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Locating Exiled Wr iters in

Contemporary Russian Literature


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Locating Exiled Wr iters in
Contemporary Russian Literature

E xil es at H o m e

Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya


locating exiled writers in contemporary russian literature
Copyright © Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-62185-5
All rights reserved.

First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the


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ISBN 978-1-349-38358-0 ISBN 978-0-230-10203-3 (eBook)
DOI. 10.1057/9780230102033

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wakamiya, Lisa Ryoko, 1969-


Locating exiled writers in contemporary Russian literature : exiles at
home / Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-349-38358-0 (alk. paper)
1. Exiles’ writings, Russian—History and criticism. 2. Russian
literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Return migration
in literature. 4. Self in literature. 5. Identity (Psychology) in literature.
6. National characteristics, Russian, in literature. I. Title.

PG3515.W35 2010
891.709'9206914—dc22 2009024121

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: December 2009


Contents

Acknowledgments vii

1 Introduction: The Exiles Return 1

2 Russian Cosmopolitan 27

3 Agency Abroad and at Home 69

4 Authenticity, Camera, Action 109

5 The End of Exile—The End of Return? 147

Notes 155

Works Cited 187

Index 201
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Acknowledgments

I am fortunate to have benefited from the generous support


of many institutions and people as I worked on this book.
A Fulbright research grant enabled me to spend much
of 2006 in Moscow and supported the research and experi-
ences that made this book possible. Grants from the Office of
the Provost, the Council of Research and Creativity, and the
Winthrop-King Institute at Florida State University supported
additional research. The Faculty Senate Library Committee
provided a Primary Sources Materials grant, which, along with
the interlibrary loan service, aided in the acquisition of materi-
als that contributed to my work. The staff in the libraries and
special collections units of the University of California at Santa
Barbara, the University of California at Los Angeles, the Uni-
versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of
Michigan provided invaluable assistance.
In Moscow, I am grateful to Elena Evgen’evna Chugu-
nova and Dmitrii Viktorovich Neustroev of the State Rus-
sian Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI). The staff at the
Library-Foundation “Russia Abroad” and the Russian State
Library permitted access to rare materials. Marisa Fushille of
the American Center at the Library of Foreign Literature and
Ekaterina Iur’evna Genieva, director of the Library of Foreign
Literature, gave me materials indispensable for completing
Chapter 3. Edward Roslof and Valentina Gruzintseva of the
Moscow Fulbright office and many faculty and staff at The
Russian State University of the Humanities (RGGU) provided
conditions conducive to writing. I am particularly indebted to
the late Vassily Aksyonov and to my friend Viktor Mikhailov-
ich Essipov.
viii Acknowledgments

Marina Balina, Angela Brintlinger, Galya Diment, and


Andrei Rogachevskii provided instrumental support dur-
ing this project’s early stages. They, along with David M.
Bethea, Ann Komaromi, Mark Lipovetsky, Leo Livak, and
Alexei Pavlenko heard or read preliminary versions of parts
of this book and shared their knowledge and comments. D.
Barton Johnson generously shared materials and welcomed
conversations that assisted with writing Chapter 2. Konstantin
Kustanovich read a substantial part of an early version of the
manuscript and readily offered his insights. Tetsuo Mochizuki
invited me to present a preliminary version of Chapter 2 at
the Slavic Research Center of Hokkaido University and vol-
unteered many helpful suggestions. The esteemed presenters
at the 2007 conference “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as Writer,
Myth-Maker, and Public Figure” at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign inspired and encouraged me as I wrote
Chapter 3. I am especially indebted to Edward E. Ericson,
Alexis Klimoff, Michael Nicholson, Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna and
Ignat and Stephan Solzhenitsyn, and Richard Tempest. I owe
years of intellectual mentorship to Michael Henry Heim. In
innumerable ways this project has benefited from the counsel
of Vyacheslav Vs. Ivanov, Olga Kagan, Roman Koropeckyj,
and Ronald Vroon. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues
in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at
Florida State University for their boundless encouragement
and all manner of sustenance. I am especially thankful to Mark
Pietralunga and Feng Lan for their invaluable guidance, Alec
Hargreaves, and Bill Cloonan for his unwavering support.
My editors Brigitte Shull and Lee Norton at Palgrave
worked with extraordinary efficiency to bring this book into
its present form. I thank them and Rachel Tekula of Palgrave
and Daniel Constantino of Scribe for their enthusiastic sup-
port of this project. The anonymous reviewers of the man-
uscript provided constructive criticism and comments that
have been gratefully incorporated into this book.
Brief sections of Chapter 2 appeared in an earlier form
in the volume American Contributions to the XIV Interna-
tional Congress of Slavists, edited by David M. Bethea and
Acknowledgments ix

Christina Y. Bethin (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers at Indi-


ana University, 2008). A previous version of brief sections of
Chapter 4 appeared in Canadian-American Slavonic Studies
37 (Spring–Summer 2003): 1–2. These passages are repro-
duced with kind permission from the original publishers.
I am grateful for the unconditional support of my family
and friends. I dedicate this book to my parents. Writing, like
everything else, is more fun with Rob.
4
Chapter 1

Introduction

The Exiles Retur n

T he legacy of exile is not confined to the tradition of texts


that chronicle the experience of expulsion or longing for a
lost homeland. Its traces can be found even in narratives of
return. By its very existence, the narrative project of return
acknowledges the writing of exile that preceded it. It reor-
ganizes the poetics of exile in various ways, reshaping and
refracting an inherited set of figures to rhetorically con-
struct and enact the experience of return and the place called
home. As part of the project of reconfiguring exilic narrative
constructions from a position more of familiarity than of dif-
ference, the writing of return offers a complex of figures of
estrangement and connection and rhetorically marks a move-
ment from the former to the latter.
The goal of this study is to analyze and critically situate
narratives of repatriation produced by former exiles. In the
1990s, several writers exiled from the Soviet Union returned
to a reformed Russia. They initiated narrative processes of
self-definition oriented simultaneously toward writers, read-
ers, and more broadly, the nation, all seeking self-identity at
a time of social, political, and cultural transition. Their narra-
tives of return variously reorganized the poetics of exilic writ-
ing and engaged in the project of rhetorically constructing
stable identities within a rapidly changing national imaginary.
Their narratives of return were, and are, as notable for their
2 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

heterogeneity as for their reshaping of the rhetorical construc-


tions of exile that defined the earlier works produced abroad.
At first glance, the predicament of the returned exiles
may seem ideal—seemingly against all odds, they returned
to a renamed and reformed homeland, reclaimed their
readership, and reestablished a productive relationship
with both. But their return also raises provocative ques-
tions: Have these former exiles ceased striving to engage
Western readers? To what extent is their writing informed
by the dynamics of the post-Soviet period, including Rus-
sia’s resistance to adopting Western economic and political
structures; the transnational migrations of its writers and
literature; the increasing effects of globalization on Russian
culture; and nostalgic nationalist constructs that look to the
Soviet and imperial past? Does exile, even in the act of being
“undone,” still contribute to estrangement?
In addressing these questions, this study strives to eluci-
date the relationship between exilic writing and the writing
of return, and the latter’s narrative processes of adaptation,
reintegration, and allegorization oriented toward local audi-
ences. It critically identifies the location of contemporary
Russian narratives of return at the interstices of modernism
and postmodernism, Soviet and post-Soviet, to demonstrate
how the path from exile to return is mediated by narrative.
In striving to deny the effects of exile and maintain coher-
ent subjects and narrative worlds, exilic writing may project
a tenuous and fraught stability. Conversely, it may explic-
itly reflect its dislocation in violent rhetorical disjunctures.
Exilic writing, with all of its diverse rhetorical positions, is
nevertheless forced to renegotiate its predicament when its
authors return to a post-Soviet Russia characterized by com-
peting cultural discourses following a fundamental rupture
in the “discursive regime” established during the Soviet era.1
A comparative study of their narratives of exile and return
and the conditions in which these narratives emerge allows
us to plot the diachronic and rhetorical movement from exile
to return against a cultural map of simultaneous and compet-
ing discourses.
Introduction 3

The complex nature of the cultural processes and products


associated with the reorientation and rearticulation of national
identity, however, is also indicative of the multiple challenges
that face both returning exiles and those who study their work.
The dialogue between exilic writing and the writing of return
may be fluid or contentious. Writers and critics may look to
essentializing constructions of identity to establish homoge-
neous subjects and readerships in an effort to promote a vision
of “Russianness” as a repository for a unique set of cultural
values. The relationship between the individual’s narrated
journey of return and the projected collaborative processes
that enlist local audiences in the construction of national iden-
tity may be overdetermined. These processes, moreover, may
prove difficult to define without recourse to diasporic or other
formations of identity that require substantive adaptation to
the contexts of return. These challenges emphasize the need
to question the ideological premises that inform the construc-
tion of return and its study.

Why Study Retur n?


Return reinscribes territorial and disciplinary boundaries. As
Rey Chow has indicated in her investigation of the relation-
ship between area and cultural studies, transnational and dia-
sporic writing are often associated with tropes of connection
and enabling, with those productive figures extending to the
scholar’s commitments to interdisciplinarity.2 The writing of
return, conversely, can imply finality, a form of closure that
is less accommodating to interdisciplinary study and more
resistant to translation. Critical approaches to return risk
becoming implicated in narratological processes that lead
toward conclusion, a summing up and end to the experience
of exile that closes off productive outlets of investigation by
privileging localizing discourses, and in effect, marginalizing
the critic’s position and work.
At the same time, the scholar who studies narrative strat-
egies of return may be seen as pursuing subjects or writers
that were considered topical in exile but are now regarded as
irrelevant. During the cold war, the West provided a haven for
4 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

writers and narratives deemed anti-Soviet. Universities offered


forums for writers’ views, whether at invited lectures or with
long-term professorships. Presses and libraries made their
works available in the original Russian and in translations. Aca-
demics integrated writings by exiled writers into their curricula
and research. But it was not only the exiles who found their
place in the Western academy. Scholars in Slavic studies made
valuable contributions to the field with their studies of exiled
writers and translations of their works, interviews, and pub-
lic presentations. They also facilitated connections between
exiled writers and audiences in the West. In some respects, the
study of return can be regarded as a continuation and criti-
cal revisitation of these scholars’ efforts to accommodate the
circumstances by which exile entered the creative and critical
traditions and the Western academy.
Return, however, does not carry the frisson of excitement
or the sense of ethical mission associated with handling “for-
bidden” texts. Works by returned exiles can take the form of
television serials shown in nightly installments, as is the case
with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and Vassily
Aksyonov’s Moscow Saga. The writers may publish their works
online and participate in online forums. They may pub-
lish works that are not eventually released in translation or,
indeed, not intended for an international readership at all.
To paraphrase Chow, scholars of exilic writing gained a cer-
tain upward mobility from their solidarity with exiles. And to
continue Chow’s evaluation of such affiliations, the Slavist’s
melancholy at the loss of the exile may be expressed as a deni-
gration of “nationalism,” “globalization,” “postmodernism,”
or other contemporary modalities that finalize the loss of his
object of study and the ethical values it was felt to scholar
noted that represent.3 The writing of return, in contrast to
works produced in exile, may seem somehow undeserving of
scholarly attention.
But Russian exiles living in the West during the seventies
and eighties were not an undifferentiated group of unequiv-
ocal literary heroes any more than repatriated former exiles
are all literary icons of the postmodern age or irrelevant
Introduction 5

has-beens indulging in nostalgic reveries about the “good


old, bad old” days when their writing mattered. While some
readers may contend that exile is best and most dramatically
challenged from within the condition of exile itself, narra-
tives of return should not be approached exclusively as false
evidence toward claims of the writer’s triumph over exile and
adversity. Some readers may strive to find meaning in estab-
lishing more rigid disciplinary and cultural boundaries in the
return of writers and their narratives to their ancestral home.
However, narratives of return cannot be idealized as exem-
plary representations of national and personal history any
more than they can be dismissed as purely reactionary affir-
mations of essentialist notions of identity, nation, or belong-
ing. By maintaining ethical evaluations of literature shaped by
cold war ideologies in historical context and moving toward
an awareness of strategies of narrating and studying return
that are oriented toward establishing consensus on issues of
national and cultural identity, the study of the relationship
between the writing of exile and return can reveal a hetero-
geneous set of texts and practices that directs our attention
to new questions, approaches, and issues.
The varieties of contemporary exilic writing were noted by
literary scholars who observed that the wave of exiles and émi-
grés who left the Soviet Union from 1966 to the early 1980s
did not constitute a group with a unified vision of its home-
land, itself, or its goals upon reaching its adoptive lands.4 One
scholar has noted that “any attempt to survey recent Russian
émigré prose is an exercise in frustration. There is too much
of it, by too many authors, in too many different genres.”5
Scholars attempted to address the heterogeneity of the writers
of this “third wave” of emigration by compiling works of an
encyclopedic nature that featured alphabetically or chronolog-
ically ordered entries for individual writers6 or by assembling
collections of articles about émigré writers and their experi-
ences.7 The latter category includes published conference pro-
ceedings in which scholars and writers presented their views
of the exilic experience8 and scholars’ collections of interviews
with émigré writers.9 Third-wave writers themselves actively
6 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

participated in the process, founding their own journals—such


as Vladimir Maksimov’s Kontinent and Andrei Siniavskii’s Sin-
taksis—whose contents gave a loose indication of the writers’
creative and political affiliations and orientations.10
The diversity of Russian exilic writing has yielded a wide
range of responses in the writing of return. If “all displaced
people do not experience exile equally or uniformly” and
“exile discourse thrives on detail, specificity, and locality,”11
return yields equally individualized experiences and narratives.
Of those writers who have returned to Russia since the fall
of the Soviet Union, not all have done so in the same way or
with the same intent. Many writers—Joseph Brodsky, Sergei
Dovlatov, and Viktor Nekrasov among them—opted not to
return to Russia or died before they could. Their returns were
enacted exclusively on paper. Their works were included in the
flood of previously unpublishable writings that entered into
print in Russia in the 1990s, contributing to the diversity of
new voices that characterized the years of perestroika and new
articulations of the literary canon that have emerged since.
Other writers maintain a regime of regular travel between
Russia and the West. Zinovy Zinik, despite having become
well integrated into London’s literary scene and having visited
Russia many times since he emigrated in 1975, maintains that
he is an “émigré writer.” In his words, this is “a useful con-
cept to define a specific type of literature.”12 Iuz Aleshkovskii,
Igor’ Efimov, Anatolii Gladilin, Natal’ia Gorbanevskaia, Iurii
Kashkarov (1940–1994), Naum Korzhavin, Sasha Sokolov,
and Aleksei Tsvetkov also are among those who have returned
to Russia sporadically to visit or who travel regularly between
Russia and their homes abroad. Others divide their time
between a residence in the West and one in Russia but ori-
ent their creative activity, with varying degrees of exclusivity,
to Russian audiences. Vassily Aksyonov (1932–2009), whose
work I treat in detail in this study, spent considerable time in
Moscow while maintaining a home in Biarritz.13 Among others
who divide their time between two residences are Bakhit Ken-
zheev, Iurii Mamleev, Siniavskii (1925–1997), and Vladimir
Voinovich. Some writers, such as Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008)
Introduction 7

and Eduard Limonov—both of whom I will treat at length—


returned permanently, as did Iurii Kublanovskii and Aleksandr
Zinov’ev (1922–2006). Even the offices of some émigré jour-
nals established abroad—Kontinent, Grani, and Strelets—per-
manently relocated their operations to Moscow.
Despite the vast number of identifications and practices
associated with return, in the wide range of narratives by those
writers who no longer identify as exiles or émigrés and who
maintain that they have permanently returned to Russia or a
Russian readership, it is possible to discern shared practices
that we can identify as rhetorical points of commonality in the
construction of a writing of return.14 The writing of return
reveals a debt to the exilic writing that preceded it. In addi-
tion to undoing their own exilic writings, the writers’ initial
narratives of return reveal signs of discursive displacement
that reflect the transitional status of their own work and that
of the nation as both seek a stable self-identity. Eventually,
following the initial transitional works produced soon after
repatriation, their narratives of return find situated points of
enunciation. While these features are found in the work of
each of the returned exiles I treat in this study, the respective
narrative constructions of home they project in their writing
and other methods of self-presentation remain highly differ-
entiated from one another.
In identifying certain shared tendencies in the rhetorical
representation of return, including the integration of social
imperatives directed toward readers, I acknowledge the dif-
ficulty in posing questions of resistance to, or complicity with,
certain imagined national aspirations. It can be an especially
thorny issue to treat texts that engage such issues as nostal-
gia, rootedness, and the articulation of national identity at the
same time they strive to negate previous narrativizations of
exile. Problematizing the narrative processes and critical space
between exile and return foregrounds the assumption that the
rhetorical refiguration of exilic modes into modes emblematic
of return can never be illustrated as a hermetic there-and-back
in which identities developed in exile become seamlessly rein-
tegrated following the writer’s repatriation. The aspirations
8 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

and proposed affiliations of returned exiles need not deter-


mine or overtake our understanding of how and why exilic
texts become rewritten following the writers’ returns and the
range of meanings this journey yields. In critical juxtaposition
with one another and with postexilic writers outside of the
Russian tradition, the shared practices of the writing of return
must be historically and critically situated, but they cannot be
characterized as a rigid system that generates a uniform cor-
pus of texts and makes broadly generalized assumptions about
returned writers and their audiences.
In revealing the rhetorical practices affiliated with exile and
return and by analyzing their narrative products, I aim for
the methods and readings presented here to elucidate these
writers’ narratives of return, which have received less atten-
tion and more limited distribution than their exilic writing,
and to contribute to the small but growing corpus of stud-
ies of return. Because the recent Russian literary context is
one of very few in which return is a realized, and not merely
an idealized, counterpoint to exile, its models of “emplace-
ment”15 can facilitate discussion of literary repatriation in the
productive spaces between negative accounts of return as an
inscribed end to exilic discourse and capitulation to isola-
tionist constructs of national belonging and romanticized
homecomings accompanied by nostalgic appropriations of
past cultural roles for the writer and reader.
Return, like exile, is constituted of diverse experiences
and narratives. The writers who have experienced it position
themselves variously, and their initial, transitional narratives
of return—as well as their later, more stable constructions of
emplacement—assume the potential to enact social and criti-
cal change. In tandem with transnational and diasporic litera-
tures, the writing of return can reveal that which often has
been omitted or suppressed from our understanding of what
the end of exile might yield. Its study demonstrates the poten-
tial to generate a critical space alongside the study of exile and
map the diverse processes of eliding difference between exilic
narratives and narratives of return, as I will argue is the case in
my reading of Aksyonov, or of emphasizing those differences,
Introduction 9

as in my readings of Solzhenitsyn and Limonov. At the same


time, the end of exile entails a consideration of exile and
return as finite modalities that occupy interstitial temporal
zones. Having crossed geographical boundaries, the former
exile then navigates discursive space to leave exile and arrive
at return. In studying this journey, it is vital to acknowledge
that while return is inevitably linked to history and biography
and its narratives to the writers’ particular moment, narratives
of return also widen the critical possibilities for understanding
how and why specific subjects relocate themselves after exile.

How S ho ul d We Study Retur n?


