Postmodernist Moscow in the Prose of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin
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framing the story of an old lady obssessed by the foreign film “Waterloo
Bridge” within the political context of the post-Stalin cultural develop-
ments, Petrusˇevskaja brings to the fore the fact that politics develops
within textuality itself. In postmodernist vein, Petrusˇevskaja argues that
our identities are not the result of our imagination since they derive from
an existing history of narratives and styles. Petrusˇevskaja demonstrates
how delineation of Soviet cohesive society (based on the totalitarian
regime created by Stalin’s policies) into various groups and subcultures
leads to the volatility of contemporary visions of signifiers and texts.
The theme of artificial memory and historical amnesia also plays a
significant role in Pelevin’s novel “The Clay Machine-Gun” (the original
title of the novel is “Cµapaev i Pustota”, 1996). Thus Pelevin’s idea to in-
scribe Cµapaev, a popular children’s folk character, into urban modern and
postmodern space alongside television and cinema pop-stars (Arnold
Schwarzenegger, for example) manifests the writing of the city as a po-
tentially allegorical activity. It is as if Pelevin describes adventures which
present writing featuring a reality of multiple meanings, or a palimpsest.
As a result, one level of reality contains another, and gradually they deve-
lop into a faint image, the void, that Jacques Derrida defines as “chora”
(borrowing this concept from Plato’s “Timaeus”). Plato’s “chora” at its most
literal level signifies the notions of place, location and country. Derrida is
interested in the term as part of his deconstructive reading of texts. It can
be argued that Pelevin’s “The Clay Machine-Gun” also deconstructs the
multiplicity of meanings in Moscow as cultural construct highlighting the
notion of the void.
The interest of many postmodern critics in ‘chora’ derives from their
desire to find some terms that disturb the logic, the logos of the text they
study. The notion ‘chora’ is used often in their writings to signify the
trace of another text and locate a point of indeterminacy. According to
Elizabeth Grosz, the notion of ‘chora’ serves to produce a form of disem-
bodied femininity that writers use for the creation of their conceptual
vision of universe. Grosz explains: “The production of a (male) world –
the construction of an ‘artificial’ or cultural environment, the production
of an intelligible universe, religion, philosophy, the creation of true
knowledge and valid practices of and in that universe – is implicated in
systematic and violent erasure of the contributions of women, femininity
and the maternal” (Grosz in Watson and Gibson 1995, 55). The philoso-
phical models of Plato and Derrida depend on definitions of a femininity
deprived of its connections with the female and maternal body and made
to carry the burden of something that men cannot articulate. Pelevin’s
images of Moscow and Inner Mongolia are akin to the representation of
something unfathomable, voracious, disruptive, and displaced as discussed
8
Alexandra Smith
in Derrida’s works. If we take account of a tendency in Russian cultural
tradition to feminise the image of Moscow as maternal, then we can
suggest that both Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin attempt to re-define Moscow
as a traditional feminized image, seeking for it some new meanings. Their
dislocation of Moscow (into a world of fantasy and the supernatural)
resembles an allegorical dislocation of the Greek logos, testifying thereby
to the postmodernist project that develops the Enlightenment mode of
anti-authoritarianism and treats Nature and Reason as unneeded substi-
tutes for God. The vision of Moscow of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin as
infinite Other calls upon an ethical relationship and leads to opening the
space of liberating metaphysics.
Their portrayal of Moscow in the 1990s stands in sharp contrast to the
cultural constructs found in Russian realist and modernist texts. It does
not seem coincidental to see the highly scornful responses of some critics
to their writing. Some reviewers go so far as to suggest that Pelevin’s “The
Clay Machine-Gun” is comparable to a computer virus designed to destroy
Russian cultural memory. (By the same token neither are the novels of
Petrusˇevskaja virus-free.) Sergej Kornev denounces Pelevin’s obsession
with creating a text that could act as a virus to trigger a type of self-
destruction of the cognitive system in the minds of Pelevin’s readers
(Kornev 1997). Kornev’s responses to Pelevin’s prose are akin to Plato’s
profound suspicion of artificial memory and derive from the realisation
that postmodernism represents the deepening modern crisis that uncovers
the crisis in modernism itself. Mark Lipovetsky’s 2001 article on Russian
postmodernist literature also points to Pelevin’s acid attacks on Russian
cultural memory. According to Lipovetsky, Pelevin’s fiction contains
numerous polemical intersections with the modernist tradition (Lipo-
vetsky 2001). Lipovetsky compares Pelevin’s novel “Generation ‘P’” with
his previous novel “The Clay Machine-Gun”. Lipovetsky sees as antipodes
the decadent poet Piotr Pustota (Peter the Void) (the protagonist of “The
Clay Machine-Gun”) and Vavilen Tatarskij (central character of the novel
“Generation ‘P’”, former poet who writes the commercials). Peter has no
ability to distinguish between the authentic and fictitious realities that he
encounters. He welcomes as more authentic the world where he acts as a
decadent poet and as Cµapaev’s Commissar. Pelevin playfully suggests that
the Soviet films featuring war heroes can be seen as influencing Russian
views on masculinity and heroic identity. More importantly, Pelevin de-
plores the use of Soviet films for propaganda purposes. The name “Peter
the Void” might be seen as an allegorical allusion to Peter the Great’s radi-
cal modernisation of Russia that inspired Soviet leaders. On a philosophical
level, Pelevin’s novel might be read as a critical reassessment of the pro-
ject of Lenin and Stalin to purify the state on a utopian scale. The under-