Postmodernist Moscow in the Prose of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin
11
Alexander Blok, Anna Axmatova and Marina Cvetaeva
1
. It was popular
with Russian émigré philosophers and historians whose works were re-
published in Russia in the 1990s. Some of the influential advocates of the
Eurasianist historiography in the 1990s Russia include Lev Gumilev and
Nikita Mixalkov. Commenting on the inherent Eurasianist hostility to-
wards Western cultural and political concepts, Charles J. Halperin explains:
“According to the Eurasianists, Eurasia was a self-contained geographic
entity whose boundaries coincided roughly with those of the Russian
Empire of 1914. […] The Bolshevik revolution was doomed, since Marx-
ism was but another excrescence of a decadent European civilisation of
which Russia should have no part” (Halperin 1982). One of the layers of
Pelevin’s palimpsest in “The Clay Machine-Gun” can be easily identified
as Eurasianist. It is strongly articulated in conversations between Serdjuk
and Kawabata, a Japanese businessman. Pelevin’s contemporary flâneur
Serdjuk stumbles across the semi-veiled Eurasian identity of the city space
in his ‘real’ and imaginary walks through Moscow. Thus, Kawabata
introduces Serdjuk to the idea of a sacred marriage between East and
West, attacking contemporary Russia for being too pragmatic to appreciate
such a metaphysical idea. Serdjuk describes contemporary Muscovites as
being unreceptive to this type of universal narrative. He criticises Mos-
cow’s fragmented state of affairs: “Life here nowadays is enough to make a
man give up on everything too. And as for traditions … well, some go to
different kind of churches, but of course most just watch the television
and think about money” (Pelevin 1999, 165). It is not surprising to see
Serdjuk suffering some amnesia when it comes to visiting the Moscow
cultural highlights canonised in Bulgakov’s novel “Master and Margarita”.
Pelevin portrays Serdjuk as a person free of the burden of memory,
achieved through heavy drinking: “Serdjuk downed another one and
unexpectedly found he had fallen into reminiscing about the previous
day – it seemed he’d gone on from Pusˇkin Square to the Clean Ponds, but
it was not clear to him why: all that was left in his memory was the
monument of Griboedov, viewed in an odd perspective, as though he was
looking at it from underneath a bench” (Pelevin 1999, 164f.). In this
passage we come across another deconstruction of modern ideas. It
appears that Serdjuk’s most important recollection of wandering around
Moscow has nothing to do with the object (the monument of Griboedov)
but with the manner of his gaze.
The odd perspective is in fact a device that Pelevin himself uses to
deconstruct the modernist image of the monument which has lost its
1
Although Blok is usually seen as a forerunner of the Eurasianist ideology, Cvetae-
va’s links with the Eurasianist movement should not be overlooked either. The Eu-
rasian aspect of Cvetaeva’s work is discussed in Smith, 2001.
12
Alexandra Smith
reference. Serdjuk’s visual image of Griboedov’s monument which he re-
captured in his memory “from underneath the bench” reminds us of
photo-images of Aleksandr Rodcˇenko, renowned for his innovative avant-
garde portrayals of Moscow in the 1920s-30s. Rodcˇenko and his fellow
artists El Lissitzky and Aleksej Gan represented a break with the tradition
inherent in the Constructivist principle of film-, photo-, or even
‘architecture’-montage that focuses on a chaotic moment and defines new
boundaries. Pelevin’s narrative evokes some Constructivist slogans – such
as “Constructivism is the present world-view” and “Everything is change-
able” – that manifested a radical frame of mind and a new way of looking
at things. The Constructivist outlook was rooted in a deconstructive idea
that divides, analyses, fragments and alienates. For Constructivists there
was almost no boundary between art and the everyday life they aestheti-
cised. They considered factory or household work more satisfying than
preoccupation with the esoteric art of high culture which, in their view,
was an escape from the harsh and dull routine of everyday life. Both
Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin appear to revive these principles in their fiction,
transforming Constructivist ideas into their own literary strategies that are
akin to Dziga Vertov’s montage-based experiments.
A recent revival of Vertov’s ideas on Constructivist film-making may
have contributed to growing interest in montage. A number of Vertov’s
slogans can be easily applied to the fiction of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin,
including such statements as “Long live the ordinary mortal, filmed in life
at his daily tasks!” and “Long live life as it is!” (Michelson 1984, 71). Both
Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin are preoccupied with the everyday life of or-
dinary Muscovites, whom they portray at their daily tasks. Thus, Petru-
sˇevskaja’s cycle of stories “Requiems” immortalises people in trivial situa-
tions and unremarkable surroundings, notably in crammed apartments or
suburban dachas. Pelevin also creates a gallery of engineers, factory wor-
kers, drop-outs, drunks and even lavatory cleaners, presented in his stories
as philosophers and even poets. For example, in “The Ninth Dream of
Vera Pavlovna” we come across two lavatory cleaners (Masˇa and Vera)
who discuss at their work place metaphysics, philosophy and modernist
literature, and who recite Fedor Sologub’s poetry. Gorbacˇev’s reforms
shatter their work environment, and one day their lavatories are privatis-
ed. As a result, music speakers playing Verdi, Mozart and Wagner are in-
stalled into the lavatories. The conjunction of classical music and lavatory
waterfalls is one of Pelevin’s most radical gestures. Some critics would find
his allegorical equation of Moscow with life in a public/semi-private
lavatory repulsive, anti-humanist and explosive. Commenting on similar
trends in postmodernist architectual designs to shock, Jenks provides an
objective explanation of new aesthetic forms which he defines as ‘New