Political Animals: Representing Dogs in Modern Russian Culture Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics
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Political Animals: Representing Dogs in Modern Russian Culture Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics Editors O.F. Boele S. Brouwer J.M. Stelleman Founding Editors J.J. van Baak R. Grübel A.G.F. van Holk W.G. Weststeijn VOLUME 59 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sslp Political Animals: Representing Dogs in Modern Russian Culture By Henrietta Mondry LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: the monument to Pavlov’s dog in St Petersburg (1935), photographed by Peter Campbell. On the initiative of Pavlov a monument to a dog was installed near the department of Physiology, in the garden of the Institute of experimental medicine, to pay a tribute to the dog’s unselfish service to biological science. Sculptor: Bespalov. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930710 issn 0169-0175 isbn 978-90-42-03902-5 (paperback) isbn 978-94-01-21184-0 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. To my son Ary for his love of dogs One is not obliged to love dogs, but it is advisable to ponder over the meaning of some dog stories. – Ilya Ehrenburg People, Years, Life. 1966 Contents Preface: Vladimir Durov’s dog story: A thematic capsule xv Introduction 1 Dog stories 3 How to approach the dog stories in Russian culture 10 Examining dog stories 20 Chapter structure 27 PART ONE: EXPLORING CRUELTY, INJUSTICE, AND THE SHIFTING HIERARCHIES BETWEEN DOGS AND HUMANS Chapter 1. When dogs were more expensive than people 31 The rich man’s dogs and the poor man’s honour: Alexander Pushkin’s ‘Dubrovskii’ 39 Dostoevsky’s sadistic landlords, villainous muzhiks, and animal and serf abuse in The Brothers Karamazov 46 A populist writer on serfdom and the dog breastfeeding plot: Vladimir Korolenko’s ‘On a Cloudy Day’ 53 The phantasmagorical world of dogs, dog killers and serf women in Velimir Khlebnikov’s ‘The Night before the Soviets’ 57 Chapter 2. ‘The Children’s Hour’: Cruelty to dogs 79 The functions of dogs vis-à-vis children in The Brothers Karamazov 81 Choosing the life of abuse: Chekhov’s ‘Kashtanka’ 93 Alexander Kuprin: girl dreams of an elephant, a good boy and a bad boy, and the dog in ‘The White Poodle’ 104 What do the real ‘children’s hour’ dog stories teach us? 112 Chapter 3. Degradation narratives: Dogs and humans in social and moral transformation 117 Degradation or elevation? Transformation into a dog language-reading madman: Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman 118 The picaresque tradition and social transformation: Petr Furman’s Transformation of a dog 127 viii Contents Animal commune after the October Revolution: Boris Pilnyak’s ‘A Dog’s Life: The Vicissitudes of Destiny’ 135 Times of famine – from socio-economic transformation to dog-eating degradation: A Dog’s Destiny 137 Moral degradation in Soviet times: Dog meat for dogs in the Leningrad siege 144 PART TWO: EXPLORING EMOTIONAL NEEDS: DOGS AND THEIR UNDERDOG PARTNERS Chapter 4. The fate of dogs in partnerships with the marginalised Other 149 Ivan Turgenev’s dogs and the politics of sexual transgression 152 Alexander Kuprin’s racialised dogs and scapegoats in ‘Gambrinus’ 170 White companion dogs and their fair ladies: Zamiatin and Chekhov 180 Chapter 5. Dogs and inmates in prison and Gulags: Writing and re-writing the humanistic canon 189 Ethnographic take on dogs in prison: Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead 191 Varlam Shalamov’s prison ‘Bitch Tamara’ 203 A guard’s story: Sergei Dovlatov’s dog eaters 209 PART THREE: DOGS IN THE SERVICE OF THEIR COUNTRY Chapter 6. Dogs and their masters in police and prison service: 1960s-1980s 217 Dogs and socialism with a human face: ‘Mukhtar’ by Izrail’ Metter 219 Dogs and socialism without a human face: Georgii Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan: the story of a guard dog 230 Prison guard dogs as nobody’s dogs in Sergei Dovlatov’s The Zone: Notes of a Prison Camp Guard 242 Chapter 7. The cult of the border guard dogs 249 Nikita Karatsupa and the cult of the border guard dogs 252 Contents ix High Stalinism of the 1930s and the making of an iconic dog in Dzhulbars 256 On the edge of the border of Stalinism and post-Stalinism: Frontier Post in the Mountains 260 Closing the Decade of Developed Socialism: the 1970s and The Border Guard Dog Alyi 264 From the defence of the Soviets to the defence of Russian borders 270 