted instead within Russia’s tiny, fledgling, highly marginalized comics subculture . The indifference to the Maslov case among the general public only confirms the longstanding Russian bias against comics as a legitimate medium for adult themes—nothing new there. But the uniformly vehement—even virulent—antagonism against Maslov on the part of his fellow komiksisty says much not only about that group’s preconceptions regarding komiks; about the “right” way to get published; and the “proper” approach to depicting contemporary Russia in comics form. There was more at stake here. The Maslov case revealed how Russian self-conceptions—what it means to be a Russian—have splintered and changed since the collapse of Communism. Autobiography Literary critics, at least since the deconstructionist Paul de Man’s influential essay “Autobiography as Defacement,” have read the genre less as a referential 181 Autobiography in Post-Soviet Russian Comics document of “true-life” events, and more as a rhetorical mode of illusionistic autocreation . As de Man puts it in an oft-quoted passage: But are we so certain that autobiography depends on reference, as a photograph depends on its subject or a (realistic) picture on its model? We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium? (69, emphasis in original) The autobiographer/self-inventor presents, through an elaborate linguistic scheme, a unified “face” (or prosopon) to the reader, who plays along with the charade by accepting the story as referentially valid, clear, and delimitable. In prose autobiography , both writer and reader rely on ready-made cultural types, settings, and narrative logic to round out a coherent, decipherable version of reality. For Charles Hatfield, autobiography in comics poses unique challenges and opportunities to identity and truth, since by their hybrid visual-verbal nature comics problematize the very idea of “non-fiction” in ways neither prose nor the visual arts can manage. In Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Hatfield writes: “If autobiography has much to do with the way one’s self -image rubs up against the coarse facts of the outer world, then comics make this contact immediate , and graphic. We see how the cartoonist envisions him or herself; the inward vision takes an outward form. This graphic self-representation literalizes a process already implicit in prose autobiography, for . . . the genre consists less in faithfulness to outward appearances, more in the encounter between ‘successive selfimages ’ and the world” (114).1 “The cartoon self-image, then,” Hatfield concludes, “seems to offer a unique way for the artist to recognize and externalize his or her subjectivity” (115).2 Maslov Nikolai Maslov (born 1954) hails from a working-class family (his father was a telephone lineman), in rural Russia near Novosibirsk, Siberia. Shy and unassuming , he lost his father at the age of ten. As a young man Maslov worked various jobs, including construction, did his military service in Mongolia, attended a local art institute for one year, and eventually moved to Moscow in the 1970s to work in a bakery and a gallery, delivering Lenin portraits. Following the death of his brother Oleg, and in response to numerous personal setbacks and spiritual malaise , he fell into alcoholism and severe depression before winding up in a mental 182 Close Readings hospital. He recovered, with his wife raised two daughters, and for several years has worked as a night watchman in a...