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Parody and Repudiation of Soviet Historiography in the Works

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Parody and Repudiation of Soviet Historiography in the Works View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository Novel Histories: Repudiation of Soviet Historiography in the Works of Iurii Trifonov, Vladimir Makanin, and Liudmila Ulitskaia Jenne Powers A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Chapel Hill 2009 Approved by: Beth Holmgren Radislav Lapushin Madeline Levine Christopher Putney Lawrence Feinberg ABSTRACT Jenne Powers Novel Histories: Repudiation of Soviet Historiography in the Works of Iurii Trifonov, Vladimir Makanin, and Liudmila Ulitskaia (Under the direction of Madeline Levine and Beth Holmgren) Aspects of Stalinist historiography have influenced the style of late-Soviet and post-Soviet Russian prose fiction. Through a simplified linear plot, archetypically heroic and villainous characterizations, and catechismal rhetoric, the Soviet leadership manipulated Russian history to justify their own power. Soviet historiographical methods of emplotment and characterization as well as narrative and rhetorical devices form a stratum of meaning in the fiction of Iurii Trifonov, Vladimir Makanin, and Liudmila Ulitskaia. These three writers polemicize with the style and substance of Soviet historiography, but they do not participate in a postmodern rejection of the artist’s potential role as historian. These three author’s fictional plots counteract the teleological plot of official Soviet history. The prose fiction of Trifonov, Makanin, and Ulitskaia disavows the linear progress plot through fragmentation. The actors in the dramas of Soviet historiography are typically collectives: peasants, workers, and the Party. The characters in the works I will present by Trifonov, Makanin, and Ulitskaia reverse this choice of character. Their characters tend to be anything but heroic; they are ii failures, underdogs, and underachievers. They are foremost individuals, however, alienated from the collective and acting, or refusing to act, according to expectations or rational laws. This prose also abounds in metaphors and symbols for the passage and effects of time. Natural images such as fire and flood, evocative emblematic emotions, such as Makanin's feeling of being "left behind," and dream imagery all serve to personalize history. Finally, official Soviet histories were narrated by a single, authoritative voice. A consistent feature of the novels and longer works of Trifonov, Makanin, and Ulitskaia is the presence of multiple narrators within single, unified works. The presence of voices in first and third person in each of these works forces the reader to accept not only multiple viewpoints, but also multiple ways of telling the stories of the past. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the Fulbright Association for funding my research in Mosow and the Graduate School of the University of North Carolina for funding a year of writing. I am also grateful to Madeline Levine for her assistance in the completion of this project and especially for her wise advice. Beth Holmgren’s patience and persistence truly made this dissertation possible. Finally, I thank my parents and my husband for their encouragement. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Russian Literature as History / Russian History as Literature………. 1 Chapter One: Poetics of Soviet Historiography……………………………………… 27 Chapter Two: Trifonovian Counterdevices…………………………………………… 57 Chapter Three: Makanin’s Creation of Community…………………………………. 116 Chapter Four: Ulitskaia’s Privatizations of the Soviet Past…………………………. 151 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………. 201 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………… 207 v INTRODUCTION: Russian History as Literature / Russian Literature as History Iurii Valentinovich Trifonov (1925-1981), Vladimir Semenovich Makanin (b. 1937), and Liudmila Evgen’evna Ulitskaia (b. 1943) – three writers with diverse careers and divergent critical receptions – share an important preoccupation with the Soviet past. What links these writers and separates them from many of their peers is an obsession not only with representing the past through fiction, but also with interrogating the forms in which history is written. Soviet history figures as a perpetual background and theme of their prose – as it has done and does still for many Russian writers in the post-Stalin era. Trifonov, Makanin, and Ulitskaia stand out from other fictionalizers of the recent past because of the discernable presence of Soviet historiography in their prose fiction: these three writers engage in a persistent polemic with the methods of emplotment, characterization, and narration as well as the exploitation