Russian Culture Center for Democratic Culture 2012 The Aesthetic Code of Russian Postmodernism Mark Lipovetsky Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/russian_culture Part of the Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons, and the Slavic Languages and Societies Commons Repository Citation Lipovetsky, M. (2012). The Aesthetic Code of Russian Postmodernism. In Dmitri N. Shalin, 1-36. Available at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/russian_culture/19 This Article is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Article in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Article has been accepted for inclusion in Russian Culture by an authorized administrator of Digital Scholarship@UNLV. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Aesthetic Code of Russian Postmodernism [1] Mark Lipovetsky Introduction Postmodernist discourse has become central to literary criticism in the 1990s. Unlike many other literary discourses, it was never formally announced, yet beginning in the late 1980s (with Mikhail Epstein’s articles) it took over almost all literary publications and effectively led to a new polarization of literary forces. If, during the first years of Perestroika, literary and cultural factions were divided primarily along political lines, with Western liberal sympathizers and anti-Communists on one side, and nationalist defenders of Communism on the other, then by the middle of the 1990s debate about postmodernism had split the liberals into those who sided with postmodernism and those who backed the “realist tradition.” For example, while the journal Znamia [The Banner] welcomed postmodernist experiments in its pages, such pioneers of 1960s liberalism and the dissident movement of the 1970s and ‘80s as the journals Novyi Mir [New World] and Kontinent [The Continent] tried to exclude the anti- realists in every possible way. [2] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a standard- bearer of Russian anti-Communism from the 1960s onward, expresssed his indignation regarding postmodernism in 1993: Thus we witness, over history’s various thresholds, a recurrence of one and the same perilous anti-cultural phenomenon, with its rejection of and contempt for all foregoing traditions, and with its mandatory hostility toward whatever is universally accepted. Before, it burst upon us with the fanfares and gaudy flags of ‘futurism’; today the term ‘postmodernism’ is applied. There is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative -- ’the world as text,’ a text any postmodernist is willing to compose. How clamorous it all is, but also -- how helpful. [3] At the same time, even analysts and defenders of postmodernism could not unite; some, such as Mikhail Epstein [4] and Boris Grois [5] , delineated Russian postmodernism as a small circle of Moscow conceptualists, while others, such as Viacheslav Kuritsyn [6] , ascribed to postmodernism almost all at least somewhat significant literary phenomena, including the selfsame Solzhenitsyn. A third group, which included the critic Vladimir Novikov, refused to view Russian postmodernism as an independent literary event at all, and found in it only evidence of the modernist and avant-garde aesthetics. [7] In the end, postmodernist discourse exceeded the boundaries of literature itself and became a vivid illustration of intellectual chaos, as the subject of discourse became as myriad and nebulous as its language. Minister of the Interior Anatolii Kulikov (who could hardly be considered an academician) was not so far off the mark when he publicly reacted to some absurdly convoluted situation in 1997 with the words “This is some kind of postmodernism!” [8] The present author has also weighed in on these arguments and even wrote a book on Russian postmodernist prose. [9] In this article I would like to summarize some of this protracted discourse and examine Russian postmodernism from the semiotic viewpoint, as one of the crucial crossroads of Russian cultural dynamics in the twentieth century. I would like to argue that, unlike Western postmodernism, the Russian variety did not strive to counter the modernist tradition; rather, it attempted to resurrect it after many decades of sociorealism’s cultural monopoly. This was precisely the intent of Russian postmodernism’s seminal texts, which subsequently became its classics: Moscow to the End of the Line by Venedikt Erofeev (1969); Pushkin’s House by Andrei Bitov (1971); A School for Foolsby Sasha Sokolov (1973-75); and the early conceptualist poets, such as V. Ufliand, Vsesvolod Nekrasov, Henry Sapgir, and Evgenii Kropivnitsky. These literary experiments were continued and elaborated by the so-called “underground” writers, who surfaced during the first years of Perestroika: Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Timur Kibirov, Alexander Eremenko, Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Erofeev, Evgenii Popov, and Alexander Ivanchenko. By the end of the 1980s and beginning of the ‘90s, other postmodernist writers, such as Tatiana Tolstaya, Vladimir Sharov, Viktor Pelevin, Viacheslav Pietsukh, Valeria Nabrikova, and Dmitri Galkovsky had made their debut. As it evolved, Russian postmodernism rejected more and more consciously a key element of the modernist and avant-garde aesthetic -- themythologization of reality. In the modernist and avant-garde tradition, the creation of an individual poetic myth, which always hearkened back to some authoritative archetype or model, signified the creation of an alternate reality, or more precisely, an alternate eternity -- one which could overcome the senselessness, violence, oppression, and horror of life. The myth symbolized the ultimate form of existence because it was created freely and consciously by the artist, and thus embodied the concept of freedom itself. Postmodernism deliberately aimed to destroy all mythologies, viewing them as the ideological foundation of utopianism and all attempts at mind-control in general -- enforcing a single, absolute, and rigidly hierarchical model of truth, eternity, liberty, and happiness. Beginning with a critique of Communist mythology (socialist art in the visual sphere, and subsequently in literature), postmodernism soon turned on the conceptual myths of Russian classical literature and the Russian avant-garde, and later to the myths fostered by contemporary mass culture. However, in shattering existing mythologies, postmodernism strives to reassemble the pieces into a new, non-hierarchical, non- absolute, playful mythology, since the postmodernist writer views myth as the most stable and a-historical form of human consciusness and culture. Thus postmodernism’s strategy with regard to myth might be defined more properly as deconstruction than destruction -- a restructuring along different, counter-mythological principles. The most concrete expression of this strategy in Russian postmodernism is the tendency to create unstable, frequently conflicting and even explosivehybrids -- compromises formed between both aesthetic and ontological categories, which are traditionally perceived as incompatible and even antithetical. These might be paradoxical “compromises” between life and death (as in works by Bitov, Erofeev, Sokolov); fantasy and reality (Tolstaya, Pelevin); memory and forgetting (Ilia Kabakov, Sharov); order and absurdity (Viktor Erofeev, Pietsukh); the personal and the faceless (Prigov, Evgenii Poppov, Kibirov); eternal archetype and vulgar stereotype (Sorokin). The search for ontological junctures forces the postmodernist writer to build his poetics upon unstable aesthetic compromises between the elevated and lowly, mockery and pathos, wholeness and fragmentation, and so on. This central principle of Russian postmodernism -- simultaneously structuring and deconstructive -- is defined below as the paralogism of Russian postmodernism. This paralogism, which aims to form eruptive compromises among contradictory ideas and cultural discourses, was the first in the twentieth century to create such an open (“systematic”) alternative to the traditional binary model of Russian cultural evolution, in which, according to Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspensky, “change occurs as a radical negation of the preceding state. The new does not arise out of structurally ‘unused’ reserve, but results from a transformation of the old, a process of turning it inside out. Thus, repeated transformation can in fact lead to the regeneration of archaic forms.” [10] In a certain sense the postmodern cultural aesthetic turns out to be more “clever” than its own authors. If the Russian postmodernist aesthetic creates paralogical compromises, then the postmodernist writers, obeying the intertia of Russia’s cultural tradition, generally organized their relations to the non-postmodernist world within the literary context, viewing readers and writers of the older generations along the principles of binary opposition: for them, as for the Russian avant-garde at the turn of the century, self-assertion became inseparable from “full-scale destruction” of the opposition, which was understood primarily to be the Russian realist tradition. In the words of Lotman and Uspensky, Russian postmodernists “did