The diverse narratives I examine share rhetorical points
of commonality in constructing a writing of return at the
same time their agendas do not inscribe a uniform notion of
home, identity, or nation. In identifying rhetorical constructs
of exile that gradually become refigured to produce a writing
of return that is not unvarying but variously oriented to the
nation and the reader in its cultural politics, a comparative
study allows for the examination of a heterogeneous body
of texts that do not easily lend themselves to an overarching
paradigm. A comparative study also accommodates readings
that explore productive, and often provocative, lines of ques-
tioning while generating a model for the analysis of narratives
of return that may be applied more broadly to texts out-
side of the Russian tradition. For this reason, I have devoted
separate chapters to individual writers to demonstrate how
each variously reorganizes his experienced and narrated exile
into a highly mediated return that unites the writer, read-
ers, and nation in stable, if differently imagined, constructs
of community.
I examine the work of Aksyonov, Solzhenitsyn, and
Limonov, treating each writer’s narrative trajectory of exile
and return as a case study to come to grips with the particu-
lar rhetorical strategies and cultural positions they adopt as
they enact their returns. The selection of three writers whose
creative production and politics could not be more distinct
from one another is deliberate. Aksyonov, Solzhenitsyn, and
10 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

Limonov represent a wide range, one might even say the


extremes, of the last generation of writers to return from
exile. Yet the juxtaposition of these writers—and their works
with vastly divergent politics, themes, and agendas—yields
a discernible pattern of shared rhetorical practices by which
exilic narratives become a writing of return.
I elucidate the processes by which the exilic modes observ-
able in each writer’s work—Aksyonov’s cosmopolitan ethics,
Solzhenitsyn’s historiographical imperatives, and Limonov’s
transgressive quasi-autobiographism—gradually become
reshaped into narrative figures of return. Each writer initiates
his return with a provisional discourse—Aksyonov’s writing
of return features an unsituated transnational persona, tran-
sient figures in Solzhenitsyn’s “Binary Tales” emerge from
the writer’s own two-month journey of return across Russia
by train, and Limonov’s improbably named dislocated liter-
ary subject “Indiana Ivanovich” is “an alien among aliens”—
that then gives way to a situated rhetorical position that is
maintained through subsequent works and that functions as
a national allegory. In each chapter, I identify the complex of
narrative strategies and practices of self-presentation that the
exiled writer employs to mediate between preexilic and exilic
narratives and audiences at home and abroad. I then demon-
strate how those strategies and practices are adapted to pro-
duce narratives of return, which include extraliterary projects
such as photography and film and television adaptations of
their work, to illustrate the processes by which identities and
narratives previously available primarily to Western audiences
become reindigenized.
Michael Seidel describes the relationship between preexilic
and exilic writing as “a necessary recourse: projection images
proximity, imagination reinforms, allegorizes and enlivens
material already assimilated, or to put it another way, new
accounts draw from funds already on deposit.”16 Even as
exilic narratives portray the impotence and eventual destruc-
tion of preexilic identities, as in the case of Limonov’s novel
It’s Me, Eddie, they yield allusions to their preexilic sources.
Exilic narratives also encode their intended reception—an
Introduction 11

exilic gesture both in its compensatory projection of audi-


ence and in the occasional variances between intended recep-
tion and individualized readings. All of these exilic rhetorical
constructions are recognizable in their refigured forms in
narratives of return. I examine the work of Aksyonov, Sol-
zhenitsyn, and Limonov within the larger tropes of “travel,”
“historiography,” and “autobiographism” to explicate the
rhetorical confluences between their preexilic and exilic writ-
ing and, later, between their exilic work and their writing of
return. The writers’ movement from an exilic predicament
to one of return is grounded in the narrative and historical
moments that reorient the relationship between the writer
and his audience and necessitate a reengagement with ongo-
ing processes of cultural identification.
The questions that emerge in the course of examining the
trajectory from exile to return are difficult and have ramifi-
cations for both the contemporary literary context and its
study. Are non-Russian readers at all concerned with the
work produced by former Russian exiles in return? Do con-
temporary Russian culture’s evocations of the Soviet past
occasion a need for the return of oppositional writing and a
return to redemptive constructions, such as those associated
with exilic identity? If so, do the constructions of identity
proposed in narratives of return challenge this process with
writings that evince complicity with certain nationalist dis-
courses or that propose various representations of the writ-
ing subject as competing proxies for the nation? Do they
support this process by encouraging nostalgic appropriations
of literary value? Taking into account the recent television
adaptations of Aksyonov’s and Solzhenitsyn’s novels and
Limonov’s departure from the literary world for a career in
politics, it is also necessary to address whether, in figuring
its own condition as well as that of the nation, the creative
practices associated with return constitute a response to the
post-Soviet waning of literature as a social force.
In introducing my methodology and approach to these
questions, it is instructive to look to the examples of two
relevant studies: Amy K. Kaminsky’s After Exile (1999), a
12 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

study of South American narratives of postexile, and Andrew


Baruch Wachtel’s Remaining Relevant after Communism
(2006), a paradigmatic treatment of the types of writing
that emerged across Eastern Europe after the fall of the iron
curtain. My study responds to Kaminsky’s call to avoid uni-
versalizing metaphors of exile and return by offering case
studies of individual writers and close readings of their work.
“The colors, shape, and weight of the word ‘exile,’” Kamin-
sky writes, have been “eroded by the carelessness of those
who picked it up and made use of it in their desire to name
something else.”17 Certainly, a study of exilic writing that
construes exile as a universal condition of alienation expe-
rienced similarly by all writing subjects would propose an
easier task for itself by accounting for return in similarly
universal terms. As Kaminsky notes, however, it is not in an
undifferentiated universality but in specificity that we find
productive, if difficult, directions for the study of return that
confront the relationship between the historical and indi-
vidual contexts of exile. In an effort to avoid contributing
to the semantic erosion of the expansively accommodating
metaphors of “exile” and “return,” I remain focused exclu-
sively on the work of writers who physically returned to
Russia and announced their return to the Russian reader
and whose physical returns coincided with the widespread
reformulation of Soviet constructions of identity into post-
Soviet Russian notions of selfhood.
Kaminsky moreover argues that “the postexile who does
not return is always something of an outsider. As is the one
who does return.”18 The diasporic condition, in Kaminsky’s
view, is the inevitable outcome of all cases of literary displace-
ment.19 The “impossibility of national identity” for displaced
writers of the Southern Cone becomes the impetus for their
discursive forms. The wider context of the study of displace-
ment allows for consideration of the diasporic condition of
the exile who remains abroad, as well as for the returned
exile who still feels not quite at home. The writers I treat, in
distinction from the displaced figures Kaminsky discusses in
her work, all believe in national identity. They are all willing
Introduction 13

to take the risks involved in defining and narrativizing it in


exchange for the potential social and cultural contributions
of its productive structures. The rhetorical strategies put
forward by Aksyonov, Solzhenitsyn, and Limonov, together
with these writers’ personal narratives of commitment to
return, call upon the reader to participate in their respec-
tive agendas: the construction of home, the preservation of
endangered cultural sites, and opposition to governing ide-
ologies. The various means by which they elicit the reader’s
participation in these agendas and in the construction of
a sufficiently rooted and viable national identity form the
subject of my work.
It has been argued that writers and critics who experienced
the fall of the Soviet Union from within its borders also
transformed their rhetorical practices. However, to expand
the notion of “return” to include those who did not experi-
ence exile as such would necessitate the creation of a broad
and flexible framework within which “exile” and “return”
would include the experiences of diasporic communities, reli-
gious groups, internal exiles, and numerous other constituen-
cies. The definitions of “exile” and “return” would have to be
extended to include discontinuities and reconnections of many
kinds. Existing studies—for example, those that examine the
rebirth of Orthodox Christianity in post-Soviet Russia—have
focused on the “return” of particular traditions and communi-
ties. To organize the “return” of several such communities in
an encyclopedic volume on the post-Soviet condition is a task
for another study.
My work complements Wachtel’s Remaining Relevant
after Communism in that we both treat the same cultural
moment and consider the question of how writers strive to
maintain their relevance in the post-Soviet era. My approach,
however, emphasizes the differences that Wachtel elides.
Wachtel focuses “on broad literary strategies, more or less
ignoring the differences between the various countries” of
the former Eastern bloc to produce an ambitious “introduc-
tion to a transnational consideration of postcommunist lit-
erature,” a study of the “most significant currents of literary
14 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

development in Eastern Europe today.”20 In contrast, I work


with a group of writers that may seem to be relatively small
and homogeneous—all Russians, all male, all exiles of the
late Soviet era who returned to Russia in the 1990s—but
whose divergent constructions of exile and return require
individual consideration of their rhetorical strategies of
rearticulation and allegorization. If our subjects and meth-
odologies differ, it is in our shared interest in uncovering
the relationship between historical processes and narrative
ones that Wachtel’s study and mine find common ground.
Wachtel identifies distinguishable literary trends across the
vast region he surveys but acknowledges in conclusion that
recent events indicate “this period of broad postcommunist
similarity might be coming to an end.”21 Biography and his-
tory function as guideposts that ground my analysis in orga-
nizing structures that help to determine when exile ends and
return begins. My interrogation of the methods by which
exile ends and becomes rearticulated as return takes place
against this backdrop.
My comparative approach to the exilic writing and narra-
tives of return by three writers is not intended as a compre-
hensive or even representative survey of the writing of return.
The specificity of the experiences of exile and return, not
to mention the heterogeneity of the examples of Aksyonov,
Solzhenitsyn, and Limonov, does not easily lend itself to a
single, uniform, and comprehensive paradigm. Narrative
returns may aspire to a coherent totality of post-Soviet Rus-
sian identities shared by the writer, reader, and critic and
project a certain uniformity of intent and intended recep-
tion. This localized and highly ideologized set of similarities,
however, should be juxtaposed with the processes by which
initial, provisional narratives of return become stable and sit-
uated allegories. The former set of practices risks reinscribing
cultural and disciplinary boundaries that can isolate returned
exiles, their narratives, and their investigation. As a form
of closure, return defined as such may emphasize claims to
irreconcilable cultural and disciplinary differences. The latter
processes more productively gesture toward how the writing
Introduction 15

of return, regardless of where its authors call home, is rhetor-


ically constructed and how it interacts with other historically
and biographically conditioned forms of cultural production.
With this study, I aim to reconcile a sensitivity to individual
articulations of exile and return, a critical approach to isolat-
ing ideologies of disciplinary difference, and the pragmatic
goal of presenting a viable rhetorical model of return that is
germane to other literary traditions and disciplines.
The critic who seeks out confluences between interdisci-
plinary dialogue and the study of return is presented with a
range of critical approaches that require adaptation if they are
to serve their purpose. Interdisciplinarity is most often associ-
ated with diaspora, a critical modality that elucidates the rela-
tionship of diasporic communities to ancestral and adoptive
homelands. Kaminsky reveals that the diasporic condition can
in fact accommodate exiles and even returned former exiles,
but can it describe returned exiles who deny displacement and
claim their rootedness as exemplary for the nation?
In considering the relationship between the relatively
unstudied body of narratives of return and the prominence
of diaspora in cultural studies of postcolonial contexts, the
utility of diaspora for addressing and indeed enabling trans-
national connections over the more circumscribed national
and local becomes evident. As Ella Shohat notes, “Since the
very definition of house, home, and homeland requires a
boundary, whether that is a fence, a wall, or a border, the
metaphors of fluidity in diaspora and postcolonial discourses
express the critique of a fixed notion of identity.”22 It may
even be said that the writer who moves from exilic to dia-
sporic constructs becomes critically viable. Nico Israel’s Out-
landish: Writing Between Exile and Diaspora (2000) explores
the space between exile and diaspora to critically situate iden-
tity in works produced “out of place.” Israel offers exemplary
readings of works by Joseph Conrad, Theodor Adorno, and
Salman Rushdie that elucidate the tensions between modern
constructions of exile as a solitary—often enabling—condi-
tion, diaspora, and the theories of postmodernism, hybridity,
and postcoloniality that are often used to explicate them. In
16 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement


(1998), Caren Kaplan looks to metaphors of travel, includ-
ing diaspora, displacement, and exile; she explores how they
operate in literary and feminist theory to critique the politics
of location as an essentializing form of identity politics. Both
Israel and Kaplan construe exile outside of universalizing
ahistorical metaphors and totalizing modernist constructs
to broaden the critical vocabularies used to study diasporic
writing and situate narrative and critical texts in the viable
interpretive spaces in between.
Alternately, one encounters constructions of the national
that are rooted and situated and that may find greater rel-
evance to narratives of return. Timothy Brennan contrasts
the cosmopolitan writer with the indigenous artist, the
former “easier to embrace” and the latter posing “explicit
challenges” to contemporary Western critical practices.23
In treating a writing of return that seeks above all to undo
its exilic rhetorical constructs and situate itself at home, the
critic must become attuned to constructions of national his-
tory, national identity, and the role of the writer that are
challenging to accept. Indeed, one of the premises of Wach-
tel’s study is that the national writer as nation-builder is no
longer a productive, or at all emergent, cultural figure. As
a response to diaspora and diasporic studies, return and its
study appear to close off appealing and expansive avenues for
understanding the relationship between exile and displace-
ment. Return seems to orient the critic toward assumptions
about the writer’s role that have been attenuated by the eco-
nomic and historical contingencies of the post-Soviet era.
The nostalgia that accompanies figurations of the writer as
a repository for truth and authentic constructions of national
identity finds a counterpart in nostalgic affirmations of Rus-
sia’s recent return to authoritarianism. Discussions of the
need for writers who openly oppose the state accompany
speculation that the ideologies shaped by the cold war have
returned more or less intact. In confronting the implications
of such affirmations, an insistence upon the individuality of
Introduction 17

each writer’s response to his exilic and postexilic predicament


may appear to set the “minor” struggles of identity politics
against the larger problem of resurgent authoritarianism.
This opposition, however, would assume that the writing
of return functions in opposition to, or even unheeding of,
institutional patriotic or nationalist interests. In fact, the
writing of return can at times intersect with certain state-
sanctioned initiatives to rekindle support for such values.
Whether or not they believe the writer should position his
work to promote or contest state initiatives, returned for-
mer exiles—like the state—propose to establish a unifying
sense of belonging and national identity. Alexei Yurchak has
claimed that “an undeniable constitutive part of today’s
phenomenon of ‘post-Soviet nostalgia,’ which is a com-
plex post-Soviet construct, is the longing for the very real
humane values, ethics, friendships, and creative possibilities
that the reality of socialism afforded—often in spite of the
state’s proclaimed goals.”24 The variety of unifying strate-
gies and visions found in the writing of return demonstrate
that the very conditions that occasion a rewriting of exilic
narratives can also produce nostalgia for certain aspects of
exilic writing and its production.
Are nostalgic constructions to be the exclusive modality
through which we approach repatriated writers and their study
if we are to claim that they matter? By insisting upon the indi-
viduality of returned writers and the constructions of home
that emerge in their narratives of return, my study itself may
be implicated in nostalgic structures that privilege the artist
and his role within the broader context of the third wave of
emigration as a whole and the larger scale migrations taking
place across and beyond Russia’s post-Soviet borders. A study
of literary exile and return can potentially appear to write itself
into an impasse by juxtaposing the individualized particulari-
ties of the experience and writing of return to a monolithically
defined nation or by contrasting localized concerns—that draw
their interpretive and critical models from the modern exilic
past—with the empowering constructs of diasporic identity.
18 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

When studies of diaspora are construed not in opposition


to the study of return, but alongside it in that they also pro-
pose potentially productive outcomes to exile, they can assist
in the apprehension of narratives committed to a nationally
defined identity. They do not envision unanchored free-
floating subjects entirely deprived of location or agency any
more than studies of return are restricted to proposing that
its subjects can only be conceived in opposition to or in col-
laboration with the state, the West, or other monolithically
conceived social institutions and the assumptions that accom-
pany them. Diaspora studies often predicate the emergence
of cohesive diasporic communities upon the rejection of cer-
tain contested notions of what constitutes the nation; studies
of return and their subjects focus upon a variety of points of
identification with the nation. In both cases, however, the
study and narrativization of particularized articulations of
national identity lends itself to the critique of false universals
posited in the name of commonality and unity. These varia-
tions make it possible to treat three distinct representations
of exile and return by writers from three separate generations
(Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918, Aksyonov in 1932, and
Limonov in 1943), while emphasizing that any similarity in
their methods for writing return are not deliberately shared
between them or passed down from one generation to the
next. I begin with the example of Aksyonov, as his work fol-
lows a trajectory compatible with the critical concepts out-
lined in this introduction. He does not disavow his exile as
Solzhenitsyn does, a gesture that in Solzhenitsyn’s case chal-
lenges the very premise that he rewrites his exilic narratives
to generate a writing of return, nor do Aksyonov’s writings
of return exhibit the stereotyped primordial nationalism that
Limonov claims for his political platform.
In arguing for the study of return I do not intend to sug-
gest that a few narratives of return can make the uncontested
claim to have global currency. Rather, this study of returned
writers and their narratives locates their articulations of the
nation within contemporary criticism and against the back-
ground of ongoing post-Soviet cultural processes, such as
Introduction 19

the emergence of nostalgia as a dominant mode of cultural


production and interpretation. The brief excurses I have pro-
vided in these introductory remarks and the more detailed
materials and case studies presented in subsequent chapters
are intended to demonstrate how we can productively read
and discuss the corpus of texts and other mediations that
constitute narratives of return, and how investigations into
the shared rhetorical patterns and individuated refractions
found in narratives of return that propose to construct an
“imagined community” can contribute more broadly to the
study of return as a complex outcome of exile and a subject
of critical inquiry.

S ituating Retur n
“Exile,” as I have used it in this introduction, refers to lived
experiences and modalities of writing and is not intended
to conflate individualized personal circumstances or creative
agendas under a single category. Similarly, “return” refers to
a complex of practices, including the dissolution of exilic rhe-
torical structures and the dynamics of reception, that do not
always correspond to a single moment of physical repatriation,
although it is accompanied by a realized journey of repatria-
tion in the case of each writer I study. Focusing on individual
histories in separate chapters allows for discussion of the spe-
cific conditions and rhetorical refractions of each writer’s exile
and return. Aksyonov has referred to himself at different times
as a voluntary émigré and a forced exile. Solzhenitsyn depicts
the moment of his forced departure in 1974 in unambiguous
terms: hustled to Moscow’s Sheremetevo airport from a cell
in Lefortovo prison, he was placed on a flight to Germany
under official escort, a coarse piece of prison-issue bread still
in his pocket as “a lump of something solid to show that it did
really happen.”25 Limonov maintains his separation from other
exiles and the “literary ghetto” of Russian literature abroad by
asserting that he left Russia of his own accord. While I treat
these individual stories and their implications for writing in
the chapters devoted to each author, I use the term “exile” to
refer to the narrative constructs that accompany physical exile
20 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

and that feature the rhetorical patterns that will be dismantled


and rearticulated after return.
Once exile becomes a biographical fact for the authors I
treat in my study, it quickly obtains specific rhetorical and
thematic reflections in their work. Aksyonov’s travel memoir
In Search of Melancholy Baby (1987) chronicles his process
of finding a home in a foreign land, Solzhenitsyn’s The Little
Grain Fell between Two Millstones (Ugodilo zernyshko promezh
dvukh zhernovov, 1998–2003) describes his self-admitted
disorientation when confronted with certain Western insti-
tutions, and Limonov’s It’s Me, Eddie: A Fictional Memoir
(1983) introduces his exilic alter ego “Eddie,” who loses his
wife and his identity as a poet upon arriving in New York.
Situated firmly within historically specific conditions of writ-
ing, exile here does not dissolve into “a metaphor for the
alienated or marginalized modern consciousness,” a general-
ized discourse of displacement so expansive as to encompass
any alienation or cultural disaffiliation that is not grounded
in the lived experience of exile as such.26 While Aksyonov and
Limonov may frequently tap into motifs of dislocation and
outsiderhood by respectively positioning themselves within a
multicultural America or among fellow social outcasts, all the
writers, to greater or lesser degrees, acknowledge the impact
of exile on their lives and work in autobiographical contexts.
Aksyonov, Solzhenitsyn, and Limonov respond to their
post-Soviet predicament by first acknowledging their disloca-
tion as newly returned subjects in the confusing, if exhilarat-
ing, early 1990s and then engaging the well-defined cultural
mechanisms at work in the Putin era’s “new regime.”27 The
relationship of their most recent writing of return to state-
sponsored projects of cultural definition ranges from a shared
commitment to resurrecting particular sites of cultural mean-
ing to organized, even violent, political opposition. Their
projects of return also occasion a response to the economic,
political, and cultural changes that marked the transition
from the Soviet to post-Soviet and saw a sharp decline in
the literary market.28 In depicting its own predicament along
with that of the nation, the writing of return promotes vastly
Introduction 21

divergent projects of nation-building and problematizes


constructions of agency. Through a comparative analysis of
these writers’ histories and narratives, the study of return can
account for the representation of the writer, the reader, and
the nation within a period of transition while avoiding over-
extended metaphors of national belonging that could result
in a scholarly hermeticism that removes its subjects and their
investigation from wider debate.
In Chapter 2, “Russian Cosmopolitan,” I treat the return
of Aksyonov to discuss how the “unexpected cosmopolitan-
ism” of exile becomes expressed as an ethical commitment to
cosmopolitan ideals on the part of the returned writer, who
encourages the same commitment on the part of the reader in
his post-Soviet narratives. In contrast to his exilic narratives,
which invite the reader to explore the potentials of estrange-
ment, Aksyonov’s writings of return rhetorically enact home-
comings. They identify the reader as “coauthor” and invite
participation in collaborative creative performances that have
real-world applications, such as contributing to the building
of one’s “home” inside and outside the text, and participat-
ing in projects that increase the engagement and stand-
ing of Russian culture in the global sphere. His novels The
New Sweet Style (1997) and Caesarean Illumination (2002)
evince the social agenda at their center, confronting not only
isolationist nationalist ideologies but figures such as Bren-
nan’s diasporic “third-world celebrity” writer and opportu-
nistic new Russian businessmen—global entrepreneurs who
exploit the local for their own gain—to promote social and
cultural values that situate Russian culture constructively
within the processes of cultural globalization. Extraliter-
ary arenas of creative endeavor, such as television, allow the
mediated presence of the author as a figure of return to be
quickly and effectively transmitted to a local audience, and
account for Western readers’ and publishers’ reduced expo-
sure to their work, along with the post-Soviet marginaliza-
tion of literature. I demonstrate how Aksyonov’s Moscow
Saga (1993; released in translation as Generations of Winter
and The Winter’s Hero), a family novel written for a Western
22 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