2010: The centenary of Karatsupa’s birth and the return of the cult of the Russian border guard dog 273 PART FOUR: TRANSITIONS, TRANSFORMATIONS, TRANSGRESSIONS Chapter 8. The hunter’s dog as hunted: White Bim Black Ear as the cult event of the Stagnation Era, 1970s-1980s 281 Cryptic code of canine genealogy: The Bible, Moses, Leo Tolstoy and cynology 284 Nostalgia for the past: the Russian forest, the aristocrat hunter and his dog 291 Animal symbolism of the Other in the 1970s: dogs versus cats 299 The blackness of White Bim and the whiteness of the hunted animals in the Village Prose 302 No hunting dogs: the post-Soviet parody in Peculiarities of the National Hunt 306 Chapter 9. Transformation narratives: physical, metaphysical, scientific 309 Woman-dog physical transfiguration in Fedor Sologub’s ‘The White Dog’ 311 The metaphysics of physical dog-human transformations in A Dog’s Destiny 319 Organ donation: a human liver for a dog? Maiakovskii’s ‘How I became a dog’ 330 Scientific or metaphysical transformation? Surgical experiments in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog 336 Towards Pavlov’s dogs 352 Postmodern dog-human transformation in the post-Soviet era: Oleg Kulik as Pavlov’s dog in the 1990s 353 x Contents Cosmic dogs in a post-Soviet parody: Victor Pelevin’s Omon Ra 359 Chapter 10. Sleeping with the animal: boundary crossing in life and art (from pre-Revolutionary modernism to post-Soviet postmodernism) 363 From Vasily Rozanov’s future of the Russian family to Kulik’s ‘Family of the Future’ 365 Nina Perebeeva’s human-dog family in Vladimir Tiul’kin’s Not About Dogs 377 Conclusion: Dogs are ‘good to think’ 381 The future dogs of the twenty-second century 385 Bibliography 391 Index 423 Illustrations Taxidermic dog Zapiataika xviii Oprichnik with a dog’s head attached to the saddle 7 Ivan Izhakevich. ‘The Exchange of Serfs for Dogs’, 1926 32 Nikolai Kasatkin. ‘Serf-actress exiled to breastfeed puppies’, 1911 36 The dog that Vladimir Durov thought he had killed, 1929 87 Viktor Borisov-Musatov. ‘Boy with a Dog’, 1895 92 Shooting of a mad dog, from Derkachev’s The Dog, 1883 114 Dog rescuing a child in England, from Derkachev’s The Dog 116 Pavel Fedotov. ‘An Aristocrat’s Breakfast’, 1849 130 When dogs were sold for meat; 1920s photograph 143 Vladimir Tsesler. City sculpture ‘Mu-mu’, Amsterdam 162 Contemporary city sculpture to Mumu in St Petersburg 169 Karatsupa’s search dog Indus, later named Ingus, 1935 255 The dog Dzulbars from the film Dzulbars, 1935 260 Briukhonenko’s experiment; Iskry nauki, 1928 338 Monument to ‘Pavlov’s dog’, St Petersburg, 1934 357 Monument to Laika, Moscow, 2008 359 Rozanov’s illustration of an Ancient Egyptian image 369 A Note on Transliteration In translating Russian, I have used the Library of Congress system, except for personal names commonly used in English, such as ‘Alexander Pushkin’ and ‘Leo Tolstoy’. In bibliographical references, however, I have used the conventional transliteration of personal names. Preface Vladimir Durov’s dog story: A thematic capsule Every Russian knows the name of the famous circus animal trainer Vladimir Durov (1863-1934). Everybody who goes to the circus to watch the clowns and trained animals thinks of Durov; every Russian circus and animal-training show is eager to proclaim its lineage from Durov. Durov’s elevated status is based on his reputation as a friend to all animals and as an operator who used kindness to make them do his bidding. Indeed, Durov is the father of a humane method of animal training. His brand of education using love and patience (Russian and Soviet animal trainers have institutionalised his name as a brand) has produced extraordinary results.1 Durov left a significant body of written material from which his method of training animals has been disseminated. He was the author of an autobiographical book Moi zveri (My Animals, 1929)2 and vari- ous scientific texts.3 The latter are based on his experiments on ani- mals in what he termed ‘zoopsychology’. These experiments were made jointly by Durov and biological scientists and physicians of the time, including the famous psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev (1857- 1927).4 The variety of animal species with which Durov worked was very broad, from rats to elephants, but his favourite animals were 1 Leonid Geller, “Brat’ia Durovy kak kul’turnaia mashina”, in Zveri i ikh re- prezentatsii v russkoi kul’ture. Eds Leonid Geller and Anastasiia Vinogradova de la Fortel, St Petersburg: Baltiiskie sezony, 2010, 326-341.