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Sorokin's Tridtsataia Liubov' Mariny and Tsvetaeva's Krysolov When Non-Negotiation is the Norm: Sorokin’s Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny and Tsvetaeva’s Krysolov Karin Grelz Сложные взаимоотношения с чужим словом во всех сферах культуры и деятельности наполняют всю жизнь человека.1 Marina Tsvetaeva’s Krysolov (The Ratcatcher) and Vladimir Sorokin’s Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny (Marina’s Thirtieth Love) are two innovative literary works in which the authors use the clashes of values and the on- going negotiations in everyday, vernacular Russian of their time for their own artistic purposes. Although one is representative of modernist and the other of postmodernist aesthetic practices, both relate to language as a producer of communal values, and both texts appear to be born out of an experience of suspicion of, or distrust in, the communicative situation as such. The second being apparently modelled upon the first — as will be suggested in the following — both works can be interpreted as decla- rations of a non-negotiative standpoint when it comes to the aesthetic dimension, and as demonstrations of the artist’s ability to escape, by the force of his or her own word, the world of social and ideological conflict and value-laden social languages. Marina’s Thirtieth Love Vladimir Sorokin’s Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny is dated as written be- tween 1982 and 1984, and the action is set in 1983.2 By this time the 1 Mikhail Bakhtin, 1986, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, Moscow, p. 367. 2 Vladimir Sorokin, 1998, Sobranie sochinenii v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1, Moscow, pp. 595–798. Quotations from Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny, abbreviated tlm, refer to this edition, with page numbers in brackets. WHEN NON-NEGOTIATION IS THE NORM 169 Brezhnev era had come to an end and the former kgb officer Andropov was head of state. Most of the dissidents had emigrated or been expelled abroad; Joseph Brodsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had already been living more than ten years in the US. This was the time of a quietpost festum, after the dissident turmoil of the 1960 and early 1970s, and it was dominated by material concerns and a minimum of expectations. The plan economy and corruption, in combination with the nomen- klatura system and the ongoing war in Afghanistan, kept hollowing out the Soviet economy and the morals of the citizens. People did not go to their jobs, in the big cities almost everyone knew how to change foreign currency into cheap roubles and the black market flourished. Still, no- body could foresee that the forthcoming collapse was so close. The secret service kept doing its job, and the saying from the seventies, that the only common activities you could devote yourself to without being suspicious in the eyes of the state were sexual, still seemed to be valid. The percent- age of divorces was extremely high and abortion was used as a contracep- tive, due to the shortage of other means of protection. In short, the moral “landslide” that had begun under the cover of mechanically repeated po- litical slogans in the Brezhnev era was now more acutely felt. Official artistic life was characterized by political and sexual puri- tanism, as in most totalitarian systems. In literature, Iurii Trifonov and Valen tin Rasputin were counted among the more daring writers, and it was still impossible to mention repressed authors like Lev Gumilev, Ev- genii Zamiatin or contemporary, taboo-breaking ones like the émigré Eduard Limonov. Meanwhile, any text by these authors, or by any other forbidden writer, could be found in samizdat or bought on the black mar- ket in foreign editions. Underground unofficial art had become a perma- nent institution, with its own clubs, exhibitions and journals, although not without repressive actions taken against them. Just as the dissidents had done in the sixties, these artists and writers kept in contact with the outside world through diplomats and journalists — not necessarily as a life-insurance, but at least in the hope of making some kind of living from their art that could make material life easier. Foreign publications, exhibitions about and books by forbidden, unofficial or emigrated Rus- sian artists had contributed to a new demand for this culture in the West. A rather big literary event in 1983 was the publication of the third and fourth volume of Tsvetaeva’s collected poetry by the New York pub- 170 KARIN GRELZ lishing house Russica.3 These books immediately appeared on the black market and contributed to a resurgent interest in Tsvetaeva’s poetry; those of her poems that had been banned or abbridged by Soviet censor- ship — among them Krysolov — now became accessible to a broader pub- lic. This fact cannot be overlooked in connection with Sorokin’s novel, the heroine of which carries the same name and patronym as Tsvetaeva: Marina Ivanovna. Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny describes an Odyssey around Moscow, mainly by taxi, made by the lesbian piano teacher Marina Ivanovna An- dreevna during three days in March 1983. She goes to see her colleagues and pupils, her lovers, friends and party as well as dissident acquaint- ances with whom she exchanges material assets and sexual favours. Dur- ing this trip, at the very bottom of the journey’s downward decadent spi- ral, Marina’s political ideas and ethical thought undergo a paradigmatic change. The journey ends with a final “homecoming” in a Soviet factory where Marina — a former enemy of the Soviet system — joins the work- ers’ collective and becomes a devoted communist. She breaks up with her old friends and old life-style, turns to collective means of transpor- tation, leaves her apartment and moves in with her new comrades in a dormitory. The detailed account of the journey is regularly interrupted by a ret- rospective narrative of Marina’s personal background and biography. This narrative informs the reader of Marina’s early sexual experiences in nursery school, how she used to watch her mother with a lover and how she was raped by a teacher at a pioneer camp. A central scene in this line of reminiscences is the description of how she was abused by her father during a summer vacation by the sea, and how she was left alone in the hotel as he committed suicide by drowning himself the following day. As a result of this, we learn, Marina has become incapable of experiencing an orgasm together with a man, but is still dreaming of the perfect meet- ing with a male individual who would render her that experience. Subsequently, there is the story of Marina’s first lesbian love affair and a catalogue of the twenty-eight following ones, brought to the fore by her finding a pink notebook in which she keeps photographs of them all. Fi- nally, recollections of how she became involved in the hippie movement and Moscow dissident circles in the seventies explain how she came to 3 Marina Tsvetaeva, 1983, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy v piati tomakh, vol. 3 & 4, New York. WHEN NON-NEGOTIATION IS THE NORM 171 adopt the dissident Solzhenitsyn as an idealized, Pugachev-like defender of the true Russia and some kind of Christ-like father figure to come that would heal her personal traumas. Recurrent recollections of dream sequences constitute a third level or dimension of the narrative, in which the past and the present are inter- twined. In one of these dreams, beginning on the island of Lesbos, he, that is, Marina’s ideal man in the guise of Solzhenitsyn, reproaches her for never really having loved anybody in her life. Shaken by this message, Marina instantly breaks up with her girlfriend, slaps her on the way out and embarks on a sentimental walk through the streets of Moscow. As some kind of ritual or transitional process, this is followed by two equally violent break-ups with old acquaintances, before Marina runs into the believing communist Sergei Nikolaevich Rumiantsev — an exact copy of Solzhenitsyn as a young man. This fateful meeting is crowned by a night with this Soviet soul in a dissident’s body, during which Marina gets her desired orgasm to the sound of the Russian national hymn. The next morning she accompa- nies Rumiantsev to his job and decides to leave the decadent life behind her and start working at the factory. The description of her life as a fac- tory worker and a happy Soviet citizen, who has found the meaning of life in working on fulfilling the plan, follows the dramaturgy of a typical socialist-realist novel. Initially, the text appears to be an ideal example of a neutral, bio- graphical account. It is told in the third person by an invisible narrator and with a dialogue bordering on the documentary. The careful descrip- tion of the heroine’s moral development puts it in the realm of the Bil- dungsroman, while the more explicit parts about Marina’s sexual experi- ences have more in common with the genre of soft-porn literature and its taboo-breaking ingredients, including that of the sexually interested child. In the end socialist realism seems to prevail. But the Komsomol girls’ dialogue gradually turns into a modernistic polyphony of interfer- ing voices in a veritable Virginia Woolf-like style, before finally giving way to a twenty-page monological-ideological text that seems to be taken directly from a news broadcast on Soviet radio in the 1980s. Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny can hardly be read as an example of any kind of realism — neither psychological, social nor socialist. It is not a typical Bildungsroman and it can scarcely pass even as a soft-porn novel. 172 KARIN GRELZ Rather, it is an affront to the conventional semantics of literary genre as such.
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