audience, was marketed to Russian readers as a historical and


national epic, and ultimately produced as a popular television
miniseries in 2004, to argue that these adaptations repack-
age representations of national identity for increasingly local
audiences. Like Moskva-kva-kva (2006), set in the apartment
building where Aksyonov lived until his passing in July 2009,
such narratives illustrate how constructions of home may
conflict with cosmopolitan ideals.
In Chapter 3, “Agency Abroad and at Home,” I examine
the trajectory of Solzhenitsyn, whose work strives to negate
exile’s effects while engaging the potentials of return. His
narrative of exile and return, as he has written it, renders an
uninterrupted arc, illustrated in his immediate pronounce-
ment of his intent to return to Russia upon his exile to the
West; his revisitation of preexilic genres and works, such as
the prose-poem “Miniatures,” first written from 1958 to
1960 and then after his return from 1996 to 1999; and his
2006 screenplay for the television adaptation of his 1969
novel The First Circle. Within the narrative continuity of
his oeuvre, I identify exilic constructs in the rhetorical gaps
in The Red Wheel, a work that depicts not only the 1917
February Revolution, but the discontinuities between the
stated public utility and individual readings of the work—
that is, between authority and agency. Solzhenitsyn’s writing
of return is concerned with preserving local cultural values,
emblematized in the ruins that appear throughout the recent
“Miniatures” and the rural way of life the writer encountered
during his two-month odyssey of return and described in
his “Binary Tales.” Solzhenitsyn sought to avoid any associa-
tion between exile and marginality; yet following his return
he becomes an advocate for threatened discourses that have
become marginalized in contemporary Russian culture. Crit-
ics have argued that Solzhenitsyn’s position represents a
troubling mode of affirmation in that it is predicated upon
the need for marginalized local populations and values. The
television adaptation of The First Circle thus has been read by
some as Solzhenitsyn’s inclusion of his own writing among
the marginalized discourses that require advocacy, and an
Introduction 23

illustration of the process by which the novel becomes a


state-sponsored television channel’s reconciliation with, and
appropriation of, oppositional writing. The complex issues
of identification and affiliation, authority and agency that
organize the “last great Russian writer’s” narratives of return
are indicative of the tensions in the task of writing national
literature in a globalized world in which the national writer,
and even the nation itself, are often considered obsolete.
The fourth chapter of my study, “Authenticity, Camera,
Action,” concerns the exile who abandons literature upon
his return. For Limonov, return is a process of revelation
that generates a series of autobiographical albums, narratives,
and public performances intended to archive his exilic past
and reveal an authentic self. If Limonov’s exilic novel It’s Me
Eddie (1978) depicted the rage of a Russian poet on the cul-
tural periphery of New York, repatriation involved occupying
the cultural center by returning to Moscow and founding an
ultranationalist political party. The photographic autobiogra-
phy Limonov in Photographs (1996) visually documents this
shift with images and captions that identify in succession the
“poet,” “Eddie,” and “the thinker and his AK-47.” From
the lace and lilac finery of the exilic persona of It’s Me, Eddie,
to the army fatigues he wore when he joined snipers in Sara-
jevo, Limonov’s sartorial choices chronicle his perpetuation
of self-valorizing myths and integration into chosen commu-
nities. His writing of return reflects this transition, with exilic
novels that eschew any potential comparison with literary pre-
decessors giving way to the political antiutopian allegory 316,
Point “B” (1998), in which a Russian immigrant becomes
president of an allegorized United States, and eventually to
nonfiction works such as My Political Biography and Limonov
versus Putin that align Limonov with a selected pantheon of
writers-cum-political thinkers. Limonov’s series of autobio-
graphical portraits documents his development as he sought
to establish himself outside of Russian émigré literary circles,
then countered his self-constructed image of a Westernized
individual subject by immersing himself in the communal and
highly nativist nationalist ideology of his National Bolshevik
24 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

Party. Limonov’s emplacement is now contingent on both his


self-suppression, which denies discursive autonomy to his for-
mer exilic literary selves, and his suppression by state authori-
ties. As literature no longer generates serious threats to the
state, Limonov—the leader of a now-banned political party—
appropriates the hegemonic discourses of those in power to
suppress his own past and to assert his own oppositional plat-
form within culturally dominant hierarchical structures.
In my conclusion, I address the question of when the writ-
ing of return might be said to come to an end. As the incom-
plete list of returned writers of the third wave provided above
indicates, many practitioners of return are at least a genera-
tion older than the new voices contributing to current Rus-
sian literature. Some, such as the late Aksyonov, Siniavskii
and Solzhenitsyn, demonstrate that neither biography nor its
rhetorical reflections in the writing of exile and return gener-
ates a static system that is impermeable to further productive
readings. Does return continue as long as its writers and read-
ers continue to creatively enact it, or does return continue as
long as post-Soviet questions of identity find validation in
narratives of return? Does return end earlier, when its narra-
tives reach some final state of assimilation? I also address the
issue of nostalgia, as the potential to recuperate national dis-
courses through nostalgic formations, including the figure
of the author-dissident, suggests that renewed interest in the
writing of returned exiles may stem from recovering read-
ing practices and author functions associated with the Soviet
past. The question of whether nostalgia should be applied
to the writing of return, or whether it can be effectively cri-
tiqued when both writers and readers can be seen to channel
its potential for emancipatory readings, has ramifications for
both contemporary Russian culture and its study.29
In Aksyonov’s, Solzhenitsyn’s, and Limonov’s work, exile
is rhetorically represented, then undone, to create emplaced
voices that engage in dialogue with national and critical dis-
courses. As the title of my study indicates, exiles at home
represent a point of transition that helps to map the cultural
Introduction 25

and critical locations of contemporary Russian writing. The


risks of self-orientalization, nostalgia, and institutionalism
(or clichés of anti-institutionalism) bump up against ques-
tions of whether emplacement may be posited as a feasible,
or even appropriate, end to exile and transition to new
forms of national writing. Return entails a reconsideration
of redemptive constructions of reading and the relation-
ship between literature and the state. Its study may alienate
readers for whom such reading practices represent a nostal-
gic form of cultural identification. It may also be selectively
appropriated by those who wish to elaborate a monolithic
vision of post-Soviet Russian national identity and cultural
value. A comparative approach to the writers and emphasis
on the rhetorical constructions in their enactments of return
frustrates such appropriations; it may also create conflict for
those who believe that the exiled writer, even in return, does
not seek the confluence of constructed authorial and national
identities but remains a defender of objective truths.
At the same time it raises provocative questions, return
continues the dialogue begun by earlier generations. In 1956
Gleb Struve introduced the image of Russian exilic writing as
a temporarily diverted stream that would eventually flow back
into the river of Russian literature. Few could have imagined
how this neat metaphor would, on the one hand, illustrate
precisely what happened, and on the other, require qualifi-
ers and caveats by way of demonstrating how personalized
experiences and narratives of exile would lead to the produc-
tion and performance of highly individualized returns at a
moment of dramatic social and cultural change. This book—
in its partial mapping of the range of the writing of return
and its demonstration that the commitments and constructs
of narrative return allow its subjects to come home, even as
“home” obtains a different set of values and associations for
each writer—is intended to continue earlier discussions at the
same time that it opens a dialogue between the growing body
of studies of exilic writing and the imagined or realized returns
of their subjects.
4
Chapter 2

Russian Cosmopolitan

W ith the reinstatement of his Russian citizenship in 1990,


the writer Vassily Aksyonov, who was exiled from the Soviet
Union in 1980, began returning to Moscow twice a year
from his home in Washington, DC. Rapid changes to the city
guaranteed the writer would see a different Moscow on each
visit, but it has been said that each trip brought a different
Aksyonov to Moscow as well. First he was the reigning writer
for the generation of the 1960s, returning to a country that
no longer existed. Then he was the author of The Island of
Crimea (1981), a novel only publishable after the reforms of
perestroika that depicted a utopia as attractive and unstable
as Russia was during the early 1990s.1 The young Aksyonov
enjoyed a reputation as a cosmopolitan writer for the urbane,
Westernized image he cultivated during the Soviet era, and he
maintained that image during his ten years in exile. In more
recent years Aksyonov’s cosmopolitan outlook returned to its
roots and became increasingly oriented to exclusively Russian
readers. As of 2004, Aksyonov no longer lived in Washington,
but split his time between a home in Biarritz and the Moscow
apartment made available to him in 1991. He traveled to Rus-
sia several times a year to promote his work on television and
in public appearances, and regularly published novels, inter-
views, and journalistic pieces for his Russian audience, having
published no fewer than ten books between 1991 and 2007.2
Judging by the commercial success of Aksyonov’s 2006
novel Moskva kva-kva—whose title features an echolike play
on the name of the Russian capital—his popularity among his
28 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

Russian readers only increased following his return from exile.


The novel became available in stores on February 25, 2006,
and by March 14, at a reading and discussion of the novel
organized by the publishing house Eksmo, it was announced
that the first print run of 30,100 copies was nearly sold out.3
Moskva kva-kva is not only a novel about Russia’s capital—the
city Aksyonov called home for more than half of every year
after 2004. It is, in fact, about the very apartment building
in which he lived. The building is one of Moscow’s “Seven
Sisters,” a Stalin-era high-rise apartment building on the
Kotel’nicheskaya River embankment whose distinctive tow-
ers were completed in 1952. Aksyonov’s trajectory—from
cosmopolitan Soviet youth, to exile in America, to a returned
exile whose constructions of home include even the nostalgi-
cally tinged heady optimism and monumental architecture of
the Stalin era—illustrates that the end of exile can generate
unexpected perspectives on the relationships between exile
and return, narration, and rhetorical emplacement.
As Aksyonov’s recent activities and novel suggest, the
conditions of his many returns to Russia and his construc-
tions of home substantively refigure motifs that structured
his creative activity during his period of exile. Émigré crit-
ics have seen in Aksyonov a “mirror of Russian liberalism”
and have proposed that the development of the author’s
writerly persona is representative of the changing attitudes
of the Russian intelligentsia during the late Soviet period.
However, if “Aksyonov’s artistic experiments corresponded
almost perfectly with the insight of the late 1950s, the hope
of the early 60s, the doubts of the late 60s, and the despair
of the early 70s,”4 it can be said that his writings of exile,
produced during the 1980s, and his writings of return,
dating from the mid-1990s to the present, offer narratives
about narratives: the writings of exile continue to reflect the
lives and social conditions of his contemporaries, but they
also establish connections with new audiences and refig-
ured rhetorical strategies; following the writer’s return they
undo those relationships and strategies to generate new
modes of interaction with local audiences. The reflexivity
Russian Cosmopolitan 29

of Aksyonov’s writing of these periods, with its continual


reconfigurations of community and national and autho-
rial identity, must be construed against the background of
changing institutional critical and cultural practices that
accompanies his exile and many returns.
Once he finds himself abroad, Aksyonov’s embrace and
criticism of the exilic condition reveal his allegiances to, and
doubts about, modernist formulations of exile and its univer-
salizing discourses of cultural displacement. This will lead him
to experiment with varied constructions of national cultural
identity following his physical return, and the return of his
texts, to Russia. Throughout the period of exile and return,
Aksyonov writes travelogues, whether to challenge the oppo-
sition of cultural belonging and dislocation, to redefine the
location of the reader vis-à-vis the author, or to support, then
eventually challenge, postmodern claims to inclusivity. The
travelogue In Search of Melancholy Baby rhetorically struc-
tures his exile, finding commonality, rather than opposition,
between aesthetic tropes of travel and exile. A transitional
period distinguished by the numerous short works produced
during his early regime of travel between Russia and the West
reveals transnational figures ungrounded in either sustained
narratives or place. These modalities eventually give way to
rooted representations of culturally, nationally, and rhetori-
cally defined formations of community.
I place Aksyonov’s writing within the broader discussion
of metaphors of travel as a means of understanding how his
early Soviet and exilic writings negotiate tropes of common-
ality, and how his later writings of return in contrast navigate
more uneasily between the rubrics of national belonging and
cosmopolitan commitment. I look to contemporary theo-
rizations of travel, especially those put forward by Caren
Kaplan and Aihwa Ong, as means of challenging binary for-
mations (such as official/unofficial), and the constraints they
place on critical readings of Aksyonov’s explorations of travel,
displacement, and belonging. This dynamic opens possibili-
ties for recognizing the productive imperatives that organize
Aksyonov’s later novels of return, while also demonstrating
30 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

that these works often present a precarious balance between


the rhetoric of return, with its emphasis upon on the writer’s
relation to the reader, and institutions that would appropri-
ate this rhetoric toward supporting nationalist ideologies.
Also of interest here is Aksyonov’s self-identification as a
cosmopolitan writer, for it sustains the tension, to use Bruce
Robbins’s terms, between the “negative” sense of cosmopol-
itanism that associates it with privileged figures who are not
at all “rootless” but are in fact situated within professional
or elite institutions, and the “positive” values associated with
cosmopolitan “‘belonging’ to parts of the world other than
one’s nation,” as a means of negotiating local and global cul-
tural articulations.5 Aksyonov’s embrace of the term “cos-
mopolitan” may initially appear simply to provide another
name for his status as an exile. His swift acclimatization to
the Western academy, where he held employment while con-
tinuing his career as a writer, suggests that his exile might be
associated with the privileged detachment often negatively
associated with cosmopolitanism. His acknowledgement of
a deep American provincialism, unimaginable during his
America-infatuated Soviet youth, as well as his deliberate
challenges to the Soviet regime’s pejorative use of the term
to designate Jewish intellectuals, however, shape the cos-
mopolitan cultural imperatives that he orients to his respec-
tive audiences. It is only after Aksyonov begins to travel
regularly to Russia that he begins to explore his Jewish heri-
tage in both his travels and his writing, and the ensuing nar-
ratives form the initial part of his strategy to join the figures
of the writer and reader in the creative act of constructing
narratives of return.
None of this is to say that Aksyonov’s exile was not a forc-
ible expulsion outside Russia’s borders, that he construed his
exile in purely enabling terms, or that his recent regimen of
travel, frequent returns to Russia and their resulting narra-
tives ameliorated the pain of his exile. Rather, by proposing
that his writing of return reflects the strained relationship
between certain national and cosmopolitan affiliations, we
can consider questions that have yet to be raised about his
Russian Cosmopolitan 31

recent works. Does Aksyonov’s self-proclaimed shift from


modernist exile to postmodern modes of displacement
account for the increasingly particularized definitions of
home and his orientation to a narrower audience in his nar-
ratives of return? How did his family novel A Moscow Saga
become repositioned from potential American bestseller to
contemporary Russian national epic to blockbuster televi-
sion miniseries, and what do these adaptations reveal about
the particularities of reception for “national” literature? The
movement of the writer and his texts facilitates an approach
to the writing of return that takes such transitions into
account, and demonstrates the critical potential of exploring
the boundaries between them.
In this chapter, I will first treat Aksyonov’s early travel-
ogues and their relation to his works written in exile. By
negotiating between travel and exile, the writer and his texts
mediate between Soviet and Western culture, allowing both
the authorial persona and his audiences to traverse the borders
between them. The later narratives of return interrogate the
boundaries between the cosmopolitan and national, narrating
author-figure and biographical subject, and pose more com-
plicated relations that will be addressed in more detail in the
second part of the chapter devoted to narratives of return.
Beginning with Aksyonov’s writings of the late 1960s,
which simultaneously address readers of his published works
and unpublished manuscripts and traverse the boundaries
between these publication sites, the authorial persona is a
necessary figure for establishing a connection between the
particular conditions of the author and the shared experi-
ences of his readers. If it can be said that one extreme of
criticism would eliminate all vestiges of the author, and the
other proposes to limit readings to how they compare with
the biographical author’s experiences, it is vital to look to the
mediating figure of the authorial persona in the case of the
Soviet writer who integrates a quasi-autobiographical narra-
tor or protagonist into much of his work as Aksyonov does.
The authorial persona allows for a construction of author-
ship that is multiple, and includes biographical facts about
32 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

the author, the reader who appropriates the text, as well as


intertextual references.6 In this way the persona is also an
effective medium for historically and socially grounding the
movement from exile to return, which is figured in the writ-
er’s biography and the broader reception of his later texts.

A s tro nauts and Amphi bi ans


Metaphors of travel appear frequently in Aksyonov’s writ-
ing—from his “youth prose” of the 1960s, and his works
produced in exile, to his writing of return—and develop
over time. Whether generating a sense of mobility that chal-
lenges stable conventions for locating identity in the Soviet
context, or introducing new tropes for the physical and rhe-
torical acts of exile and return into contemporary Russian
writing, Aksyonov’s travel narratives reflect the experiences
and creative tasks he shares with his audience. Travel themes
allowed the young Aksyonov to broaden the rigid bound-
aries of Soviet prose. The protagonists of A Starry Ticket
(Zvezdnyi bilet, 1961) are motivated by a vacation in Tal-
linn rather than professional or social obligations, and their
journey takes them west to the Baltics, rather than east to
Siberia, where most youth were sent to participate in Soviet
construction projects. Such narratives marked a break from
published tales “about the glorious deeds of our youth at
the building sites of communism” that often inspired young
writers to travel eastward and write construction narratives
of their own.7 The writer Victor Erofeyev paraphrases Neil
Armstrong to metaphorically link the journeys undertaken
by the protagonists of A Starry Ticket and “Halfway to
the Moon” (“Na polputi k lune,” 1962) with the ground-
breaking literary path forged by Aksyonov—a path subse-
quently traversed by his readers and fellow writers—when he
describes the effect of reading A Starry Ticket as one “small
step for a writer, but a giant leap for the Russian mentality.”8
This feature of Aksyonov’s work is similarly reflected in
the title of the 1966 film project The Journey (Puteshestvie),
which consists of three adaptations of Aksyonov’s early sto-
ries “Halfway to the Moon,” “Papa, What Does it Spell?”
Russian Cosmopolitan 33

(“Papa, slozhi!” 1962) and “Lunches of 1943” (“Zavtraki


sorok tret’ego,” 1962). “Halfway to the Moon,” the tale
of a coarse working man who becomes enamored of a flight
attendant on a trip from Khabarovsk to Moscow and is trans-
formed through the numerous flights on the same itiner-
ary he takes in the hope of encountering her again, is the
only tale of the three to explicitly feature the theme of travel.
The incongruity of the protagonist’s rough demeanor in the
genteel environment of the plane on his initial flight paral-
lels the clash between the smell “of tomatoes and Chechen-
Ingush cognac” in a room in which a song by “three French
boys . . . about how they had been round the whole wide
world and seen things you would never see” plays.9 Such
conflicting notes eventually give way as travel and reading
become an integral part of the protagonist’s life; just as travel
and its attendant pastimes contribute to the distinct identi-
ties of the flight attendant, a sailor acquaintance, and a past
love interest who leads geological expeditions, so are they
instrumental to the protagonist’s process of self-discovery.10
The other two stories adapted for The Journey are among
those Konstantin Kustanovich describes as “anti-romantic,”
in that they do not offer escapes to far-off places or the
promise of love, but unconventional approaches to conflict
and coping with dissatisfaction in one’s day to day life. In this
way, they break from the stories of the early 1960s—which
depicted a kind of balance between social commitment and
youthful desires—to explore an older protagonist’s complex
relations with others and the world around him.11 They also
depict reading practices that do not so much resemble mod-
els for romantic appropriation as propose unconventional
and creative answers to artistic and social conventions.12 A
characteristic work of this period is “Little Whale, Varnisher
of Reality” (1964), in which a father reads fairy tales to his
son before bed. The boy reacts angrily to the violent cli-
max of a story in which one animal attacks another, and is
unable to wait for the resolution to the conflict. When the
next story comes to a similarly violent climax, in which a wolf
grips a goat kid in its jaws, the boy describes the scenario as
34 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

a billy goat playing with its son. The father points out his
son’s mistake and tries to explain the conventions of story-
telling to him, but soon accepts his son’s version of events.
The child’s view of the world provides an escape from the
difficult social conditions the protagonist confronts each
day, as well as an approach to rewriting circumstances that
seem predetermined and out of his control. The rules of
storytelling, which the protagonist treated as rigid system
unto itself, are revealed to be mutable. This shift in reading
habits allows the protagonist to change his view of the nar-
rative of his life.13
Aksyonov incorporated similar constructions into the trav-
elogues he began to write in the mid-1960s. Here Aksyonov
also introduces tropes that are further explored in the later
works he had no hope of publishing in the Soviet Union,
such as his novel The Burn (completed in 1975), as well as
the works he would write in the West following his exile.
Like many of the works written “for the drawer,” his exilic
writings and narratives of return, the travelogues explore the
predicament of narrating on the interstices of the national and
the cosmopolitan. As the travelogues were intended for publi-
cation in the Soviet Union, however, Aksyonov does not posit
a cosmopolitan identity as an alternative to an ideologically
defined, internationalist Soviet one, but incorporates brief,
subjective meditations into the travelogues as a means of
considering the role of the artist and reader between the
social and aesthetic imperatives of the Russian and Euro-
pean modernist traditions and political realities in the Soviet
Union.14 It is these meditations, largely centered around
the modernist trope of alienation, that find echoes in his
unpublishable novels and stories that eventually find their
way into print abroad.
Following Nikita Khrushchev’s assertion in 1963 that
writers needed to travel abroad to inform Soviet readers
of how people of other nations lived, the number of works
devoted to travel grew dramatically.15 Permission to travel
was a privilege granted only to those writers who were con-
sidered ideologically trustworthy, but by most accounts,
Russian Cosmopolitan 35

writers were kept on an extremely short leash. To get a sense


of what these officially organized trips for writers were like,
we can look to Anatoly Gladilin’s account of his 1961 trip to
Paris. Like Aksyonov, Gladilin published several examples of
travel prose, but only in emigration could he reveal just how
constricted the conditions of these travels were. The Soviet
writers in Paris were accompanied by chaperones at every
step, and interaction with Parisians was so restricted that a
planned meeting with students was spontaneously cancelled,
allowing the students and writers only a brief glance at each
other through the windows of a bus while a Soviet guide
invented a reason why the meeting could not take place.16
As Marina Balina demonstrates in her study of travel prose of
the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, writers confronted with such
circumstances sought out loopholes in the conventions of
their genre that allowed them to circumvent any discussion
of the actual conditions of their trips and invite the reader to
become an active participant in the experience of travel and
the creation of the travel text.17
Aksyonov was allowed to visit India, Italy, Japan, and
Poland in 1962. In 1963 he traveled to Argentina and vis-
ited Japan a second time. These trips resulted in the travel-
ogues “Japanese Jottings” (“Iaponskie zametki,” 1964) and
“Under the Sky of Sultry Argentina” (“Pod nebom znoinoi
Argentiny,” 1966). In the period from 1965 to 1967, he
traveled to Austria, Bulgaria, England, Germany, Italy, Swit-
zerland, and Yugoslavia. Between 1975 and 1979, he visited
France, Germany, Italy, and the United States.18 His account
of his trip to the United States, titled Around the Clock Non-
Stop (Kruglye sutki non-stop, 1976), would be followed by
a second American travelogue written in exile, In Search of
Melancholy Baby (V poiskakh grustnogo bebi, 1987), in which
he narrates the process by which he was deprived of his
Soviet citizenship and made his home in Washington, DC.
Travel privileges and their ensuing travel narratives, along
with Aksyonov’s participation in a thriving youth culture
during the early 1960s that extended beyond the page to
promote Western styles of music and clothing, contributed
36 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

to Aksyonov’s image as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan figure.


