Postmodernist Moscow in the Prose of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin
21
create another. Just as in fashion where the hallmark of the product is not
elaboration, but novelty and impact, authors like Petrusˇevskaja and Pe-
levin need to rely on new dreams and re-configurations of dreams pro-
vided by mass culture. They examine the banal and identify themselves
with banal objects. It would not be far-fetched to compare their vision of
writing to Warhol’s self-representation of himself as a machine that
produces everything machine-like and aspires to create all the objects sim-
ilar to each other. To this end, Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin identify them-
selves with machine-like contemporary Moscow which evokes the same
desires of consumption in all its citizens. As Petrusˇevskaja admits, “come-
dy is not a genre, it’s a success” (Petrusˇevskaja 1993, 96). In order to
achieve this success Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin need Moscow as much as
Moscow needs them.
It is also useful to bear in mind that from the linguistic point of view it
is necessary to have space to create satire. As Kristeva explains: “Any spa-
tial representation provided from within a universal language is necessary-
ly subject to teleological reason, contrary to what ‘romantic minds’ might
maintain, attracted as they are to the ‘mythico-magical’ […] It is hence-
forth clear that meaning’s closure can never be challenged by another
space, but only by a different way of speaking: another enunciation,
another literature” (Kristeva 1980, 281). In fact the image of the child-
like, infantile laughing Moscow we encounter in the fiction of Petrusˇev-
skaja and Pelevin could be explained in terms of the mother-child re-
lationship studied by Kristeva in relation to language development:
“During the period of indistinction between ‘same’ and ‘other’, infant and
mother, as well as between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, while no space has yet
been delineated (this will happen with and after the mirror stage-birth of
the sign), the semiotic chora that arrests and absorbs the motility of the
anaclitic facilitations relieves and produces laughter” (Kristeva 1980, 284).
Furthermore, Kristeva points to the fact that children lack sense of hu-
mour, but they laugh easily “when motor tension is linked to vision (a
caricature is a visualization of bodily distortion, of an extreme, exagger-
ated movement, or of an unmastered movement”; when a child’s body is
too rapidly set in motion by the adult […]; when a sudden stop follows a
movement” (ibid.). Given this semiotic and psychoanalytical explanations
of the origin of laughter, it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that
caricaturised images of Moscow in the works under discussion are the
most adequate forms of the representation of a newly born Russian capital
learning to speak and create its new symbolic language, and filling the
void with laugher in the meantime.
It could be added that the urban tales of Moscow told by Petrusˇevskaja
and Pelevin are stories about strangers, strange fantasies or of estrange-
22
Alexandra Smith
ment. One of the striking features of these contemporary urban narra-
tives is the use of foreigners, immigrants to Moscow, children, or elem-
ents of children’s literature genres (horror tales, and wonder tales). Fur-
thermore, there is a strong tendency to depict poverty and violence (in
such narratives as “The Time: Night”, “Little Sorceress”, “The Clay Ma-
chine-Gun”, “The Ninth Dream of Vera Pavlovna”, for example). Raban’s
“Soft City” offers a useful explanation of this predominantly urban pheno-
menon, pointing to the interconnectedness between poverty and vio-
lence inasmuch as both relate to people’s attitudes towards strangers: “If a
city can estrange you from yourself, how much more powerful can it de-
tach you from the lives of other people, and how deeply immersed you
become in the inaccessibly private community of your own head” (Raban
1974, 2). It can be argued that Petrusˇevskaja’s story “Little Groznaja” is a
prime example of such an act of alienation. It is an allegorical depiction of
the disentegration of the urban utopia: if in ancient times and in the
middle ages cities were built to protect their citizens from strangers and
foreigners, in modern and postmodern times the grammar of modern life
has changed dramatically. City architecture exemplifies the absolute
strangeness of city life, triggering newcomers to abandon hope of holding
on to their old values and their old symbolic language. Petrusˇevskaja’s
Groznaja represents, therefore, a newcomer from the Caucasus, who
would not abandon her hope to preserve her world of family values and
moral imperatives. This character may be seen as a veiled allusion to
Stalin, too, who withdrew from the city into his own fantasy world.
Given Raban’s explanation that the postmodern city is soft, amenable
to a dazzling and libidinous variety of lives, dreams, interpretations, it be-
comes possible to detect a tendency in Petrusˇevskaja’s and Pelevin’s nar-
ratives to explore the very plastic qualities of post-Soviet Moscow. They
see it as the city that liberates human identity but at the same time as a
space vulnerable to psychosis and totalitarian nightmare, suggesting there-
by in the style of Plato that the city’s discontinuity favours both instant
villains and heroes. It might bring to the fore the displaced subject’s vio-
lent, sub-realist expression of his panic, his envy and his hatred for stran-
gers. In this respect, Petrusˇevskaja’s protagonist in “Little Groznaja” may
be seen as a protector of the Platonist/Stalinist ideal of space which repre-
sents the human ideal of reasoning and order. Her other protagonist Anna
(who appears in her novel “Time: Night”) also functions as the protector
of her own highly organised Moscow space which she perceives as being
threatened by immigrants (whom she sarcastically labels as representatives
of the Whole Russia) and chaos from the outside world. In other words,
Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin also represent Moscow as the embodiment of
hope which turned into a pursued dream, wanting and destructive.
