Five Years That Shook The World by Harley D. Balzer

Author:Harley D. Balzer [Balzer, Harley D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History
ISBN: 9780429719103
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2019-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

The Shock of the New?

However unpropitious the current circumstances, original talents (in compliance with the unfathomable dynamics of artistic creativity) have materialized in the last few years (recall our fifth category of glasnost literature). Some, like Vladimir Makanin, have gained prominence rather late in their careers, while others have attracted a following with the publication of their first work (e.g., Mikhail Kuraev with Captain Dikshtein [1987]).16 Whereas the rise of certain authors (such as Tolstaia, who began writing in 1983) has been meteoric, others (such as Petrushevskaia, who tried to break into print in the 1960s)17 have struggled a decade or more to attain recognition or, as in the case of Alexander Ivanchenko, access to print. In its technically novel treatment of any and all aspects of life, the "new" prose has revived the modernist tradition long stifled by prescriptive Stalinist aesthetics and thus may more appropriately be characterized as "renewed" or "renovative." A grain of truth may be buried under the mountain of abuse heaped by Dmitrii Urnov on this "alternative" or, as he pseudo-ingenuously labels it, "bad" prose:18 Part of its appeal for Soviet readers (trained to read literature as encoded political statement) may indeed reside in the involuntary frisson produced by texts glamorized through prohibition (though that cannot explain the popularity of Tolstaia, who encountered no serious obstacles in getting published). More likely, however, the liberal intelligentsia welcomes "alternative prose" not because of its piquancy but as a promising liberation from hoary formulas-a chance for writers to pursue flights of individual imagination instead of adhering to collective stereotypes.

Radical differences in authorship, subject, and manner notwithstanding, the novellas and short stories (if not the novels) by the period's most gifted prosaists share a number of refreshing tendencies: a more subtle or original perspective on familiar phenomena; a focus on the inner world of human experience, with the external defamiliarized or relegated to the periphery; attentiveness to the stylistic, rather than ideological, aspects of prose; a scrambling of temporal and spatial categories; a propensity for irony and fantasy; a postmodernist explosion of intertextuality; enriched vocabulary; and a generally freer approach to language. The heterogeneous, unaffiliated group associated with this trend-Tolstaia, both Erofeevs, Kuraev, Valerii Popov and Evgenii Popov, Viacheslav P'etsukh, Ivanchenko, Valeriia Narbikova, the Viktor Konetskii of "Cat-Strangler Silver" (1987),19 and Andrei Bitov, especially in "Pushkin's Photograph (1799-2099)" (1987)20-has greater affinities with Vladimir Nabokov, Sasha Sokolov, and the writers of the 1920s than with its immediate Soviet predecessors. Most seem to have imbibed, at creative (re)birth, Siniavskii's prophetic intuition that the future of Russian literature lies not in a drab art of Purpose, but in an absurd, fantastic, phantasmagoric art of hypotheses (What Is Socialist Realism? [written in 1956]).

Kuraev's Captain Dikshtein splendidly illustrates how artistic complexity can vouchsafe a more nuanced treatment of a subject that seems doomed to simplification in the hands of overt polemicists. Captain Dikshtein comprises a lengthy "historical" account of the Kronstadt uprising, set within a short fictional frame. This rebellion against Communist rule by

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