Far from being born out of the ennui of privilege, however,
Aksyonov’s travel writings brought with them a sense of
excitement and expressed a concomitant shared, if covert,
sense of alienation from certain elements of Soviet life. The
sense of expectation with which the protagonist of “Halfway
to the Moon” purchases three new suits upon arriving in
Moscow, and his later near desperation as he tears open the
seams of his undergarments to spend his remaining travelers
checks on more cross-country airplane tickets is emblematic
of this cultural impulse.19
“Japanese Jottings,” “Under the Sky of Sultry Argen-
tina,” and Around the Clock Non-Stop all appeared in the
Soviet press. As the Soviet reader of this time could hardly
be expected to enjoy similar travel experiences, Aksyonov,
like other travel writers of the period, developed a strategy of
interspersing highly subjective passages among generalized
impressions of his travels, so that issues of aesthetic and ideo-
logical difference became inextricably tied to questions of
identity.20 This device diminishes the social divide that sepa-
rates the experiences of the reader and writer by allowing the
reader to, as Balina notes, “travel along with the writer” and
thus lift the “mask of the official representative from the face
of the writer just a little bit, making him or her human again
and showing that the writer had not yet fully learned how
not to think, suffer, and doubt.”21 On the one hand, these
writings may be read more generally within a universalized
idiom of alienation that cultivates an intimate relationship
of affiliation between reader and writer despite the official
institutions that would prefer to place the writer in a posi-
tion of social instruction and privilege. On the other hand,
Aksyonov’s travel writings feature linguistic tropes, such as
the consistent mispronunciation of his name, that contribute
to a rhetorical construction of displacement in which signi-
fier and signified rarely correspond. These features will be
developed in Aksyonov’s exilic travelogue In Search of Mel-
ancholy Baby to produce the rhetoric of exile characteristic of
Aksyonov’s later works written in the United States.
Russian Cosmopolitan 37

The early “Japanese Jottings” has been described as a “safe


content” piece that utilizes “a radical, impressionistic style.”22
Along with the traveler’s impressions of his surroundings, it
explores his thoughts on alienation, personified in the fig-
ure of a lone bicyclist. Of his encounter with the bicyclist,
Aksyonov writes, “He is very close to me, and I understand
only too well what it means to transport one’s inner world
on two small wheels, to ride off into the darkness on brit-
tle spokes.”23 Here Aksyonov draws on both meanings of
the word “close” (blizok) to suggest that the bicyclist’s state
of isolation is very much akin to his own, a sentiment that
allows Aksyonov to address individual, rather than collective,
concerns in his travel essay. Far from suggesting that he and
the bicyclist share a universal sense of alienation, however,
Aksyonov elucidates their differences through terms that do
not correspond to one another in register. Thus, a later pas-
sage invoking the bicyclist concludes, “one cannot dissolve
into another nation. The soul has no ‘emergency ration,’ it is
all consumed on one’s own country. Perhaps that is why one
cannot discover the exact nature of another’s sorrow.”24 This
passage may be read as an example of the formal requirement
to champion Soviet culture, with the writer dutifully noting
that his soul, like that of every Soviet citizen, is thoroughly
invested in his homeland. Yet Aksyonov also allows that this
point of identification is restricted in its capacity to under-
stand others by this very same definition.
The image of the traveler as a space-suited astronaut is a
distinctly Soviet one: strictly enforced rules about movement
outside of Russia’s borders give the traveler little choice but
to experience foreign lands from within a protected bubble.
By suggesting that this bubble may have a social or ideo-
logical function but has little bearing on matters of the soul,
Aksyonov rhetorically identifies the differences between
himself and the Japanese bicyclist in the displacement con-
structed by the social institutions that surround him, rather
than on individual terms. This sentiment is mirrored in the
“I” and “he” that Aksyonov uses to describe himself and
the bicyclist as closely identified individuals, pronouns that
38 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

yield to the impersonal constructions he uses to describe the


sphere of officialdom that surrounds him but does not define
his identity while abroad.
Aksyonov will revisit the image of the traveler as astro-
naut in his essay “Lungs and Gills,” written six years after
his exile from the Soviet Union. In reference to the con-
dition of the writer in emigration, he notes, “A working
writer . . . shouldn’t count on the steadily leaking container
on his back . . . With a limited amount of the authentic Rus-
sian air in your shoulder cylinders, those batteries cannot be
recharged whenever you want.”25 As suggested by the title
of the essay, the cultural isolation of the astronaut should
instead give way to an amphibious existence. Aksyonov pro-
poses the exiled writer develop “lungs and gills” that will
allow him to dive and emerge through diverse linguistic and
cultural territories throughout each day. Noting moreover
that the needs of the Russian reader may be better met by
the amphibious cosmopolitan than the space-suited traveler
counting each last breath of artificially preserved native air, he
advises fellow exiles: “Take advantage of your unexpected cos-
mopolitanism. You cannot vouch that this is exactly what your
native culture wants from you at the moment.”26 The exile as
amphibian will reemerge later as a significant rewriting of the
trope of displacement in In Search of Melancholy Baby.
Like “Japanese Jottings,” “Under the Sky of Sultry Argen-
tina” is an early travel memoir that introduces ideas that find
resonance in Aksyonov’s later exilic writings. The author
arrives in Argentina as part of a Soviet delegation promoting
the film The Colleagues, an adaptation of Aksyonov’s early
novel of the same name. “Under the Sky of Sultry Argen-
tina” also features subjective passages intended to draw the
reader and writer into a complicit relationship in which the
mediation of an official point of view is absent. Commenting
on Orson Welles’s 1962 film adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The
Trial for example, he writes, “All right, when an argument
starts over Kafka’s, or in this case, Orson Welles’, right to
depict such a world, just try to remember if you have never
in your life found yourself in endless, terrifying corridors or
Russian Cosmopolitan 39

in a constricting dead end. I know I have.”27 Those who


are aware of Aksyonov’s tendency to insert subjective state-
ments directed to the reader will recognize that at the same
time he appears to be describing sensations universally asso-
ciated with fear, he is describing the claustrophobia or “ide-
ological congestion” associated with Soviet life.28 This idea
will be elucidated in a 1992 essay in which Aksyonov dis-
cusses the phenomenon of writers living in close proximity
to one another in the Soviet Union. Writers were “grouped
together in various ‘palaces of the arts’ and literary settle-
ments,” where “fundamental betrayals were initiated . . . In
an area covering eleven time-zones the regime contrived to
create an unimaginable crush of people . . . a labyrinth of
Kafkaesque corridors and dead-ends.”29
Aksyonov’s strategy of developing the tropes of alienation
found in his early Soviet travel writings for the English-read-
ing audience he encounters in exile can be further illustrated
through examples of linguistic disarticulation, exemplified
not only by his shift from publishing in Russian to Eng-
lish but by the diverse renderings of his name. It is natu-
ral that accepted transliteration systems produce “Aksenov,”
“Axionow,” and “Axionov,” among other variants, and
the writer offers his preferred, if unconventional, variant
“Aksyonov.” But intentional and unintentional misspellings
of Aksyonov’s name provide a productive trope of displace-
ment that simultaneously liberates and dislocates the writer
from any fixed sense of identity associated with his name.
In “Under the Sky of Sultry Argentina,” the writer’s pho-
tograph appears in the newspaper over the legend: “Boris
Arsenov, officer of the fire department for Mosfil’m stu-
dios.” The film festival also begins with a showing of The
Colleagues, “based on the story of the same name by Boris
Arsenov, officer of the fire department of Mosfil’m.”30 The
misidentification of the author results in the creation of an
alter ego, “Boris Arsenov,” who leaves Buenos Aires for a
glamorous Hollywood-like world of film and fantasy and
eventually disappears into the world of dreams. The creation
of this alter ego allows Aksyonov to insert fantastic episodes
40 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

into his travelogue and depart from the tendency to con-


struct travel writings around the delicate balance between
ideological tenets and the author’s observations. The iden-
tity of Aksyonov’s alter ego may have emerged from at least
two instances of misidentification that befell Aksyonov while
one of his stories was being considered for film adaptation.
An official request submitted by the screenwriter Konstantin
Piotrovskii on December 7, 1959, to develop a film based on
Aksyonov’s short story “Asphalt Roads” as well as the letter
from the studio confirming receipt of the request, identified
the author as “V. Arseniev,”31 a misidentification that may
have led Aksyonov to consider introducing a split between
“Aksyonov,” the Soviet writer, and “Arsenov,” the personage
who lives in the world of film and fiction.
The assertion of multiple identities, or the creation of an
identity that challenged the essentialized image and task of
the writer in the Soviet period, would eventually become
an important strategy for Aksyonov by the late 1960s and
1970s. Establishing an official reputation as a screenwriter
as well as a novelist,32 Aksyonov would also become known
as a translator, travel writer, playwright, and writer of chil-
dren’s books and short stories. Alongside his identity as a
writer in these genres, Aksyonov established himself as the
author of works that could not be published in Russia, but
could be acquired and read by intrepid and resourceful read-
ers of samizdat editions and eventually by readers abroad.
By making intertextual references in his officially published
travelogues to works that would not see print in Russia until
the 1990s, Aksyonov contests the boundaries between his
Soviet travel writings and later exilic writings, and encour-
ages his readers to negotiate the margins between the two to
consider them as a creative whole.

N ot-S o -S entimental Jo u r neys


Tropes in Aksyonov’s prose that link travel to the condi-
tion of exile, and later, to the experience of return, dem-
onstrate that travel and displacement need not be treated,
as Kaplan notes, as “binary categories where travel simply
Russian Cosmopolitan 41

signifies modernism and displacement purely articulates


postmodernism” but instead should be treated as modalities
that allow us to question “the construction and proliferation
of modernisms from a postmodern critical standpoint.”33
As we have seen, travel in the Soviet context is hardly the
consumer-driven leisure activity it is in the West, and the
Euro-American modernist tropes of exile that Kaplan argues
work to remove themselves from political or historical con-
texts to generate aesthetic categories and ahistorical values
are distinct from the highly politicized and historically spe-
cific rhetorical circumstances in which late Soviet exiles like
Aksyonov found themselves.34 From his use of figures such as
the mispronunciation of his name it becomes apparent that
in his published works Aksyonov shared his sense of cultural
isolation with his Soviet readers by using modernist idioms
to elucidate shared conditions of alienation and anxiety, but
given the opportunity to explicate these ideas in essays pub-
lished abroad, turned the focus of these passages to the spe-
cific condition of the Soviet writer.
Far from creating simple narratives of opposition that
posit official strictures and themes against unofficial ones,
“Japanese Jottings,” “Under the Sky of Sultry Argentina,”
and the later, associated essays printed in the West contend
with proscribed conventions for Soviet travel literature and
Western perceptions of Russian exiled writers. We encounter
tropes that unravel the rules of signification, tropes that will
become fully developed in the experience of exile chronicled
in the American travel memoir In Search of Melancholy Baby,
which builds on his earlier travel writings and the relation-
ship they established with his Russian readers while cultivat-
ing a new relationship with a Western readership that does
not yet know his name. By focusing on the links between
the published travel narrative Around the Clock Non-Stop,
the unpublishable manuscript of The Burn and the exilic
travelogue In Search of Melancholy Baby, we can see that if
earlier Aksyonov used subjective meditations to address the
historically specific and individual conditions of Soviet inter-
nal exile, once abroad he will respond to American cultural
42 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

narratives associated with immigration and Soviet dissidence


with new tropes of displacement that are germane to both
his Russian and American audiences.
The travelogue Around the Clock Non-Stop, which features
fictional passages, reportage, and the creation of an autho-
rial alter ego “The Muscovite,” is notable as the first Soviet
work to portray America in exclusively positive terms, and
this distinction allows the work to function outside of cer-
tain prescribed conventions for travel writing, in which nega-
tive appraisals of particular aspects of American life would
be obligatory.35 Like Aksyonov’s travelogues of the 1960s,
Around the Clock Non-Stop furthers the complicit relation-
ship between the figure of the author and his reader, but
does so through allusions to the unpublishable manuscript
of his novel The Burn and the author’s developing interest
in bridging the margins between his identities, genres, and
published and unpublished manuscripts.
Around the Clock Non-Stop ostensibly records the events of
Aksyonov’s visit to the United States following an invitation
to give a series of lectures at the University of California, Los
Angeles. These sections of reportage are interspersed with
the fantastic “Typical American Adventures” experienced by
“The Muscovite,” and the merging of these modes is in fact
the subject of one of the first sections of the work, titled
“Imagination and Reality.” Although the “Typical Ameri-
can Adventures” allowed readers to accompany the narra-
tor on his travels to Las Vegas, the Monterey Jazz Festival,
Los Angeles, and New York, it is in the passages in which
the narrator, as part of his teaching responsibilities, gives
lectures on literature and art that the intertextual allusions
to Aksyonov’s unpublished manuscript appear. The role of
the reader as a complicit collaborator in the creation of his
texts is explicated in the lecture on Iurii Trifonov’s short sto-
ries: “Once at a lecture I read one of Trifonov’s stories, and
using his example, spoke about intuitive prose and how here
the reader is summoned as a coauthor and becomes (with
certain, no doubt, well-known efforts) a participant in the
creative act, like the listener at a jazz concert.”36 When an
Russian Cosmopolitan 43

American student expresses disappointment that such liter-


ature cannot be published in the Soviet Union, Aksyonov
shows him his Russian edition of Trifonov’s book, published
in a print run of one hundred thousand copies. With the rev-
elation that such prose can be published in the Soviet Union,
Aksyonov suggests that the Soviet literary establishment is
more progressive than Americans are willing to believe. Sig-
nificantly, this discussion of Trifonov’s story and his own
published writings, which can be read as the dutiful response
of a Soviet citizen educating an American audience misin-
formed about his motherland, immediately follows one of
his lectures about a bas-relief he saw in a museum in Berlin,
which depicts the legendary battle between the gods Zeus,
Athena, Heracles, and Poseidon and the Giants, a mythical
race of savage men. As if in answer to the question he con-
sistently poses to his students—“How does something come
out of nothing?”—Aksyonov draws an association between
the everyday act of visiting a museum and the creative acts
of ekphrasis and narration. He concludes with an homage
to marble and paper, the media that record and preserve the
process by which ephemeral events and ideas become art,
when “something” emerges out of “nothing.”
Aksyonov’s construction of a tacit relationship between
the reader and writer takes on a new dimension by this time:
his substantial reading public could seek out his less-contro-
versial published pieces and recognize coded references to
his unpublished works in them. Aksyonov’s manuscript of
The Burn, which would be completed by the time Around
the Clock Non-Stop appeared in print, features a similar dis-
cussion of the battle between the gods and Giants in rela-
tion to the artist’s struggle to communicate his ideas without
ideological compromise. Samsik Sabler, a saxophonist, leads
his jazz band, The Giants, at a concert where he performs a
new composition that expresses his hopes for the future while
preserving his artistic integrity.37 Sabler’s attempt at optimism
in the face of Soviet authorities’ efforts to repress his creativ-
ity is defeated, however, when the militia arrives to stop the
concert. The conflict between the artist and representatives of
44 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

the state is presented in a visual image reminiscent of the bas-


relief described in Around the Clock Non-Stop: “Samsik’s six
shadows flickered back and forth over the wall, soon joined
by the shadows of the approaching police officers. The sax
wailed and a creative thought was born: The Battle Between
the Gods and the Giants.”38 Using scenes from the mythical
battle to juxtapose the free conditions for artistic creation
described in the sunny narrative Around the Clock Non-Stop
with the repressive atmosphere of The Burn, in which creative
individuals struggle to maintain their integrity at consider-
able risk, Aksyonov draws attention to the reader’s role in
two iterations of the creative process. The need for reciprocal
dialogue between alternating models of the creative process
proves vital, for without it, the art that is the outcome of this
dialogue and the act of reading can be reduced to nothing
through the reader’s own negligence.
The 1987 travelogue In Search of Melancholy Baby was writ-
ten and published in the United States, rendering Aksyonov’s
strategy of inserting subjective passages into an otherwise
“safe” text unnecessary. The impetus to engage the reader
in the creative process remains, however, for now Aksyonov
becomes introduced to his new, Western audience first by
the fact of his exile, and then by his writing. The tendency
to jump forward to Aksyonov’s exile as the salient feature of
his biography for the Western reader is notable in a feature
story published in the Los Angeles Times: “After his first novel
The Colleagues was published in 1960, he quickly established a
reputation as one of Russia’s most outspoken anti-Soviet writ-
ers, eventually leading Communist Party authorities to strip
him of his citizenship in 1981.”39 Despite, or perhaps because
of, the potential shifts in audience and agency evinced by such
journalistic interventions, Aksyonov continues his strategy
of juxtaposing intertextual references intended to engage his
new audience in the creative act of reading, particularly when
the creation of authorial identity is at issue. Thus In Search of
Melancholy Baby introduces both his Western and Soviet read-
ers (if the latter could get their hands on the work in a sam- or
tamizdat copy) to his new status as an exile and encourages
Russian Cosmopolitan 45

them to approach the work as an exploration of the writer’s


new identity as well as his new land. Exile and travel are the
two themes that orient the narrative toward Aksyonov’s two
audiences: on the one hand, his journey parallels that of his
book, which would eventually find its way to Russian readers;
on the other, it parallels the journey of his fellow Americans,
who, he observes, “all come from somewhere else.”
In Search of Melancholy Baby allowed the Russian reader
to participate in Aksyonov’s border crossing in that it con-
fronted or confirmed their long-held beliefs about America
as Aksyonov experienced them. More important, Russian
readers recognized that the untold stories of their genera-
tion—the thaw years under Khrushchev, Boris Pasternak’s
forced renunciation of the Nobel Prize, samizdat, magnitiz-
dat, dissidence and exile—were being told abroad. Not only
was Aksyonov engaging with the Russian reader by openly
affirming their shared cultural heritage, he was teaching it to
a generation of American readers. The work allowed Russian
readers to experience America while simultaneously becom-
ing part of its university curriculum. As Aksyonov writes, “I
talk to [my students] about Soviet reality in terms of my old
friends and what happened to them and watch their picture
of Russia changing from a vast dark blob on the map to a
battleground for human dignity . . . [and] I realize I am
doing something eminently worthwhile.”40
At the same time, Aksyonov’s affirmation of social and
creative identity over national origins throughout In Search
of Melancholy Baby is directed to his American audience,
who, he believes, can transcend his otherness to understand
his condition. In this way, In Search of Melancholy Baby
becomes an enabling fiction in which the author, stripped of
his Soviet citizenship, renews his commitment to Russian lit-
erature while discovering a new home and audience. It is not
a coincidence that he explores the alienation of ethnic com-
munities in America, who, like the exile, experience the split
between cultural identity and nationality. Aksyonov goes so
far as to claim that all Americans are exiles—and that identity
crisis and exile go hand in hand.
46 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