of conventional imagery typical of the Soviet writing of history. The entire framework for examining Soviet history changed a decade after Trifonov’s death in 1981. Makanin and Ulitskaia came to prominence in a post- Soviet Russian literary marketplace that bore little resemblance to the Soviet command system Trifonov struggled with. Bringing two post-Soviet writers together with a Soviet writer in a single study of novelizations of the Soviet era is an unconventional choice; nearly all contemporary Russian critics represent the Soviet and post-Soviet eras as inimical to one another. For some, the contemporary scene embodies freedom, experimentation, and discovery; for others, contemporary literature manifests loss and travesty.1 Well-known novelist and literary critic, Viktor Erofeev, in a 1997 preface to his anthology of contemporary Russian writing, proclaimed Soviet literature – both official and unofficial – dead: В конце 80-х годов история советской литературы оборвалась. Причина ее смерти насильственна, внелитературна. Советская литература была оранжерейным цветком социалистической государственности. Как только в оранжерее перестали топить, цветок заявил, потом засох. Симметричный ей цветок литературы сопротивления также захирел; они были связаны единой корневой системой. (11) Erofeev embraces and promotes apolitical, anti-ideological literature that could not have existed within the binary system of official and dissident literature that prevailed throughout the Soviet era. I take issue with Erofeev on two counts. First, the black-and-white distinction between official Soviet literature and dissident literature is belied by the very careers of writers such as Iurii Trifonov, who published within the system without completely compromising with it. Second, the fall of the Soviet Union did not necessarily produce a sharp break in literary tradition, as the careers of Vladimir Makanin and Liudmila Ulitskaia will 1Evgeniia Shcheglova blames the worst of Soviet literature for the public’s taste in mass market fiction (“Nynche vse naoborot” 42-43). For other critics who disparage the contemporary literary scene, see Dubin and Adamovich. For critics who defend the quality and gravity of contemporary literature see Natalia Ivanova’s essays collected in the volume Skrytyi siuzhet as well as “Bandersha i sutener,” Remizova, and Slavnikova. For objective studies on the changes in reading habits, see Levina and Gudkov. 2 illustrate. Makanin and Ulitskaia continue many of the artistic methods pioneered by Trifonov, even in the absence of the conditions of repression and censorship that gave rise to them. Although I cannot make the argument that Trifonov directly influenced Makanin or Ulitskaia, I can demonstrate that they share a remarkably similar set of historical fictional techniques and by analyzing the efficacy of these techniques in polemicizing with Soviet narratives of the past, I can demonstrate an important line of continuity between late Soviet and post- Soviet Russian prose fiction. In the same essay, Erofeev writes that post-Soviet Russian literature no longer follows the tradition of humanism: that literature no longer has a high moral status. He rejects Russian literature’s traditional function as philosophy, religion, political tract, and – most important for this project – historical text (29- 30). While this is in many ways true – the writer may no longer be a prophet or moral guide – it is not completely accurate. I argue that Russian writers still play the role of historian and continue to voice the necessity for an ethical treatment of the past. Both Makanin and Ulitskaia continue in the tradition of Trifonov as undisputedly serious writers who disregard the demands of censorship or the market. Trifonov demonstrated that the writer could be a historian and an ethical one even within the Soviet system; Makanin and Ulitskaia maintain that role of the writer despite market pressures and ever-changing public taste. 3 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND The practice of blending history and literature and reading literature as history (and history as literature) is not a uniquely Russian phenomenon, although the high status accorded literature in extra-literary fields in Russia is unusual. The work of Hayden White launched the practice of applying literary theory to historiographical writing. White asserts that history follows a process of “emplotment” and is narrated in the same way as literary prose.2 History and literature have similar goals, according to White. White sums up the implications of his work in a recent essay entitled “Historical Discourse and Literary Writing”: . in general, literature – in the modern period – has regarded history not so much as its other as, rather, its complement
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