Postmodernist Moscow in the Prose of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin
3
It appears that both Petrusˇevskaya and Pelevin share the belief in an
effacement of history and in Moscow’s special role in Russian cultural and
political life. These writers’ ‘hyper-real’ portrayal of Moscow draws not on-
ly on Russian modernist narratives (produced by Platonov, Pasternak, Ax-
matova, Cvetaeva, and Bulgakov) but also on the images of the Russian
capital from the media of the 1960s and 1990s. There is thus a sense of
continuity, from the modernist literature of the 1920s-40s through to the
present period. The novels of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin (especially “The
Little Sorceress” and “The Clay Machine-Gun”) present Moscow of the
post-Perestrojka period as a palimpsest that turns everyday existence into a
confusing experience. Their narratives also evoke the sense of estrange-
ment from the symbolic universe of codes permeated with automatism.
As a result, most of their protagonists feel displaced from their immediate
environment and identify themselves with foreigners whose understand-
ing of reality is based on the arbitrary reading of the signs and objects of
everyday life. It is not coincidental that Petrusˇevskaja’s novel “The Little
Sorceress” – which evolves around the notion of estrangement – was in-
cluded into a book of post-Soviet wonder tales “The Real Fairy Tales” that
appeared in Moscow in 1997. Thus, for example, in one of the wonder
tales – “The Golden Ordinary Cloth” – Petrusˇevskaja depicts a scholar’s
unfortunate adventures in finding an ancient magic cloth (which could
have been used as a flag at some stage) while climbing a mountain in an
exotic East Asian location. He fails in his attempts to sell this cloth to the
British Museum, Sotheby’s and a television company, and he ends up
working in a museum as a warden. Newspapers published numerous
stories about his miraculous escape from an earthquake and the effects of
the earthquake on a distant South-Asian village’s locals (they became
dumb), so most of the visitors come to look not at “some pots and rusty
axes but at the professor himself” (Petrusˇevskaja 1997, 172). In humorous
manner, Petrusˇevskaja suggests that the media-driven modernity turned
this scholar into a true celebrity: there are rumours that from time to time
the professor flies as a bird to these East Asian mountains to work as a
librarian for the local king. Yet the boundary between the real and unreal
is laughed away in the narrator’s statement about the authenticity of the
whole story: “I helped him to get a job in this museum. His old mum
asked me. She is my friend. And he needs to earn money somehow”
(ibid.).
It appears that, in the works of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin, writing as
such is designated as secondary in relation to speech and meaning, to the
extent that writing loses its intrinsic link with signification and becomes
allegorical. The allegorical aspect of writing has profound implications for
the notion of space shaped by artificial memory, or ‘hypomnesis’. Accord-
4
Alexandra Smith
ing to John Lechte, artificial memory, which is supposedly supplementary,
or secondary, to lived memory, can serve as a kind of personal code con-
structed for this sole purpose of recalling lived memory. (Lechte in Wat-
son and Gibson 1995, 104). In other words, the loss of living memory
gives way to idiosyncratic mnemonics of space. This is achieved by Petru-
sˇevskaja and Pelevin through the extensive use of the fantastic in their
narratives that depict everyday incidents in Moscow as being entwined
with the supernatural and with urban fantasy. In their quest for new ways
of cognising reality, Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin abandoned the more uni-
versal language of Russian modernists. They make their readers believe
that history in the postmodern age is not a means by which we make
sense of society and link events to each other. Both Petrusˇevskaja and
Pelevin share the same goal: to instil into the minds of their readers a new
perspective on the collectivity of idiolects. Their strategy is to use mem-
ory and the past as positive catalysts for invention, re-defined in the con-
text of the aesthetics of popular entertainment that presents history as a
mere resource of images waiting to be used for recreational or decorative
purposes.
The postmodern notion of ‘radical eclectism’ (Jencks and Kropf 1997,
131) helps identify the new ‘grammatology’ of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin
that brings to the fore playful constructions, radical forms of estrangement
and double-coding aimed at professionals and populace. Their linguistic
games testify to the need in a pluralist culture for an eclectic design insep-
arable from the notion of simultaneity that intensifies the perception of
urban everyday life. It partly echoes some trends in Moscow’s post-Soviet
architecture labelled as ‘Luzˇkov baroque’, bringing together the Moscow
mayor’s cultural policies and current Muscovite popular taste. Just as con-
temporary Russian architects, Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin use double-cod-
ing in their works, in order to satisfy the taste both of a wide readership
and literary critics. Thus, one of Pelevin’s stories “The Ninth Dream of
Vera Pavlovna” can be read both as parody on Nikolai Cµernysˇevskyj’s
novel “What Is To Be Done?” and as a trivial story of the everyday life of
Vera, an ordinary Moscow lavatory cleaner. In “The Little Sorceress” the
preoccupation with double-coding is also strongly pronounced: Petrusˇev-
skaja’s protagonists Barbie Masˇa and Valka Valkyrie have a double identity
and highlight the dynamic relationship between low and high cultural
traditions. To this end, Petrusˇevskaja’s and Pelevin’s aspirations to establish
radical eclectism as a popular mode of writing brings together melodram-
atic and heroic, reflecting thereby on the post-Soviet human subject’s loss
of the sense of a meaningfully defined place in history. Both Petrusˇevska-
ja and Pelevin rely on hypomnesis that highlights the sense of disorien-
tation. Their urban writing conveys a message that the process of creating