Throughout In Search of Melancholy Baby, sections of


reportage are interspersed with “Sketches for a Novel to Be,”
which follow the adventures of a Muscovite living abroad.
The sketches would eventually become incorporated into
a later novel of return, 1997’s The New Sweet Style, while
the reportage sections tellingly feature passages in which
the writer is plagued by constant misrenderings of his name.
Early in In Search of Melancholy Baby, the writer receives a
call from a furniture store: “The morning of the first day of
the third week Mr. Eskintow received a phone call.”41 An
encounter with a police officer leads the writer to realize that
he is unknown to representatives of the state in America;
later Aksyonov is mistaken for a dentist. These numerous
instances of mistaken identity reveal the flip side of the need
for a “Boris Arsenov” who can discard the identity of Soviet
writer and escape into a world of creative freedom; in exile in
the United States “Vassily Aksyonov” is deprived of all sense
of identity and is forced to construct it anew.
Aksyonov depicts the disorienting experience of having
one’s name stripped of all meaning in a key passage in which
a well-known American writer calls him at home. Aksyonov’s
wife takes a message and asks the illustrious writer to spell his
name. The stammer on the other end of the line echoes the
experience of exilic displacement, when one’s name means
nothing to others, and is amplified when the American writer
calls again and asks for “Mr.—uh—Axolotl?”42 thus associat-
ing Aksyonov with the amphibious creature and Julio Cortá-
zar’s story of the same name. Later in In Search of Melancholy
Baby, Aksyonov identifies himself by this name when he
writes of the temptation to write about himself: “The temp-
tation is great. I know from experience. Every morning I sit
at my desk, look out over the rooftops of Washington, and
yearn to write: ‘Mr. Axolotl, writer in exile, sat down at his
desk and looked out over the rooftops of Washington.’”43
References to the axolotl must be read along with
Aksyonov’s 1986 article “Lungs and Gills,” as well as “Fun-
damental Displacement,” the first public presentation he
gave upon returning to Russia in 1990 at the invitation of
Russian Cosmopolitan 47

the American ambassador, in which he stated, “We live in


two environments, in two linguistic environments. Like
amphibians, we use gills.”44 He evokes the same image in
a talk he gave at a 1989 meeting of Russian émigré writers
living in the West: “As a part of the writer’s life, the novel
cannot but reflect all its circumstances, both the former
experiences of his fatherland and the everyday life of his
new home. The novelist in emigration is a kind of amphib-
ian: he uses his lungs and gills.”45
Taken together, these texts form a matrix of intertextual
references to the condition of exile and Cortázar’s story
“Axolotl,” in which a profoundly lonely young man observes
an aquarium of axolotls at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
Staring at the strange aquatic salamanders in their enclosure,
the narrator communicates with them, learning from them
“of a different life, or another way of seeing.”46 Finally the
narrator himself becomes transformed into an axolotl, fully
aware of the impossibility of comprehending his former
self, who remains outside the glass enclosure. He comes
to realize that “every axolotl thinks like a man,” a prisoner
“buried alive” inside the salamander’s body.47 His only con-
solation lies in the hope that the young man, his self that
remains outside the enclosure, will write a story about the
axolotls and communicate their experience to the world. It
comes as little surprise that the events of Cortázar’s story
take place in the same zoo where, in a wretched gesture of
isolation described by Vladimir Nabokov, a gorilla commu-
nicated its experiences to the world through a drawing—of
the bars of its cage.
As early as 1972, Aksyonov acknowledged the impor-
tance of Cortázar for his writing,48 and if prior to his exile
Aksyonov recognized the Argentine exile’s depiction of iso-
lation, once abroad he will take on the task of the young
man in “Axolotl” by communicating the condition of the
exiled writer in his written texts. In effect, when he begins
writing for an American audience, he inverts the terms he
used to acknowledge the extratextual relationship he shared
with his Russian readers; it is after all only the text he has in
48 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

common with his new audience. Thus, in his travelogue writ-


ten in the United States he begins constructing a new kind
of extratextual relationship with the reader emblematized in
“Mr. Axolotl,” who is both a misunderstood creature behind
glass and a cosmopolitan amphibian who traverses discursive
worlds with ease.
Significantly, “Mr. Axolotl” reappears in The New Sweet
Style, the first novel to feature the complex of attributes that
constitutes Aksyonov’s rhetoric of return, in which exilic
tropes give way to figures of connection:

A sea lion plays near Fisherman’s Wharf.


For the third time in five years I come to the Alioto restaurant.
They haven’t forgotten me here, they remember I’m not a thief.
Last time, a certain Señor Axelotl [sic] greeted me here.
..........
Maître Axelotl comes up as a type from my major oeuvre.49

“Mr. Axolotl” reappears in 2007’s Rare Earths as “Bazz


Okselotl, provocateur of cosmopolitan literature,” in which
“Okselotl” is revealed not to be a mispronunciation, but itself
a name of Russian origin.50 The refiguration of the axolotl
from an emblem of exilic displacement to a figure of Russian
origin who promotes interaction between Russian and world
culture is emblematic of the method by which Aksyonov
transitions from a writing of exile oriented to Western and
Soviet audiences to a writing of return attuned to its local
reception and readers.
Cosmopolitan identity, as depicted in Aksyonov’s exilic
work, is not the default condition of the exile, but requires
participation in a diverse range of communities and activities
that allow one to shape one’s identity, then communicate
those experiences and identities to others. In his essay “Cos-
mopolitan Patriots,” Kwame Anthony Appiah describes the
conditions that allow such a process to take place:

The fundamental thought of the cosmopolitanism I defend is


that the freedom to create oneself—the freedom that liberalism
celebrates—requires a range of socially transmitted options from
which to invent what he have come to call our identities. Our
Russian Cosmopolitan 49

families and schools, our churches and temples, our professional


associations and clubs, provide two essential elements in the tool
kit of self-creation: first, they provide ready-made identities . . .
whose shapes are constituted by norms and expectations, ste-
reotypes and demands, rights and obligations; second, they give
us a language in which to think about these identities and with
which we may shape new ones.51

In Search of Melancholy Baby documents Aksyonov’s partici-


pation in various institutions, as multiple identities—writer,
Russian, resident of Washington, DC, Redskins fan—to name
only a few, begin to emerge. Aksyonov also reacts against some
of their expectations, stereotypes and demands by engaging in
the forms of semantic slippage he used earlier to construct
rhetorical tropes of displacement that cultivated a complicit
relationship with his Russian readers. Only now, rather than
juxtaposing terms that seem incompatible with one another
(emergency ration/soul, Arsenov/Aksyonov) to elucidate his
displacement, he redefines and increases the signifying poten-
tial of terms that have been applied to him by the Western
media. In doing so, he juxtaposes competing definitions of
a single term of identification, forcing the Western reader to
confront the expectations or stereotypes they may have formed
of the writer even before encountering his creative work.
At the start of his process of self-definition for the Ameri-
can reader, Aksyonov expands the semantic range of the
term “dissident,” which was generally applied to him by the
Western media at the time of his arrival in the United States.
Russian writers in the West were broadly conflated with
political dissidence, as demonstrated by the title of a 1982
conference held at the New School for Social Research—
“Writers in Exile: A Conference of Soviet and East European
Dissidents”—a forum in which Aksyonov participated. The
conference moderator used the terms “writer” and “dissi-
dent” interchangeably, referring to the group of writers pres-
ent as “dissidents” so consistently that one audience member
protested that this was an opportunistic exploitation of the
writers in an attempt to frame the discussion in terms of
the moderator’s political orientation.52 At the conference
50 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

Aksyonov responded to the use of the term “dissident” as


a designation for one’s professional identity: “Well, here we
use the term ‘dissident’ as if it were some kind of occupation.
I’m not much of a politician you know, and I would prefer to
talk about literature.” Elsewhere, he similarly distinguished
between the terms, noting that “political dissidence is by no
means an artistic criterion”53 and that had he stayed in Russia,
“[he] would not write, but would become a political figure,
a dissident.” “I could have stayed and fought,” he observed,
“but then I would have become a different person.”54
If discursive displacement engages the reader to work with
the writer in evaluating the terms of identity construction in
Aksyonov’s travel writings, this strategy will undergo its own
encounter with displacement when his texts return to Russia
during the period of perestroika. With an additional shift in
audience and agency, In Search of Melancholy Baby under-
took an uncomfortable journey into a reformed Russia’s
periodical press. Without recourse to Aksyonov’s original
Russian manuscript, the journal Krokodil in 1988 published
an excerpt back-translated from the English-language edition
into Russian. In addition to significantly altering the very
fabric of the text and its rhetorical constructions of the rela-
tionship between the reader and writer, the editors of Kroko-
dil encouraged Russian readers to respond to this distorted
edition by proposing that “the author not only writes in the
first person, but on behalf of Soviet citizens as a whole and
his generation in particular; with this in mind, we await your
letters.”55 The appeal did not go unheeded, and readers in
subsequent issues responded to the characterization of “their
generation” by contesting Aksyonov’s account of events in
the Soviet Union during the Second World War and express-
ing indignation at the views written “in their name.”56
This double act of misreading—produced as a result of a
misplaced effort to quickly publish works previously unavail-
able to Russian readers and a provocation to respond to a
distorted version of the text—complicated Aksyonov’s liter-
ary return in ways that could not have been foreseen. Far
from breaking down barriers imposed by Soviet authorities
Russian Cosmopolitan 51

nearly a decade earlier, the incident raises important ques-


tions about the reception of returning literature and writers.
In his discussion of the work of Cortázar, Arjun Appadurai
observes that “contemporary literary fantasies tell us some-
thing about displacement, disorientation, and agency in the
contemporary world” and that all the macronarratives that
can be construed from Cortázar’s work “remind us that lives
today are as much acts of projection and imagination as they
are enactments of known scripts or predictable outcomes.”57
The acts of projection that threw obstacles in the path of
Aksyonov’s literary return and provoked responses that har-
kened back to the Soviet past in their maligning of the author
stand in sharp contrast to Aksyonov’s first published narrative
of his physical return to Russia, his 1990 essay “Not Quite
a Sentimental Journey.” Here the author admits, apropos of
Appadurai’s description of enactments, that “looking back,
the scene would seem a bit too tidily symbolic.”58 Upon his
arrival at Moscow’s Sheremetevo airport after ten years in
exile, the first three people Aksyonov sees upon entering the
terminal form a gallery of distinctly Russian types: a tiotka,
a female type so culturally specific as to be nearly untranslat-
able (Aksyonov offers “a dumpy, shabbily dressed woman of
indeterminate age; a specific stratum of society that even a
doctoral dissertation could not describe”), a soldier, and a
Dostoevskian clerk.59 Upon entering the terminal, Aksyonov
is followed by television cameras that capture another
encounter: when a KGB officer attempts to block all televi-
sion cameras in the customs zone, the reform-emboldened
journalists turn their cameras on him.

Wr iting Retur n
Return becomes the subject, and very structure, of Aksyonov’s
works written following the restoration of his citizenship and
an apartment in Moscow. If in the essay “Not Quite a Senti-
mental Journey” he would “too tidily” formulate the condi-
tions of his homecoming, the narratives of return he writes in
the late 1990s and later reveal an unwieldy quality that stands
in contrast to themes of rootedness and closure. It is perhaps
52 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

this contrast that Aksyonov has in mind when he describes


his later narratives of return as “cutting off the previous cen-
tury and a certain period in my creative life, after which I
have since moved into a different stage of self-expression.”60
Following the Krokodil incident and the first publication of
The Burn in Russia, a timidly printed perestroika-era edition
with all sexually explicit passages excised, the rapid publica-
tion of Aksyonov’s works written in exile gave the Russian
reader the opportunity to read (in some cases, revisit) works
in which the relationship between the reader and writer was
well-defined. If for the American reader, the redefinition of
seemingly familiar terms resulted in a kind of exilic rhetori-
cal displacement that paralleled the condition of the simul-
taneously famous and unknown writer, the large-scale arrival
of Aksyonov’s exilic works in Russia reintroduced the cos-
mopolitan identity of the writer to Russian readers. Later
publications written following his repatriation include decla-
rations of an ethical commitment to cosmopolitan ideals on
the part of the writer and encourage the same on the part
of the post-Soviet reader in the face of growing support for
nationalist ideologies, a position that eventually yields to more
rigidly national allegories inflected with popular nostalgia for
the Soviet past. With these shifts in mind, we may turn to
the question of how the family novel, the return of the exilic
works to Russian audiences, and the publication of new writ-
ings that not only demarcate the previous century, but his
connection with an American audience as well, contribute to
the complex that constitutes Aksyonov’s return.
A Moscow Saga, a sweeping trilogy that appeared in both
Russia and the West (published in two volumes in the United
States, 1995’s Generations of Winter and 1998’s The Winter’s
Hero), was the first new novel to be published after Aksyonov’s
return. Approached by American producers to create a docu-
mentary film about the Stalin era, Aksyonov instead devel-
oped a screenplay following the fictional Gradov family over
three decades, from 1925 to the years immediately follow-
ing Joseph Stalin’s death. Conceived for the broad American
viewing public, rewritten as a family novel, and then adapted
Russian Cosmopolitan 53

for Russian television audiences, A Moscow Saga illustrates


what can happen when Russian subjects selectively engage
in what Ong describes as “self-orientalization,” the tendency
of one’s voice to be inflected by orientalist essentialisms as
well as the agency to maneuver and manipulate meanings
in public exchanges about culture.61 If, as Aksyonov asserts,
American readers are uninterested in contemporary Russian
writing,62 this may be in part due to the dominance of frames
of reference that privilege canonical and historically oriented
texts but regard contemporary ones as derivative of Western
models. If, as Rey Chow reminds us however, in the Asian
context these frames of reference create and valorize an Asia
that “continues to produce ancient culture,”63 in the Russian
context they organize culture almost exclusively around the
traditional canon of late nineteenth-century realist novelists.
Self-orientalization and its attendant agency may help to
explain Aksyonov’s temporary turn from texts about disloca-
tion that demand performative readings to the more tradi-
tional form of the family novel in A Moscow Saga. Aksyonov
readily adopted the role of realist novelist to produce A
Moscow Saga, inviting comparisons to Leo Tolstoy with the
titles of the second and third books of the trilogy (“War and
Jail” and “Jail and Peace”) and its exploration of questions
of Russian national identity and character through histori-
cal figures and the family. Yet his reorientation of his liter-
ary genealogy—which he had previously defined as going
“back to the Russian avant-garde and from there back to
Gogol rather than Dostoevsky”64—was likely not undertaken
exclusively in the interest of exposing Western tendencies to
privilege certain nineteenth-century Russian realist discourses
over contemporary ones, or to demonstrate his own abili-
ties in both idioms. Rather, his decision to, in the words of
one critic, “abandon the allusiveness of much of his earlier
work to write directly of Russian history and current events”
and “evoke all the grandeur of Tolstoy and all the inhuman
psychology of Dostoevsky”65 represents a conscious appro-
priation of the family novel as an attempt to revitalize the
contemporary Russian novel and the debate about its relation
54 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

to national identity and national literature. A Moscow Saga


and its subsequent adaptation for television provide a discur-
sive home for post-Soviet audiences, although this incentive
is not without its risks. At the same time the novel strives
to mediate between its positive social imperatives and the
ideological discourses it confronts, it can—especially in its
televised form—become appropriated by the very ideological
discourses it was intended to dispute.
As a writer subject to Western constructions of Russian
identity, Aksyonov was well positioned to demonstrate how
a family novel could once again generate, and be gener-
ated by, notions of “Russianness” as a counterpoint to the
Western subject and the Western European literary tradi-
tion. The opening lines of the novel offer panoramic descrip-
tions of the activity in downtown Moscow, where police are
“not yet entirely convinced of reality of their . . . role” and
“everything has the appearance of an amateur production.”66
Aksyonov’s familiar use of a camera lens to call attention
to the competing narrative frames that produce his story,
a device present at the conclusion of The Island of Crimea
and the introductions to Around the Clock Non-Stop and In
Search of Melancholy Baby, points to the filmic roots of the
project and immediately draws attention to the conventions
being employed in the name of “realism” and “authenticity.”
Perhaps accordingly, when read without irony as a national
allegory played out at the level of the individual and the fam-
ily, A Moscow Saga fulfilled Western expectations about what
a Russian novel should be.67 Critical comparisons to Tolstoy
and bestseller status in France illustrate the success “the Rus-
sian novel” can achieve as a cultural commodity. The weak
critical reception of the novel in Russia, however, largely
resulted from the perception that the novel was written for
an American audience. One critic declared A Moscow Saga “a
revision of Children of the Arbat,” a reference to the popu-
lar perestroika-era novel by Anatoli Rybakov, replete with a
brooding Stalin in need of medical attention and the spec-
tacle of public and private lives unfolding against the back-
ground of the 1930s.68
Russian Cosmopolitan 55

It was the adaptation of A Moscow Saga for Russian televi-


sion, a teleserial well positioned amid the boom in adapting
classic Russian novels for the small screen initiated by Vladimir
Bortko’s 2003 adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, that had
greater impact among Russian audiences, and led to a resur-
gence in the popular reception of the novel among readers.
In his study of the Russian teleserial and its emphasis on social
values, romance, and the family, David MacFadyen writes,

Television is remembering, quoting, and, in some senses, saving


the literature that society’s movers and shakers don’t know very
well. Yet TV does so by keeping people away from libraries and
on their sofas. Romantically-driven and melodramatic television
series show this strange process best of all, with the kind of caring,
cultured and morally upstanding social bonds that allow produc-
ers and directors to rummage around in the past. These broadcasts
can mine the metaphors of socialism (parenthood/brotherhood/
family/love), thus keeping the “social” yet dumping the “ism.”
They show kindness in a cruel society and do so by leaning heavily
on the structural workings of the narratives they most resemble:
serialized novels of the nineteenth century.69

In the case of A Moscow Saga, the 2004 miniseries strongly


engaged the relationship between socialism and the social that
MacFadyen describes. Aksyonov ultimately had little to do
with the production, which Arsenii Roginskii, chairman of the
human rights group Memorial, characterized as having “noth-
ing to do with Stalin and a lot to do with today” in that it could
be seen to support the current Kremlin strategy of invoking,
and controlling, nostalgia for the Soviet past.70 Aksyonov, for
his part, emphasized the social elements of the film (“it is most
important to liberate our memories [of past generations] from
ideology”), which corresponded more closely to his intent in
taking on the family novel, both in terms of resurrecting inter-
est in the novel as a literary form as well as challenging its
conventional relationship to national ideals.71
Only when adapted to the nationally specific broadcast of
the teleserial, with its own goals of promoting communal
identity among its viewing audience, was the novel effec-
tively translated from the transnational to the local sphere.
56 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

The effect of such mediations is amplified when we consider


that the house that shelters three generations of the Gradov
family is the only constant figure at the center of A Mos-
cow Saga, itself becoming an emblem of symbolic imagining
and national longing. It is a place where comforting aromas
unceasingly emanate from the kitchen and family members
congregate even as history sweeps them along to their fates.
Like the novel itself, it is simultaneously posited as a ref-
uge for the deterritorialized post-Soviet audience nostalgi-
cally revisiting its Soviet past, and for the writer, who risks
the charge of sentimentality and ideological misreadings to
appropriate some of the most traditional features of narrative
toward exploring the relationship between home and home-
land and positive and negative perceptions of “Russianness”
and the “Russian novel.” Home emerges as a fragile construct
that strives to join historical narrative and metanarrative, first
among a broad international reading audience, then among
a national viewing audience, the nature of its constructed-
ness illustrated in the mixed reception of the novel and the
varying success of its adaptations for multiple audiences, and
quite literally epitomized when the house used as the loca-
tion for A Moscow Saga burned down soon after filming.
A Moscow Saga demonstrates that if “home is locus, cus-
tom, memory, familiarity, ease, security, sanctuary,”72 in
striving to offer a narrative locus to multiple audiences, each
seeking its own projections of national identity, the unstable
home of the recently returned exile who remains displaced
promotes unease and irresolution. The unrooted quality of
such fragile constructions of home may have contributed to
Aksyonov’s temporary recognition that if an exilic identity is
no longer viable, and performing the return of the “the Rus-
sian writer” by resurrecting the family novel reflects displace-
ment to the same degree it purports to project home, the
unsettled subject could offer a workable alternative.
The fragmented quality of the stories that comprise the
collection Aksyonov published after A Moscow Saga comple-
ments the ungrounded identity of the writer as subject. Short
travel narratives based on Aksyonov’s first trips to Israel and
Russian Cosmopolitan 57