Postmodernist Moscow in the Prose of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin
23
As Petersburg did in nineteenth-century Russian literature, Moscow
acquired a new image and meaning in the works under discussion here. It
is a vibrant and dynamic city, not a grandmother admired by Gogol’ or
Pusˇkin, not an embodiment of eternal Holy Russia (portrayed by Cve-
taeva in a cycle “Poems about Moscow”), but a city of intense theatricality
and of a vast anonymity, where it is possible to abandon people, be they
the poor, the minorities, or the immigrants. Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin
present the city as melodrama, a reminder of lost paradise, spoiled by rapid
modernisation and industrialisation. Theatres, TV personalities, prosti-
tutes, poets, singers act in their narratives as signs of modernity. The city
space is a totalising space which inspires people to act, to put themselves
on show and to imitate. The image of urban everyday life mocks Plato’s
utopian vision of a socially engineered public space cherished by Stalin.
(Plato objected to drama, because it corrupts the actor, seeing imitation as
a major vice to be stamped out of the city.) The urban inhabitants por-
trayed by Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin have all the qualities of the lowest
sort of actor ready to imitate anything, any part he/she offered, of unique
goodness and unique evil, as symbolised by Val’ka Valkyrie and Barbie
Masˇa. The narrators present themselves as estranged newcomers who ex-
perience both amazement and horror when entering city life. Their nar-
rators cultivate child-like qualities since any newcomer must be stripped
of his/her past in order to appear innocent of everything except a humbl-
ing consciousness of his/her own innocence and vulnerability. Petrusˇev-
skaja and Pelevin use such characters to expose the theatricality of the
city that they see as a collection of images and a rich source of textuality
shaped by the post-Soviet mass media. They deconstruct the various
meanings of Moscow in order to underpin unnamed, maternal space
(“chora”) hidden in between its various layers of meaning.
Taking account of Viktor Sµklovskij’s examination of estrangement in
the context of the literature of the Enlightenment, it is possible to trace a
similar ideological impulse in the works of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin to
relate space to the ontological gesture of expanding knowledge. Their
images of the void suggest that their aestheticising becomes the object of
their writing, leading to the predominance of the oxymoron. From the
semantic point of view, the oxymoron produces an empty reference, be-
cause it is based on two meanings which exclude each other. The object
of such an oxymoronic discourse exists only as a verbal expression, lacking
the object to which it should refer
3
. Such a discourse is lacking an object
of reference as something which corresponds to real life. In other words,
3
Thus, for example, Pelevin’s novel “Cµapaev i Pustota” is impicitly oxymoronic: its
title can be read as Cµapaev and the void, representing history and anti-history (i.e. a
denial of history).
24
Alexandra Smith
the anti-mimetic discourse of Petrusˇevskaja’s and Pelevin’s fiction leads to
an interesting paradox: they inscribe a Moscow into the text which does
not exist as a totalising space any more. It is a product of their fantasy and
a cultural construct. In their attempts to inscribe Moscow they could be
compared to Cµexov’s three sisters who are estranged from their immediate
environment and get caught in the void, never to reach their desired
destination. The question of estrangement that possesses aesthetic poten-
tial, has been discussed in the writings of Mixail Baxtin, who explains out-
sideness as the possibility to finalise an event. In Baxtin’s view, the writer’s
work takes place on a boundary between one self and another, which
gives a form to inner life from outside, from another consciousness: “To
find an essential approach to life from outside – this is the task an artist
must accomplish” (Baxtin in Emerson 1997, 211). Caryl Emerson links this
presumption to the fact that the Russian sense of tradition is inclusive: “It
liberates the artist from the burdensome mandate to create continually
new content and form, and thus from the need to destroy tradition in
order to find one’s own voice” (Emerson 1997, 212). In light of Baxtin’s
rejection of the aesthetic of escapism and hedonism that views the philo-
sophy of ‘art for art’s sake’ as a dead end which leads to creative crisis, it
could be fruitful to use Baxtin’s philosophy of the individual conscious act
as having implications for the narratives discussed here. Baxtin suggests
that only by means of an individual act could the given individual become
an author of his/her own life, starting to resemble a work of art. As
Emerson notes, “In his view, aesthetic or art-generating activity is distin-
guished from other activity in our everyday lives (practical tasks, business,
dreams, games, and fantasy) by one overwhelming factor: the presence of
a spectator, an outsider” (Emerson 1997, 216f.). Baxtin warns, however, of
a crisis of authorship which derives from escapism into aesthetics. He
offers instead a new model of the author who reconciles himself/herself
with dialogue, which Emerson defines as a cautiously interactive model
(Emerson 1997, 219). This is precisely what Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin are
trying to achieve, by engaging in continuous interaction with a multi-
voiced Moscow. They are not writers in exile in the style of Pasternak or
Bulgakov any more, they are liberated reporters of everyday life of the
city they belong to, trying to make sense out of reality through
images of
the ‘soft’ city they can control and test.
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Alexandra Smith
(alexandra.smith@ed.ac.uk)
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