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Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the Fiction of Martin Amis, Nicholas Shakespeare and Carl Tighe

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Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the Fiction of Martin Amis, Nicholas Shakespeare and Carl Tighe Michael Szczekalla ‘Under Western Eyes’: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the Fiction of Martin Amis, Nicholas Shakespeare and Carl Tighe The implosion of the Soviet Union and its aftermath has attracted a number of British writers of fiction, among them Martin Amis, Nicholas Shakespeare and Carl Tighe. This article tries to assess their contribution to the transformation of cultural memory by focussing on the dialectics of blindness and insight that results from a foreign perspective. It is a perspective that has been shaped through travelling and/or (reliance on) scholarly research, sometimes in combination with long-standing political commitments. Martin Amis’s House of Meetings is to be given pride of place as it is a good example of all three. Enmeshed in his past, its guilt-ridden octogenarian narrator describes himself as a ‘Stakhanovite’ shock writer, who paid dearly for his complicity in the crimes of the Stalin era. At the end of his life, the former Gulag inmate is left with the self- imposed task of bequeathing what he calls the ‘festering memoirs of an elderly relative’ to his unsuspecting American stepdaughter. Though it may be difficult to compare this fictional auto- biography to the authentic survivors’ literature produced by Russian authors, it deserves our attention as an attempt to transform the Gulag into a trans-national lieu de mémoire. 1. The Dialectics of Blindness in Insight ‘My eyes, in the Conradian sense, have stopped being Western and started being Eastern’, the narrator of Martin Amis’s House of Meetings (2006) comments on his final return to Russia where he intends to die.1 The sombre fictional autobiography, which unites a prison with a love plot, was inspired by Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History (2003). It was preceded by the author’s Koba the Dread (2002) a politico-historical essay on Stalinism and the delusions of Western intellectuals, which con- cludes with a letter addressed to his father’s ghost. Like Julian Barnes’s The Porcupine (1992), Tibor Fischer’s Under The Frog (1992), Nicholas Shake- speare’s Snowleg (2004), Carl Tighe’s Burning Worm (2001) and even Ian McEwan’s somewhat earlier The Innocent (1990). House of Meetings allows us to study what happens when cultural memory crosses national boundaries, when it is appropriated by authors who have been reared in a different culture and who write with audiences in mind that cannot be assumed to share their interest, in this case, in the recent past of Eastern Europe and Russia. These authors have been audacious in more than one respect. How can Martin Amis, one may ask, hope to be able to cope with the ‘incredibly rich 1 Martin Amis, House of Meetings (New York: Vintage International, 2008), p.15. 398 Michael Szczekalla body of Russian survivors’ literature’?2 The answer depends not only on the intrinsic merit of these literary documents but also on the relevance accorded to them in Russia and elsewhere. In her epilogue to Gulag, Applebaum writes of present-day Russia that its secret police as well as its judges, politicians, and business elite do not appear to be haunted by memories of the past.3 It is probably safe to say that the survivors’ literature produced by Russian au- thors does not get the attention it deserves. And although the conservative backlash under Putin has not remained without reactions among the cultural elite, witness Vladimir Sorokin’s remarkable Den’ Oprichnika [A Day in the Life of an Oprichnik] (2006) – a dystopian novel about Russia in the year 2026, whose title echoes Solzhenitsyn’s famous account of a day in the life of a Gulag prisoner – the cultural memory of Russia is far too important to be considered a matter of purely national concern. Its appropriation by non- Russians writing in a European context should therefore hardly come as a surprise. Any attempt to assess the contribution of British authors to the production and transformation of the cultural memory of Russia is bound to focus on the dialectics of blindness and insight that results from a foreign perspective. It is a perspective that has been shaped through travelling and/or (reliance on) scholarly research, sometimes in combination with long-standing political commitments. House of Meetings is to be given pride of place because, of the English novels written in the aftermath of the Soviet Empire’s breakdown, it is not only completely uninhibited and fearlessly analytical, but also the bleakest and most disturbing fictional account of the havoc wrought by totali- tarianism.What these historical novels have in common, however, is the fact that they exhibit particularly intriguing forms of genre crossing. Their generic affiliations range from tragedy (Amis, Barnes) via comedy (Fischer) and romance (Shakespeare) to spy fiction (McEwan) and fictional memoirs (Amis, Tighe). And though thematically as well as geographically they could hardly be more diverse, covering not only the Soviet Union but most of its former satellite states, these novelistic experiments seem to be linked in a common endeavour, whose success depends on the extent to which the dia- lectics of blindness and insight is an enabling one. For reasons of space, this article concentrates on Tighe, Shakespeare and, above all, Amis. 2. Burning Worm Carl Tighe’s Burning Worm comes across as authentic on the deprivations and the squalor caused by the planned economies of Eastern Europe, in this 2 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004), p.511. 3 Cf. ibid., p.512. .
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