Croatia are interspersed among accounts of his experiences


in the American university classroom and other disparate
locales. Among the various identities he explores is an obso-
lescent author figure whose creative process is replaced by
a team of programmers. A number of the stories explicitly
address his search for identity. “Where are you, my Jewish-
ness?” the writer asks in “The Wall,” as he retroactively won-
ders whether any latent traces of his Jewish identity can be
found in his travel writings of the Soviet period. Eventually
his observations of life in Israel and social interactions with
the local population accrue to illustrate a process of iden-
tity formation through participation in the social and politi-
cal life of the nation. He gradually comes to understand his
Jewish heritage in the same terms by which he experienced
a renewed sense of his Russianness “in August 1991 and
August 1993,” while “walking in the ‘democratic column’
from the Arbat to the Moscow river.”73
These socially engaged experiences of identity formation,
however, are interwoven with those that depict the writer as
tourist, interacting with guides and other travelers, hotels and
car rental agencies. If travel here is portrayed as a quest for
identity (and the other short stories and essays published in
the collection indeed reflect a similar concern), then among
the boundaries the author traverses are those between the frag-
mented identities he participated in creating.74 Kaplan reminds
us that the tourist “confirms and legitimates the social reality
of constructions such as ‘First’ and ‘Third’ Worlds, ‘develop-
ment’ and ‘underdevelopment,’ or ‘metropolitan’ and rural.’”
“Driven by the need to ascertain identity and location in a
world that undermines the certainty of those categories,” the
tourist seeks to affirm these boundaries even as he negotiates
them.75 In response to the vanishing figure of the Russian writer,
effaced by a multiplicity of past identities, including that of the
exile, Aksyonov’s tourist seeks roots and affinities. This process
is similarly reflected in the publication history of the Israel travel
narratives, which are later excerpted from the fragmented col-
lection of stories and collected together in an anthology of sto-
ries and essays by fellow Russian writers commemorating the
58 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

occasion of their 2003 trip to Israel together.76 The recontex-


tualization of Aksyonov’s travels within a cohesive collection
of narratives that affirm shared experiences and the elucidation
of identity facilitates the movement from melancholic tourist
to returned exile. Having rejected the unsettled authorial per-
sona and established stable rhetorical ground for his reunion
with the Russian reader, Aksyonov returns to the genre of the
novel to negotiate his return.
If A Moscow Saga tested the reception of narrative con-
structions of home, and the short stories abandoned any
such construction only to acknowledge its indispensability,
the subsequent novels, The New Sweet Style and Caesarean
Illumination, propose more explicitly defined rhetorical
constructions of return. In their proposal of rhetorical points
of unity in the shared creation of social and historical narra-
tives, these novel set out to resolve the tenuous position of
the returned exile and that of his post-Soviet readership by
defining their relation to one another.
The New Sweet Style not only shifts its orientation from
expulsion to homecoming, it features a narrator who
“includes the reader” in the act of transcending her condi-
tion of alterity from the text. While the love story and verses
at the center of the novel are the formal referents for its title,
the narrative proper revolves around Alexander Korbach, a
Soviet theater director who is exiled to the West and sub-
sequently experiences no fewer than three enactments of
homecoming. In the first, as a newly arrived exile in New
York, Korbach looks up at a large building to see the name
“Alexander Korbach” written in lights: a flagship depart-
ment store on Times Square was founded by a namesake
distant relative. The large, wealthy, and widely dispersed
Korbach family integrates Alexander into their fold and
involves him in their everyday activities, which include gene-
alogical research and an ongoing quest to learn more about
their ancestry. The second takes place on August 19, 1991,
when Korbach returns to Moscow as head of the Moscow
branch of the Korbach Fund, a humanitarian organization.
The date of his arrival coincides with the hardline communist
Russian Cosmopolitan 59

coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. With protesters through-


out the city demonstrating against the takeover, and even
Boris Yeltsin extending a warm welcome to the returning
hero, Korbach’s second homecoming begins as he steps into
a busy Moscow street and joins the crowd. Leaving behind
his American dreams of becoming “someone” in hopes of
rejoining everyone, Korbach is suddenly summoned by his
American family to Tel Aviv, where the remains of an early
ancestor have been discovered during an archeological dig.
Returning to a third homeland, Korbach is introduced to a
part of his identity he hardly knew.
The reader is also invited to participate in Aksyonov’s rhe-
torical enactment of homecoming. The serialized publication
of The New Sweet Style that appeared in the journal The Ban-
ner (Znamia) in 1997 featured a foreword (not reproduced
in the later, book-format Russian edition or its English trans-
lation), in which the writer establishes his new relationship
with the reader: “Such a publication will create a sort of snare
for our ‘creative reader’ which he will willingly fall into in so
far as he knows the rules of the game . . . at the end of his
reading, the reader will consider himself a coauthor and pres-
ent his own version of the entire text . . . Thus the reader will
feel like taking the book and comparing his version with the
author’s.”77 In other words, if the Russian reader once felt
alienated from the writer who had lived abroad for so long,
the reader and writer are again on equal terms, joined in the
creative act on the unexplored terrain of a new, “sweet” style.
By extending an invitation to the Russian reader to become a
coauthor and participate in the creative process, an invitation
reiterated in the novel itself, Aksyonov renders his rhetorical
homecoming complete.
Here we may look to Theodor Adorno’s thoughts on
“home-in-writing” as a kind of modernist precursor to the
rhetorical homecoming Aksyonov proposes in his introduc-
tory note. In Minima Moralia Adorno confronts notions
of home and housing, addressing at the same time issues of
nationhood and writing as he reflects on his displacement fol-
lowing his emigration to the United States. As Nico Israel
60 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

observes, the ready-made quality of the modern house in


Minima Moralia functions as a metaphor for “the prefabri-
cated, ready-made thought that could produce the concentra-
tion and death camps along with the single-family suburban
house with garden.”78 Because this metaphoric home is unin-
habitable, Adorno turns to writing as a possible refuge. “In
his text, the writer sets up house,” he proposes, but just as
one’s home begins to accumulate needless refuse and junk, so
does the writer’s text become cluttered and eventually unin-
habitable. Adorno “builds a house out of writing, replete with
intellectual furniture, then, in effect, evicts himself, or, rather,
is evicted by the—stinking—process of writing.”79
In contrast to the rhetorical garbage heap that leaves
Adorno perpetually displaced, Aksyonov’s “snare” is pro-
posed to be a welcoming structure that the creative reader
will willingly enter and build in collaboration with the
author. Adorno’s resistance to a smooth idiom of exile
contrasts dramatically with the “sweet style” of return
Aksyonov offers as a rhetorical sanctuary. The comparison
reveals that Aksyonov does not counter Adorno’s modern-
ist displacement—a discourse that structures exile and writ-
ing as conditions of alienation—by proposing return as a
purely postmodern renunciation of such modernist tropes.
Rather, he proposes a structure for post-Soviet writing that
is intended to reclaim discursive authority and share it with
the reader with whom he has been reunited. Together, the
reader and authorial figure generate narratives of partici-
pation in political and social change in one’s nation, the
rhetorical creation of home, and the relationship of both
processes to the creative acts of reading and writing.
The encounter of the author figure and his broader read-
ership through his collaborative creative agenda is empha-
sized throughout The New Sweet Style: “It’s [the] creative
reader . . . that I consider the real coauthor of the book . . .
every act of reading creates a new version of the book, as in
jazz.”80 If the reader begins to feel at all estranged from the
comic family saga unfolding on the pages, Aksyonov consis-
tently inserts an authorial voice into the narrative to steadily
Russian Cosmopolitan 61

guide the reader to his appointed place in the creative pro-


cess. At a crucial moment of border crossing, when Korbach
enters the airline terminal at JFK to leave the United States
for Russia, the authorial voice interjects: “In order to con-
clude this highly significant section within the space of Part
10 allotted to it, we’ll have to resort to a device that we would
characterize here as the ‘one day.’ This is not done to conceal
any chronological inconsistencies—far from it; rather, we’re
hoping, with these two little words, to smoothly lead you, the
reader, through the waning years of the nineties up to the very
moment when you, having laid down a small pile of rubles,
dollars, or francs, open this book.”81 The unification of the
reader and writer obtains particular resonance if we construe
the novel as a rhetorical return homeward through the geog-
raphy of the novel. The novel moves from exile—not only the
protagonist’s, but the diasporic experience of the Korbachs—
to return, the journey of homecoming that the Korbach family
undertakes together and that concludes the novel. Aksyonov
explores the possibility of overcoming the notion that exile
is the prevailing modality that informs poetics in the Jewish
tradition, and indeed, his own writing, by paralleling the act
of return at the conclusion of the novel with the rhetorical
homecoming that unites reader and writer in the creative act.
The genealogical discoveries and authorial intrusions that
smoothly steer the story into the family’s past and forward
to the moment of reading do not so much provide a neat
closure as posit the bonds between the widely dispersed fam-
ily, and their diverse acts of homecoming, as tropes of return.
The movement of the family toward a common ancestor and
home parallels the relationship between the novel, writer and
reader, outlining a tightly woven discursive arena in which
tropes of return are affirmed as part of the project of reter-
ritorialization and emplacement.
If The New Sweet Style can be read as a rejection of the
unsettled subject and declamation of the author’s rhetorical
return, his subsequent novel, Caesarean Illumination, may
be said to deviate from the enchanting snare of “the new
sweet style” to present a complex of varied genres and loose
62 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

strands of narrative whose reader must work to find cohe-


sion among them.82 The novel invites the reader to become,
at least for the duration of the time of reading, an editor
and coauthor of the novel, and continues the collabora-
tive relationship with the reader initiated in The New Sweet
Style, although the highly fragmented multiple narratives of
Caesarean Illumination demand a more active engagement
with Aksyonov’s agenda. Aksyonov has stated that this novel
was intended to be final and definitive: “I tried to sum up
the twentieth century and my literary career . . . I honestly
thought I would wrap it all up with this [novel].”83 The novel
he describes as programmatic, a summation of his career and
the favorite among all his works was not translated into Eng-
lish. Though the complex structure of the novel may have in
fact limited its audience (one antagonistic Russian reviewer
summarized it succinctly: “?”),84 the novel is notable for its
pronouncements concerning the death of the novel and the
reading and writing practices that could lead to its revitaliza-
tion. Tropes of return and renewal lay the discursive ground
for the novel’s illustration of these premises.
Caesarean Illumination is an amalgam of prose, poetry,
and plays, classical themes and New Russian realia, a novel
that, in the words of one critic, “should have been published
as unbound sheets, so that each reader can take what he
needs.”85 Its protagonists are an exiled writer (the anagram-
mically named Stas Vaksino) who teaches at an American
university and frequently travels back to Russia, a New Rus-
sian businessman as at home in New Hampshire as he is in
Moscow, and the businessman’s girlfriend, a Russian woman
rescued from a sexual trafficking ring. This gallery of Russian
types exists in a world in which global entrepreneurs “sell”
commodities—Russian novels, shares in the stock market,
women—and their success depends on the sustained exploi-
tation of the local. These types are not only recognizable
Western constructions of Russian identity; they also con-
stitute a destructive form of self-representation that, to use
Ong’s terms, “[has] been shaped by a perception and expe-
rience of themselves as the Other of the Western world.”86
Russian Cosmopolitan 63

Over the course of the novel these figures will gradually


redefine themselves and ultimately challenge preconceptions
about Russia’s role in the transnational arena.
The wandering writer and university professor Vaksino
is of course another tongue-in-cheek rendering of the writer
“Aksyonov.”87 Well-known in Russia and unknown in the West,
Vaksino employs a familiar device associated with the rhetoric
of exile when he observes that Americans cannot properly pro-
nounce his name. He is proud of his ability to negotiate diverse
cultures and languages, but responds to the characterization
of the cosmopolitan writer—whose home is always elsewhere,
and therefore, nowhere—by contending that it is an untenable
position. He begins his narrative with an allusion to the open-
ing of Gogol’s Dead Souls, replacing the troika and the men
riding in it with two young Russian businessmen in a car alter-
nately speaking Russian and French, smoking Marlboros, and
wearing Missoni socks with Timberland boots. These figures
and their picaresque adventures not only reference Gogol, but
invite comparison with the young Aksyonov’s early, fashion-
conscious, traveling protagonists. After receiving three million
dollars and an invitation to travel to the imaginary Kukush-
kin Islands, Vaksino loses interest in writing and “definitively
drops out of the literary process.”88 When critics charge that
he had not had much of a reputation to lose, Vaksino responds
with tropes of renewal and return: he averts a friend’s suicide
attempt, offers the reader a collaborative creative project, specu-
lates that at the turn of the century mankind will evolve into
a “‘metaman’—capable of departure, and return,” and in the
final portrayal of Vaskino in the novel, depicts himself resting in
bed with his faithful cat—the writer at home.89
The transnational writer represented in Caesarean Illumi-
nation initially resembles the type of figure Timothy Bren-
nan identifies as the “Third World metropolitan celebrity.”
This figure is embraced by Western readers for, among other
reasons, a “dismissive or parodic attitude toward the project
of national culture; a manipulation of imperial imagery and
local legend as a means of politicizing ‘current events’; and
a declaration of cultural ‘hybridity’—a hybridity claimed to
64 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

offer certain advantages in negotiating the collisions of lan-


guage, race and art in a world of disparate peoples . . .”90
Aksyonov’s protagonist, having imagined himself in this role
and after submitting to Western expectations about a par-
ticular kind of Russian identity, realizes that such a position
cannot be sustained. In one of the poems that constitutes the
“Diary of the Writer,” we read,

Stas Vaksino, the celebrated classic, wanders.


There is no vacancy in the world for such a colossus as he.
.....
Stas, you are not a Russian here, you are not authoritative.

 

 ,   

 .
       

.
.....

,  
 

,   .

As part of his efforts to invalidate and overcome this decen-


tered, “non-Russian” identity, Vaksino presents the reader
with a novel in the form of a personal telephone book, a spi-
ral notebook consisting of short, interchangeable narratives
about varied individuals. As a series of narrative fragments
in various genres, the novel encourages the reader to weave
personalized narratives from its various strands. The note-
book allows the reader to insert or remove pages to person-
alize the text, and as such, offers a synecdoche for the novel
itself. In a 2001 interview, Aksyonov proposed such just a
narrative structure as a strategy for engaging the contem-
porary reader: “The novel must feature a Byronic type, with
whom the reader can identify. It is possible that [the novel]
will remain unchanged, but it might also take on completely
different, more individualized forms. It is possible that it will
become a form of hypertext: some future [writer] will pro-
pose a theme and some fundamental motifs, and anyone who
wishes can play within this theme as he likes.”91
From a “Third World metropolitan celebrity” Vaksino devel-
ops into a cosmopolitan Russian writer who creates loosely
woven literary structures that facilitate his active collabora-
tion with a local readership. The New Russian businessman
Russian Cosmopolitan 65

also grows to display a global commitment; he has not only


rescued his girlfriend from a human trafficking network, he
uses his fortune to develop alternative sources of energy.
In the same year Caesarean Illumination appeared,
Aksyonov published an essay in which he expressed his con-
cerns about the novel as a genre in need of rehabilitation
and focused on issues specific to the transnational writer’s
situation, his own in particular.92 Aksyonov describes himself
as “at the intersection of the American book market (bazar)
and a Russian postmodern schmooze.” As he sees it, he
could thrive in, or be estranged from, both environments;
in the end, he acknowledges that he is less concerned with
widening his audience, and more interested in narrowing it,
as this “contributes to the creation of the writer’s dedicated
and true co-authors.”93 Renouncing the publishing industry’s
emphasis on ever broader audiences, he cultivates his relation-
ship with a smaller, creative, local readership on his own terms.
At the same time, he acknowledges that the “Byronic novel of
self-expression,” which he argues continues to develop in Rus-
sia but is giving way to the mainstream tastes of the market in
the West, is ideally suited to new media that the Russian reader
might eventually use to coauthor her own text.94
Like The New Sweet Style, Caesarean Illumination rings
optimistic about how cosmopolitan figures can encourage
collaborative creative performances that have real-world appli-
cations: contributing to narratives that depict the act of home-
coming or redefining the notion of home, and participation
in historical processes and economic decisions that benefit
the nation and its global standing. If Aksyonov articulates his
commitment to this agenda in his art, however, he expresses
a measure of pessimism in his essays. In his 2005 essay “Nos-
talgia or Schizophrenia?” he observes that post-Soviet Russia
has, for the most part, ceased to look to the West for its social
and cultural models and consequently has begun to look away
from the potential to establish a cosmopolitan present and
instead sets nostalgic sights upon the Soviet past. The title of
Aksyonov’s essay echoes Claude Lévi Strauss’s “Cosmopoli-
tanism and Schizophrenia,” in which a local population that
66 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

is often essentialized—in this case, native Americans of the


Pacific Northwest—is revealed to be cosmopolitan in its syn-
cretic beliefs. If Lévi Strauss’s essay can be used as a response
to antimulticulturalists who would argue that the canon has
no room for certain “others,”95 Aksyonov’s essay might be
seen as a warning of the risks of self-essentialization in the
form of cozy nostalgia and nationalist isolationism.
It is curious, then, that the 2006 novel Moskva kva-kva
seems entirely compatible with the contemporary trend
toward nostalgia for the Soviet past. Readers expressed
apprehension about its orientation at two events promoting
the publication of the novel, one public, the other attended
by Aksyonov’s peers and prominent literary critics.96 At both
venues, Aksyonov was asked whether he was concerned
that by again depicting Stalin in his writing, and by endow-
ing the language and youth of the Stalin period with such
vitality, he was contributing to a popular remythification of
Stalinist grand style.97 The novel’s comic depiction of Sta-
lin and romanticized vision of cheerful, successful, Stalinist
youth, is accompanied by a jarring juxtaposition of the Sta-
lin period and post-Soviet Moscow in a single concluding
chapter (“Forty-Two Years Later”). Omitting but the brief-
est mention of the narrator’s exile, the novel skips immedi-
ately from 1953 to 1995, the year in which the narrating
protagonist returns to Moscow. The brief epilogue in which
the narrator returns to the city features an entirely changed
landscape, save for the skyscraper where he and his beloved
once lived (and where Aksyonov resided) and one Soviet-era
produce shop. It is here that the narrator realizes no one can
recognize him or remember any of his acquaintances aside
from his former flame, who is currently inaugurating a “new
phase” of neo-Stalinism. The changes to the city (and, con-
versely, the preservation of the apartment building) contrib-
ute to the forgetfulness of its denizens, laying the ground for
a nostalgia that selectively remembers the achievements of
the Stalin era while forgetting their human cost.
In interviews surrounding the release of the novel,
Aksyonov noted that one of the walls in his apartment bears
Russian Cosmopolitan 67

an anonymous inscription: “Prisoners built this house”


(Stroili zakliuchennye).98 The inscription is included in the
novel, etched into the glass of one of the protagonist’s apart-
ment windows, and as a response to the cultural myths and
the role of selective memory in perpetuating them that con-
stitute the novel as a whole, the inscription does not permit
the cultural amnesia that makes nostalgia possible.99 Moskva
kva-kva correlates the selective memory of post-Soviet soci-
ety with the sentimental exiled narrator’s reminiscences of his
youth, proposing that both perspectives necessitate engage-
ment with present concerns and the historical past to avoid
the trap of nostalgia. The utopian myths of the Soviet past
and the narrative of the returning exile remain linked by the
figure of the house, the skyscraper with its outward-facing,
monumental Socialist Realist façade and private inscription
of disclosure on an inward-facing window.

* * *

The uncomfortable confrontation of these imperatives points


to the difficulties, and the risks, of the narrative project of
return. Aksyonov’s writing of return identifies the novel as a
site that unites the creative reader and writer, demonstrating
the potential of dissolving critically or self-imposed boundar-
ies between exilic discourse and unaffiliated authorial sub-
jects and establishing a rhetoric of return in their place. At
the same time the novels of return enact a rhetorical home-
coming for the returning writer and his “coauthors,” they
resituate his tropes of exile—the unrecognized, misidentified
author and the axolotl among them—transforming them
into figures of return by reinstituting them within explicitly
national boundaries.
Not all the constructions that contribute to the creation
of a rhetoric of exile, most notably, the figure of the cul-
turally displaced Western reader, find a place in Aksyonov’s
rhetoric of return. In A Moscow Saga the figure of the exile
is eschewed to depict the difficult balance between engaging
the social dynamics of the family, home, and the collective
experience of reading, and the ideological appropriation of
68 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

these very institutions manifested in the novel’s television


adaptation. Moskva kva-kva also omits the exilic narrative to
demonstrate that nostalgia is not exclusive to those sympa-
thetic to Soviet-era constructions of national identity, but
may afflict exilic subjects exploring the cultural conditions
of their youth in which their identities were formed. While
the returned exile remains a viable figure in other narratives
of return, new tropes of return are also introduced, such as
the domestic sphere, which emerges as a space where fam-
ily histories and allegorized national histories confront one
another, requiring the reader to assert a role in coauthoring a
personalized narrative and locating a national identity at the
point of their intersection.
It is a sign of the post-Soviet times in which Aksyonov
wrote his narratives of return that some feared his readers
would only hold up parts of the proposal, selectively resur-
recting elements of the past to take nostalgia trips or allego-
rized national histories at face value. It is likewise significant
that Aksyonov was willing to risk being accused of the same in
the interest of creating narratives and identifying a community
of readers that will commit to negotiating between the often
antagonistic pairings of Russia and the West, and cultural and
national identity. In my readings of Aksyonov’s work, I have
demonstrated that Aksyonov’s writing of return responded to
the challenges that face the post-Soviet returned exile by nar-
rowing his readership and consenting to a popular television
adaptation of his work, and more important, encouraging the
reader’s participation in the rhetorical construction of home
and the production of narratives that stimulate debate toward
cultural and social change as a critical part of the search for a
sense of national identity. These frameworks raise important
questions about the rhetoric of exile and return in the work of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to be treated in the following chapter,
in which the writer’s rhetorical constructions of place, which
include a standpoint from which to articulate a position of his-
torical truth, will be shown to stand in contentious relation to
the universalizing modernist discourses and particularist local
formations that frame their reception.
4
Chapter 3

Agency Abroad and at Home

No writer illustrates the complex and continually shifting


critical location of the returned exile more thoroughly than
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Many have read the history of the
twentieth century in Solzhenitsyn’s literary and biographical
trajectory, and indeed, regard him as a figure who changed
the course of that history through the publication of his One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipel-
ago. While such a reading accords Solzhenitsyn a place of
honor few writers can hope to achieve, it also complicates
an understanding of much of the work he produced in exile
and after his return to Russia. Solzhenitsyn wrote in the faith
that literature can effect monumental change. But if it is dif-
ficult to evaluate Solzhenitsyn’s preexilic works outside of the
extraordinary conditions that produced them, it is equally dif-
ficult for many readers to reconcile the urgency he brought to
his current projects with the reformed post-Soviet climate in
which he wrote. The characterization of Solzhenitsyn as Rus-
sia’s last great writer is illustrative of this conflict of reception,
for it confers a timeless prestige at the same time it relegates
the writer and his work to modes of evaluation, self-presenta-
tion, and writing that are associated with the past.
To complicate matters, Solzhenitsyn devoted much of
his work in exile to The Red Wheel, a multivolume historio-
graphical novel documenting the years leading to the Bol-
shevik Revolution that has been characterized as an artificial
product of the “hermetic environment” of exile in which it
was produced, an “exile from [Solzhenitsyn’s] great theme,
70 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

Stalinism and the Gulag,” “a kind of time capsule and sur-


vival module in one,” and to emphasize the fact that it had
largely gone unnoticed upon its initial publication in Russia,
“a book for the future.”1 Other works produced in exile,
such as the Dictionary for the Expansion of the Russian Lan-
guage (1990), furthered the impression that Solzhenitsyn
had become divorced from his readership, writing works “of
use only to himself.”2 Moreover, his publicly stated aversion
to postmodernism in all its cultural manifestations and the
conditions of his return to Russia in 1994—as much a fare-
well to the West as a return to his homeland—furthered the
perception that his work could not be read through contem-
porary critical paradigms.
To read Solzhenitsyn’s writing of exile and return, then,
is to confront a number of critical dissonances. How do we
reconcile the power of Solzhenitsyn’s preexilic narratives of
witness, which bear the authority of autobiographical experi-
ence while offering a paradigm of conduct for both the citi-
zen and the writer, with the narrative autonomy of the exilic
period emblematized by The Red Wheel? Is the sustained crit-
ical exile of Solzhenitsyn inevitable if the works he produced
after his return appear to treat increasingly local concerns
that define national perspectives, and like the homeward
journey of the writer himself can be construed as a polemical
gesture that opposes global cultural flows? In using terms
such as “reconcile” and “critical exile,” I propose that it is
Solzhenitsyn’s critical self-relocation as a writing subject that
complicates the reception of his exilic writing and narratives
of return. Approaches to Solzhenitsyn’s work have tradition-
ally identified the writing subject as a conscious agent whose
experiences and texts have endowed our age with meaning.
While such an approach has produced valuable readings, it
necessarily faces problems of reception when treating the
work Solzhenitsyn produced during and after his exile.
One side effect of the problem of agency is the postmod-
ern undermining of the relevance of the traditional subject.3
It has become commonplace to regard agency as a vestige
of imperial or nationalist projects,4 and indeed it has been
Agency Abroad and at Home 71

claimed that Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel and the writer


himself are, or have been associated with, such projects.5 For
the contemporary critic, it is perhaps an easier task to “write
off” the question of the role of agency, and Solzhenitsyn
along with it, relegating both to the realm of irrelevance.
The notion of an intentional agent, however, has not been
entirely dissolved and its ramifications for the study of exile
and return must yet be contended with. Michel Foucault
observes in “What Is an Author?” that we have “merely trans-
posed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcen-
dental anonymity.” In citing Foucault in this context, Stanley
Fish asserts that “we have not done away with intention and
biography but merely relocated them. In principle it does
not matter whether the originating agent is a discrete human
consciousness or the spirit of an age or a literary tradition or
a culture or language itself; to read something as the product
of any one of these ‘transcendental anonymities’ is to endow
that anonymity with an intention and a biography.”6 To this
end, the characterization of Solzhenitsyn as Russia’s last great
writer raises important questions for figuring the role of the
reader in relocating the writing subject and situating his nar-
ratives of exile and return. Some would argue that The Red
Wheel—and subsequent works written after Solzhenitsyn’s
return—have no reader. In this view, having witnessed the dis-
appearance of the cold war–era institutions that gave rise to
the phenomenon of the “simultaneously highly talented and
world-renowned” writer of social conscience,7 then observed
the critical enactment of the “death of the author,” readers
sought out other works, writers, or media that better exempli-
fied their post-Soviet cultural and social politics.
Without yielding to the tendency to mourn literary pri-
orities that have, after all, not yet receeded into the past, we
may look instead to what Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return
professes to offer its potential or actual readers. It has been
my contention that the writing of return acknowledges the
physical and rhetorical separations of exile by seeking to
overcome them. Aksyonov’s example indicates that if ini-
tially he sought open horizons for the former exile as writing
72 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

subject, free to return home or travel elsewhere, he even-


tually saw such structures undermine the self-sufficiency of
a national literature. Solzhenitsyn’s response to his physical
exile was to contend that it did not have literary ramifica-
tions. His resistance to the deliberate thematization of exile,
however, must be evaluated in light of the numerous figures
of travel, return, and reengagement that structure his writing
of return. Given these conditions, and the renewed interest
in Solzhenitsyn’s work among Russian readers after nearly a
decade of popular and critical indifference and even hostil-
ity following his return, it becomes necessary to reengage
questions of agency, whether they situate the Solzhenitsyn
of exile and return firmly within traditional constructs of
authorial identity and intention, or situate his exilic works
and writing of return somewhere between modern and post-
modern historiographical and critical practices.
This approach, however, requires interrogating the dis-
cursive and ethical boundaries that surround any discussion
of the writer’s biography and its relationship to the writer’s
body of work. Solzhenitsyn’s death on August 3, 2008, was
an event the writer himself anticipated, and even prepared
for, by returning to Russia. The fearlessness and foresight
with which he met his passing, may, in time, generate stud-
ies that integrate it into posthumous readings of his work in
meaningful ways. At this time, in its commitment to refigur-
ing exilic narratives to negotiate marginalized and dominant
cultural discourses and situate itself within localized subjec-
tivities, his work remains appropriately, if not exclusively,
contextualized within the interstitial territory occupied by
narratives of return. The autobiographical imperatives and
agency that structure the writing and experience of return
retain their vitality, and Solzhenitsyn’s writings of return,
far from isolating their author from literature, and by asso-
ciation, others who write and read it, continue to shape the
historical, cultural, and individual contexts of their writing
and reading. I will explore the question of the end of return,
and how biographical, historical, and academic contingen-
cies may contribute to it, at the conclusion of this study. For
Agency Abroad and at Home 73

the remainder of this chapter, I will explore the tensions in


Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return that stem from its denial of
exilic displacement on the one hand and its acknowledge-
ment of return as means of rearticulating constructions of
home from a subjective position of belonging on the other.

C o n tinuities and Ruptures


Solzhenitsyn almost exclusively used the word glavnyi (most
important, principal) to describe the status he accords The
Red Wheel among his works. It is intended as a bridge across
gaps in the historical record, between Russians abroad and
at home, and between Russia’s past and present. It is also an
acknowledgement of the rupture in Solzhenitsyn’s life and
work, his past and present, and his all-consuming effort to
negate its effects. In describing the nearly two and a half
years that elapsed after his forced expulsion from the Soviet
Union and before his work on The Red Wheel could continue
in earnest, Solzhenitsyn referred to a “breach and buildup of
pressure” that would, in part, be relieved by the favorable
work conditions (“space, solitude, access to archives and a
Russian milieu”) he hoped to find upon relocating to the
United States in 1976.8 When the “circumstances of [his] life
and overwhelming intensity of [his] experience” spurred by
conditions in the Soviet Union no longer interfered with the
composition of The Red Wheel, it was the conditions of exile
that allowed it to emerge.9
Continuities, rather than ruptures, are characteristically
attributed to Solzhenitsyn’s work.10 Certain compositional
forms and methods can be observed across his oeuvre, such
as the compression of events into the narrative space of one
or just a few days, and the “knot” structure that presents
a cross section of several plots taking place simultaneously,
both of which are central to The Red Wheel. The continuities
create a controlled narrative of Solzhenitsyn’s creative trajec-
tory, in which one work can be seen to contain the germ of
the next, so that the entire oeuvre forms a tightly constructed
continuum. Such thematic and formal continuities, however,
bridge the rhetorical gaps that figure exilic displacement in
74 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

the works produced in exile and immediately following his


repatriation. It is in his later writing of return, namely the
prose poem “Miniatures” (“Krokhotki,” written from 1996
to 1999), where rhetorical structures more characteristic of,
and continuous with, his preexilic writing serve to “emplace”
Solzhenitsyn’s work.
To discern what constitutes the writing of exile and writ-
ing of return in Solzhenitsyn’s creative production, it is left to
the reader to determine how the preexilic, exilic, and postex-
ilic parts of his oeuvre are woven together. The “Binary
Tales” (1993–1998), begun just before and completed after
his repatriation, juxtapose events set in the 1920s–1930s and
during the Second World War with contemporary impres-
sions drawn from the writer’s two-month journey across
Russia by train in 1994. Their emphasis on the dislocation
between the past and the present—personified in the figure
of a traveler—contrasts with the rootedness and continuity
that is traditionally ascribed to Solzhenitsyn’s work. When
Solzhenitsyn resumed writing his “Miniatures” following
his return, after a thirty-year absence from the genre and
twenty-year absence from Russia, he prefaced them with the
note that he “could not write them there.”11 We are drawn
to compare the preexilic verses with the ones he produced
after his return to determine what continuities might exist
between them and how we may account for the break in
their composition.
If the “Binary Tales” call attention to their textual gaps and
cultural rifts, The Red Wheel, in its emphasis on complete-
ness, strives to fill in every potential break. As Solzhenitsyn
has asserted, “my business is to find the right facts, as many
as I can, and knit them so tightly that no space is left unfilled;
no room for argument . . . no room for empty space.”12 Yet
the work is composed of disparate plots and parts—narrative
chapters, the review or “political” chapters (identified by an
apostrophe after the chapter number), the historical docu-
ments and “glances at the newspapers” inserted into the text,
and “screen” passages that read as a screenplay complete
with directorial notes—that remain unsynthesized. Narrative
Agency Abroad and at Home 75

discourse is used to relate events and provide comprehen-


sive information about fictional and historical figures, but
The Red Wheel does not construct a plot or character-driven
story of the revolution. The lack of synthesis and causality is
central to the work; it contributes to the thesis that the revo-
lution was not inevitable, that anything that happens, great
or small, may have some later significance, or may not.
In something akin to the gaps Wolfgang Iser describes
in The Act of Reading: these unfilled spaces constitute a
place for the reader, “a kind of pivot in which the whole
text-reader relationship revolves.”13 As the reader has little
leeway in filling in the blanks in a historiographical work,
however, it is not imaginative projections that will determine
the reader’s relation to the text, but her work as a historian:
the reader’s activity consists primarily in the compilation of
historical documents and facts into a meaningful narrative.
The pedagogical imperative Solzhenitsyn hoped The Red
Wheel would carry out derives not exclusively from “setting
the record straight” through its incorporation of archival
materials, but also in calling attention to its methods for
presenting those materials.
Outside of literary studies, as David Simpson reminds
us, the retrieval of reading practices that affirm the ability
of the novel to cultivate responsibility and social knowledge
in the reader presents an exegetical model that reminds us
of the extraordinary achievements of Solzhenitsyn’s preexilic
work.14 Martha Nussbaum, in her 1995 study Poetic Justice,
argues that literary texts, in making readers participants in
the lives of others, enable an understanding of particular-
ity and difference that can have powerful ramifications for
rational decision making and the law. Her reading of Charles
Dickens’s Hard Times finds value in the novel’s potential
to generate empirical social change; the profound politi-
cal and cultural transformations wrought by Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day and The Gulag Archipelago demonstrate that read-
ing can indeed “be a bridge both to a vision of justice and
to the social enactment of that vision.”15 Solzhenitsyn in
fact extended the public utility of his work to the point of
76 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

distributing nearly all the royalties earned from The Gulag


Archipelago to political prisoners, former zeks who served in
labor camps, and their families through the charitable foun-
dation he founded for that sole purpose and that continues
its work to this day.
Can reading practices focused on public utility, such as
Nussbaum’s, contribute to an understanding of The Red
Wheel and the short works of return Solzhenitsyn authored
following his repatriation? Looking to Solzhenitsyn’s charac-
terizations of his writing practices and stated objectives for
his readers, it is evident that The Red Wheel was intended to
fill a perceived shared sense of need for the representation
of the events leading up to Russia’s February Revolution of
1917. In his “Author’s Note” to October 1916, the second
volume or “knot” of The Red Wheel, he explains, “The recent
history of our country is so little known, or taught in such
a distorted fashion, that I have felt compelled, for the sake
of my younger compatriots, to include more historical mat-
ter in this second Knot than might be expected in a work of
literature.” While these ideals remain intact for the work as a
whole, in later years Solzhenitsyn would describe the reader’s
role in terms similar to those he used to describe the author’s
method. In a statement issued in 2006 to readers of One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn seems all
too aware of how the power of literature has been inhibited
by its adaptations to television and film, particularly when
he contrasts the minimal effort exerted by an audience that
empathizes with a character on screen with the difficult work
reading entails: “Although the current times dispose us to sit
back and watch our works of literature on the screen, there
is no substituting for the effort we exert in spirit by reading,
by going outside our own experience; in this case, by walking
in the shoes of our cold, exhausted, famished brethren.”16
Solzhenitsyn’s involvement in the 2006 television adaptation
of The First Circle and the cultural rifts he addressed by mov-
ing to that medium will be treated in a later section of this
chapter. For now I wish to focus on his assertion that “there
is no substituting for the effort we exert in spirit by reading,”
Agency Abroad and at Home 77

which in the original Russian emphasizes that reading pre-


cipitates the exertion and suffering by which we step outside
the boundaries of our own experience.17
Few works of literature better illustrate the potential of
reading and writing to generate social change than One Day,
whose publication in 1962 initiated worldwide discussion of
Joseph Stalin’s labor camps while integrating camp-related
themes and lexemes into Soviet literature and public dis-
course. In this connection, then, it is especially interesting to
compare Solzhenitsyn’s discussion of the experience of read-
ing with his description of his own methods of composing
The Red Wheel: “I lived in 1917 with the people I was writ-
ing about, so much so that I felt myself in every sense their
contemporary. In many ways they were more alive to me than
people with whom I have been involved in the present day. I
was totally wrapped up in them and no one disturbed me.”18
To account for the differences in how we read Solzhenit-
syn’s preexilic novel One Day and the exilic historiographical
epic The Red Wheel, then, we may look to Solzhenitsyn’s
assertions that the reader participates in the world of the text
through the act of reading much as the writer does in the
process of writing. To generate understanding of the events
that led to the February Revolution, Solzhenitsyn calls upon
the reader’s aid in the process of recovering these events, and
in so doing, endows them with meaning. His proposal that
the processes of reading and writing share the potential to
create understanding is perhaps not unusual or distinct from
other writers’ or historians’ creative imperatives. However, if
we gather from his account of the processes of reading One
Day and composing The Red Wheel that he intends for the
reader to approach the reading of these highly differentiated
texts similarly, we may begin to recognize how the differing
commitments to referentiality and structures of agency on
the part of the author and the reader—that is, different pro-
cesses of producing meaning—can result in highly divergent
readings and receptions.
In her analyses of the preexilic novels One Day and The
First Circle, Leona Toker describes Solzhenitsyn’s method of
78 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

composition as “paradigmatic,” in that the events presented


in the novel are intended to be representative of the camp
experience, rather than precise records of true to life occur-
rences. The method, Toker notes, offers a solution to the
author’s dilemma of telling only part of the truth to facilitate
publication, and at the same time presenting “this incomplete
truth as typical (rather than individual, marginal, contingent)
in order to legitimize his subject matter.”19 In the course
of narrating the events of one day in the camps, the novel
presents a range of possible outcomes at given moments; the
novel’s protagonist often “knows the alternatives but has no
way of telling which of them will emerge,” while the reader
is reminded “of the metafictional nature of the reader-author
pact.”20 Toker thus demonstrates how Solzhenitsyn makes
the reader complicit in simultaneously engaging a fictional
world and the extratextual reality that lies beyond it. The
effect is not so much to reproduce a typical day in the camps
for the reader’s vicarious experience as to validate the read-
er’s contribution to reading the literary text and understand-
ing the atypical conditions outside of the text. This allows
for multiple readings of the novel, but the contract between
the reader and the author retains stable constructions of indi-
vidual agency committed to the text’s referential qualities.21
The decades in exile during which Solzhenitsyn revised
the first “knot” and composed later “knots” of The Red
Wheel saw significant changes in his method as well as in
the reader-author contract. If paradigmatic narratives such
as One Day may be considered associative in structure, The
Red Wheel is substitutive: it proposes to correct distortions
of the historical record and offer in their place an accurate
account of events. The first edition of August 1914 included
an afterword that appealed to the reader with this imperative:
“Almost all contemporary observers of the events described
here who might have corrected me, added to the evidence,
and revealed things which were not written at the time or
preserved, are already dead . . . In publishing the first part
of my work for the Russian reader abroad, I appeal to him
to send me his criticisms and supplementary information,
Agency Abroad and at Home 79

particularly about the historical characters about whom I


had very little information.”22 Solzhenitsyn acknowledges
that his work, despite its published form, is incomplete,
inaccurate in parts, and therefore unfinished—a concern
he will address through substantive research and revision in
preparing the second edition for publication. In his biog-
raphy of Solzhenitsyn, Michael Scammell observes that the
afterword was not only provocative for its address to Rus-
sian émigrés while Solzhenitsyn still resided in Russia, but in
that it “announced yet another of Solzhenitsyn’s ambitious
intentions, namely, to bring the departed Russian millions
back—metaphorically, at least—into the national fold . . .
His passionate desire was for national unity and harmony.”23
When Solzhenitsyn found himself among those “departed”
Russians following his exile and between the publication of
the first and second editions of August 1914, completion of
The Red Wheel and fulfillment of its multiple objectives—to
restore truth to the historical record and provide harmony in
place of the ruptures created by the revolution and its con-
temporary adherents—would become critical.24
Critics have cited Solzhenitsyn’s temporal distance from
the historical period he describes in The Red Wheel and his
physical absence from Russia as factors in its difficult recep-
tion.25 It is especially interesting, then, that Solzhenitsyn
emphasizes the living link he experienced when working with
his research materials and that he associates with the reader’s
encounter with his work as well. Is Solzhenitsyn’s narrative
autonomy, his claim to leaving no space left unfilled, a result
of his presenting his own experiences of “having lived in
1917” as an addition to his narrative history despite the fact
that the “real past” remains epistemically inaccessible to
both him and his readers?26 At the same time Solzhenitsyn
became more concerned with referentiality and complete-
ness, he inevitably grew aware of the distance between the
world of his book and the context in which it would appear.
Conveying not only the need, but the experience of work-
ing with textual materials from the past, was a means of
bridging that distance.
80 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

E x il ic H isto r io gr aphy
Although he formulated his ideas about The Red Wheel as
early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn would continually revise the
shape and method of his narrative over the decades of its
production. Throughout the 1960s he would refer to The
Red Wheel as a “novel.” Later, he would primarily identify
it by its working title, R-17, or according to its component
parts, that is, its four “knots,” the critical moments of activity
from eleven to twenty-three days long composed of disparate
narrative strands. More tellingly, in 1976 he would state, “I
am the historian of the revolution; this is my main genre.”27
Solzhenitsyn noted that the “form of the novel will change
as it goes,” and over time it appears to have moved from
“novel” to “narrative,” and its author from novelist to “his-
torian.”28 These shifts foreground Solzhenitsyn’s interest in
interrogating the tradition of historical fiction while simulta-
neously acknowledging that the fictional modes of novelistic
writing would risk greater estrangement between his subject
matter and his textual representation of it.
Unlike postmodern works of historiographical metafiction,
The Red Wheel does not set out to problematize the question
of historical knowledge as a whole.29 Rather, as Solzhenit-
syn’s working through the examples of Leo Tolstoy, John
Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway illustrates, he acknowl-
edges, then puts aside, previous literary models to demon-
strate how the form and method of The Red Wheel frame
the material that makes up the work.30 The “material,” as
Solzhenitsyn refers to his sources, and his need to “process”
(prorabotat’) it, is the crux of the project. Archival materials
are not only incorporated into the varied types of chapters
that comprise the work, but determine the very shape and
structure of those chapters. Solzhenitsyn acknowledges the
dominant role the archival material exerted over the compo-
sition of The Red Wheel: “It is so interesting that everything
becomes clear as it goes. Having set up for myself three types
of exposition (narrative, political, cinematic), I was abso-
lutely unable to incorporate the latter two types . . . into the
first two parts of the novel. It turned out as traditional, slow
Agency Abroad and at Home 81

exposition in the form of large chapters . . . then I suddenly


realized: Parts I and II can but only be this way! They are
before the revolution, in the former Russia. Thus the mate-
rial itself corrected me.”31 Such principles are incorporated
into the views of Olda Andozerskaya, one of the fictional
characters in The Red Wheel, who teaches a course on “The
Use of Sources.” When her students protest wasting “the
present generation’s powers on the Middle Ages in West-
ern Europe,” she responds, “History isn’t politics, my dears,
with one loud-mouth echoing or contradicting what another
loud-mouth has said. Sources, not opinion, are the material
of history. And we must accept the conclusions as they come,
even if they go against us.”32
Solzhenitsyn’s self-described willingness to cede to the
demands of his material lends an archival quality to The Red
Wheel itself, with the author making transparent his role as
both archivist and historian. Having determined which doc-
uments were needed to reconstruct the social memory of the
past after decades of distortion or exclusion by historians,33
Solzhenitsyn organized his assembled materials chronologi-
cally. To some extent, reading The Red Wheel is akin to work-
ing with archival fragments of the past that have been selected
and labeled by the author, then arranged in files with dated
headings, such as “February 25, Saturday,” or “February 26,
Sunday.”34 The reader’s first inclination may be to break with
this structure and follow the narrative strands devoted to
particular historical figures or events, thus imposing reading
practices associated with novels or more conventional his-
tories. The fragmentary nature of the narrative strands and
Solzhenitsyn’s admitted interpellations where the historical
record was lacking, however,35 highlight the conflict between
discursive practices associated with creative writing and those
of the archivist or historian and demonstrates that the “find-
ing aids” to Solzhenitsyn’s archival narrative are not to be
found in its plots, but in this conflict itself.
Passages throughout The Red Wheel appear to advance
contradictory agendas that differentiate the methods of the
creative writer and reader from those of the historian. In the
82 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

portrayal of General Klyuev’s misconduct in battle in Prussia,


the narrator of August 1914 states, “We shall permit our-
selves no flourish of fantasy. We shall collect the most precise
information we can, stick close to the historians and steer
clear of the novelists—and even so we shall throw up our
hands and admit once and for all that no one would ever dare
to invent anything so unrelievedly black, that for the sake of
verisimilitude any novelist would distribute light and shade
more evenly.”36 If this passage warns against the imposition
of conventional narrative constructions upon historical facts,
others will strive to justify the integration of historical and
discursive narratives within a single chapter. The biography
of Pyotr Stolypin, for example, is set off in small type to dis-
tinguish it from the discursive sections of its chapter and is
prefaced with a parenthetical note: “(Although the necessary
outline of Stolypin’s life and work which follows will be as
succinctly factual as the author can make it he suggests that
only the most indefatigably curious readers immerse them-
selves in these details. Others can easily go straight on to the
next section in larger print. The author would not permit
himself such a crude distortion of the novel form if Russia’s
whole history, her very memory, had not been so distorted
in the past, and her historians silenced.)”37 For the sake of
comprehensiveness the reader is provided with more infor-
mation than is needed to come to an accurate and complete
understanding of the events. However, for the reader-his-
torian concerned that conventional narrative elements have
eclipsed the truth to create a portrait of a born leader that
is too idealized to have had any basis in fact, the details are
available for verification. The deliberately clumsy narratorial
intrusion calls attention to itself as a means of reminding the
reader-historian of the utility of such biographical interven-
tions and the project as a whole.
Solzhenitsyn sets off proverbs in large typeface at the con-
clusion of selected chapters to figure how a discourse typi-
cally presented as a kind of folk wisdom or truth not only
comments on the past but on the representation of the past.
The proverbs do not epitomize the chapters to suggest that
Agency Abroad and at Home 83

all the complex events of 1914–1917 can be summed up


in a few timeworn maxims.38 Rather, as Solzhenitsyn has
suggested, the proverbs can be understood as the opinion
of “some old man who hears my story then straight away
responds with a rejoinder. He’s commenting on the previous
chapter” (emphasis mine).39 To cite one example from April
1917, a series of short chapters documenting the street pro-
tests of April 20–21 contrast isolated scenes of Bolsheviks
and leaders of the provisional government and the Executive
Committee competing for legitimacy as the protests grow
in intensity. The scenes are juxtaposed to invoke compari-
son with one another: the indecision of Kolia Staniukovich
(“Where should we go? Who should we find? How do we
help?”) is contrasted with General Kornilov’s resolute orders
to put troops on the streets to restore order; the Executive
Committee refuses Kornilov’s orders; cries of “Long live
Lenin” are instantly returned, “Down with Lenin!” The
social fragmentation figured in the brevity of the chapters
and opportunistic motives of various personalities elaborates
the proverb that concludes Chapter 79: “A knot cannot be
untied with one hand” (odnoi rukoi uzla ne zavyazhesh’).
The proverb thus addresses the reader’s role alongside the
writer’s in determining the link between the structure and
material of the narrative knots.
The inclusion of such passages points to the issues of ref-
erentiality and public utility that The Red Wheel sets out
to resolve. On the one hand, narrative interventions are
included to further The Red Wheel’s claim to comprehen-
siveness and extratextual referentiality. On the other, they
acknowledge the impossibility of faithfully reproducing the
past without conspicuous intervention on the part of the
author. The narrative interventions highlight distinctions
between archival materials and narratological structures such
as dialogues, the “screen” chapters that instruct the reader
in how to “view” events,40 narrative excurses that convey
characters’ thoughts, and the proverbs, which function to
eliminate the “dryness” and cold “rationality” he observed
in other writers’ historical narratives.41 Such narratological
84 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

elements, typically associated with fiction, are vital for pro-


viding details that help to establish the world of The Red
Wheel as one that can be related to human experience. Sol-
zhenitsyn noted this feature of Ivan Shmelev’s short story
“Sun of the Dead” (1923); its narrative qualities render it
“the first genuine testimony of its time about the revolu-
tion . . . such truth that it cannot be called fiction.”42 If
Solzhenitsyn has argued that “it is hopeless to first create a
general outline, then fill that outline with material,”43 the
narrative passages in The Red Wheel, conversely, function to
elaborate the heterogeneous fragments of archival material
he has arranged into chronologically ordered segments.
Solzhenitsyn’s consistent use of terms meaning “con-
densation” (“uplotnenie,” “kontsentratsiia,” “szhatie”)
to describe his method of composition similarly functions
as a guide to his narrative history.44 In the introductory
“Author’s Note” to October 1916, Solzhenitsyn makes the
claim that “art demands distillation of actuality” (kontsen-
tratsiia deistvitel’nosti). Reluctant to burden the “book
and the reader with the verbosity, indeed the empty ver-
biage” encountered in authentic documents, Solzhenitsyn
has “therefore sometimes taken the liberty of condensing a
whole text, or particular sentences in a text, to heighten the
effect, without, however, the slightest distortion of mean-
ing.”45 This admission to substitution, to exchanging modi-
fied variants of historical documents for authentic ones, is
an acknowledgment of the considerable challenges that the
work must overcome.
Following Roman Jakobson, the correlation of conden-
sation and displacement with the tropes of metaphor and
metonymy has been extended by others and applied by
Hayden White to his tropological view of historiography to
demonstrate that “the historian’s language is not a transpar-
ent, passive medium through which we can see the past,” but
a “vantage point” from which we may come to a relationship
between narrative artifacts from the historical past and the
historian’s narrative accounts of it.46 If we take Solzhenit-
syn’s references to the process of condensation to denote
Agency Abroad and at Home 85

his awareness that his self-referential narrative cannot be an


unmediated mirror image of the past that presumes his nar-
rative strategies to be invisible to the reader, we can view
his narrative excurses (and other mediating processes that
call attention to his discursive structures) as efforts to give
prominence to his methodologies and critical location.47 Sol-
zhenitsyn’s emphasis on the relationship between producing
his historical narrative and having “lived” in the past suggests
that the methodology behind The Red Wheel functions not
only to present past events as they actually happened, but also
to provide “a more or less autonomous instrument that can
be used for understanding the past.”48 In highlighting the
metaphorical qualities of the historical narrative, the reader’s
role in finding organizational structure and meaning in the
material is made clear: to have a meaningful understanding
of history, one should not simply confront the Soviet ver-
sion of the history of the revolution with “the truth” but
recognize how to work with multiple sources and discourses
to determine what they may reveal or conceal about the past
and one’s relationship with it.49
But Solzhenitsyn did not exclusively intend for The Red
Wheel to generate commentary about how it might be read.
He envisioned that it would correct distortions of the histor-
ical record and illuminate the forgotten past.50 Some readers
have taken this proposal to suggest that Solzhenitsyn effaces
the distinction between historical events, their textual repre-
sentations, and his narrative rendition of them to appeal to
the reader’s identification with the lived experiences of his
subjects. Thus, one reviewer of October 1916 describes the
fictional Colonel Vorotyntsev’s view of the war as “stun-
ning in its concreteness, an impressive piece of historical
reconstruction,” noting that “we the readers, moreover,
believe [Vorotyntsev] and his dire predictions for the future
of Russia because Mr. Solzhenitsyn has already taken us to
the front . . . We have seen for ourselves, as it were, how
a routinized absurdity and the superiority of the German
enemy have made the legendary courage of the Russian sol-
dier almost obsolete.”51
86 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

For others, the extratextual referentiality of Solzhenitsyn’s


treatment of the February Revolution as a critical turning
point in Russian and world history was more easily perceived
in his nonfiction article “Reflections on the February Rev-
olution,” written immediately after the completion of the
third “knot,” March 1917. The article, published twice in
Russia in 1995 to little notice, contributed to wide discus-
sion of the revolution upon its reprinting in 2007 on the
occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the February Revo-
lution. In noting this fact at a 2007 conference celebrating
her husband’s work, Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna asked, “Is this
not what the author of The Red Wheel wished for, that his
countrymen might look back at their history and interpret it,
free of the Bolsheviks’ distortions and omissions?”52 If so, it
suggests that Solzhenitsyn’s narrative history and historical
commentary may strive for identical public goals, but travel
distinctly different paths toward achieving their aims.
Can the public goals envisioned for The Red Wheel be real-
ized? Or to paraphrase Kalle Pihlainen, what is the moral
of the historical story? The kind of closure that The Red
Wheel strives to effect in the public sphere is distinct from
the reception it encourages among individual readers. Does
what it achieves through its emphasis on textuality neces-
sarily limit its claims to extratextual referentiality? Pihlainen
has argued that “nothing is lost by . . . admitting referential-
ity as a specifically textual feature of historical narratives,”53
but Solzhenitsyn likely would not be willing to accept such
terms. He strives to diminish the mediated quality of his
narrative by gradually marginalizing his fictional characters
over the course of its four knots and avoiding the organi-
zation of its various strands into convenient plots. To this
end, the final section of The Red Wheel, “At the Break in
the Narration” (Na obryve povestvovaniia), enumerates the
projected contents of the unfinished sixteen knots excluding
all the fictional narrative strands. Despite all these gestures
toward greater referentiality, it remains apparent that the
readers’ material, unlike Solzhenitsyn’s, is at a remove from
the archives in which the author found them, and events
Agency Abroad and at Home 87

depicted in the later knots are no more examples of “found”


history than those depicted in the first volume.54 In inviting
readers to work with a contemporary narrative rendering of
earlier textual representations of historical phenomena, The
Red Wheel calls attention to its own textuality to articulate a
way of approaching historical narratives from a present-day
perspective. In doing so, it displaces the discussion of The
Red Wheel from the ontological level of the past to the dis-
course and methodology of the text itself.55
The introduction to “At the Break in the Narration,”
along with Solzhenitsyn’s decision to leave unidentified the
numerous archives and sources he consulted, might be read
as a set of guidelines for the reader-historian who would take
up the task of completing The Red Wheel: “From April the
October Revolution already looms as inevitable. The situa-
tion after April changes not qualitatively but quantitatively.
Moreover both the volume of what has been written and my
age force the interruption of the narrative. For the subse-
quent Knots, however, I acquaint the reader with a summary
of the main events that should not be passed over should one
write them in full.”56 This is an unexpected conclusion to a
text that, by the admission of its author, strives to leave no
space unfilled—unless, as I have tried to demonstrate here,
one of its tasks is to educate and engage the reader-historian
in its methods.
What we might call the grand narrative of The Red Wheel,
emblematized in the “full screen” image of a burning wheel
coming loose from an ammunition wagon and rolling unstop-
pably into the path of the viewer, similarly elucidates the dou-
ble bind of its public aims and potential individual readings.
The sense of multiple contingencies, that things could have
turned out differently, is captured by Solzhenitsyn in all of its
detail. And yet the wheel of doom rolls ever forward, bound
by the referential pledge that points to the revolution’s tragic
extratextual conclusion. This work—unconventional in its
size, ambition, and striving for an ontological past that ulti-
mately demonstrates its textuality and the reader’s agency
exert greater control over its reception than its articulated
88 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

goals do—has so far resisted any finalized appropriation into


the system of closure that it was intended for. In its place,
The Red Wheel has, perhaps despite its other aims, challenged
the reader to bridge the gaps between its aggregate parts, the
past and the present, to evaluate the process of producing
historiographical discourse and to endow the tragic under-
pinnings of the revolutionary period with a contemporary
critical vantage point.
Solzhenitsyn’s narrative strategies in The Red Wheel ges-
ture toward familiar paradigms for the reception of his work.
Like The Gulag Archipelago, it confounds generic taxonomy
and the boundaries between fact and fiction. It revisits the
“knot” construction of The First Circle, and like that work,
its first knot, August 1914, exists in two published redactions
whose differences evince structures of self-evaluation. Unlike
those works, however, the reader is challenged to reconcile
all of Solzhenitsyn’s stated aims for The Red Wheel with what
it ultimately achieves. The task of overcoming such disloca-
tions is perhaps inevitable for a work composed over several
decades in exile during which it strives to overcome discursive
estrangement, and if not in the empirical social changes of the
kind that Nussbaum envisions, the work eventually finds reso-
lution and validation in the individual readings it generates.

Narrative Retur ns
It has become commonplace to describe Solzhenitsyn return-
ing to Russia on May 27, 1994, to a hero’s welcome, only
to reveal himself increasingly in conflict with the zeitgeist
and out of touch with the interests of Russian audiences.57
Commentators described Solzhenitsyn’s act of return as a
performance, as “the grandest author tour in history,” or
more cynically, as the arrival of the master-landowner to
his provincial home.58 While journalists sought entry onto
the private train that carried the newly arrived Solzhenitsyn
from Vladivostok to Moscow in hopes of finding indiscre-
tions to sensationalize for their own “narratives of return,”
it was Solzhenitsyn the traveler, collecting experiences and
voices from across the country, whose transitory status led
Agency Abroad and at Home 89

to further rhetorical dislocations in the short “Binary Tales”


(“Dvuchastnye rasskazy”) completed in 1998. The traveler
is thematized in the “Binary Tales” as a figure incapable of
contributing to the lives of the inhabitants of the countryside
and their idealized, if threatened, landscapes. The conflation
of displacement with travel to Russia’s rural heart allegorizes
the condition of the returned exile as well as that of deter-
ritorialized post-Soviet citizens wary of looking to Western
cultural models. In drawing the arc of Solzhenitsyn’s writing
of return, then, lines of continuity intended to “emplace”
the writing subject and his readers coexist with rhetorical
dislocations. These conflicting imperatives, particularly evi-
dent in Solzhenitsyn’s memoir of his years in exile, The Little
Grain Fell between Two Millstones (Ugodilo zernyshko promezh
dvukh zhernovov) and the “Binary Tales,” eventually give way
to more cohesive rhetorical constructions of national iden-
tity in the prose poem “Miniatures” and the 2006 television
adaptation of The First Circle.
The Little Grain Fell between Two Millstones narrates the
twenty years Solzhenitsyn lived in exile, from the moment
of his forced transport to Germany in 1974 to his repatria-
tion to Russia in May 1994. The rhetorical structures of its
opening chapters divide and alienate the reader, fragment-
ing the reader’s engagement with the writing subject, whose
profound alienation not only demarcates various national
and cultural lines but estranges the reader from the text.
The alienating discourses of the earlier chapters are resolved
only at the conclusion of the narrative, through passages
that engage the reader in vivid descriptions of Solzhenit-
syn’s encounter from abroad with the events of perestroika
that will coincide with the end of his exile and initiate his
plans for return.
Written concurrently with the events it describes but pub-
lished serially from 1998 to 2003, The Little Grain shares
several points of continuity with earlier publications. It
reverberates with the author’s commitment to his work,
affirmations of faith, and gratitude to colleagues and friends
who assisted him in his endeavors, and in this way invites
90 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

comparison with The Oak and the Calf (1975), a narrative


account of the author’s battle to remain active as a writer,
and its supplement Invisible Allies, not published until 1991
to preserve the anonymity of those who assisted the author
with his work. Like The Oak and the Calf, which has been
described as tactical and didactic,59 The Little Grain is highly
polemical, and its provocative characterizations of certain
individuals and generalizations about others have elicited
pointed responses from several readers.60 These rebuttals,
like Vladimir Lakshin’s and others written on behalf of Alek-
sandr Tvardovsky in response to The Oak and the Calf, form
a necessary addendum to The Little Grain.
The self-image of the writer that emerges from The Little
Grain is distinct from that of his earlier autobiographical
portraits. The Oak and the Calf, a “deeply archetypal work”
that depicts the writer’s battle as “the struggle between good
and evil,”61 is narrated in a bold idiom that befits the author’s
sense of mission. If its subtitle, “sketches of literary life in
the Soviet Union,” bears an ironic relation to the travails the
author endured to see his work in print, the subtitle to The
Little Grain, “sketches of exile,” is similarly ironic. Where
one might expect to see traditional exilic binaries (e.g., here/
there, past/present) or the eschatological battle of The Oak
and the Calf, The Little Grain instead splits the reader by
assuming a certain unanimity while adopting a number of
unresolvable positions.
While individual readers inevitably found fault with The
Oak and the Calf, that work pivoted on Solzhenitsyn’s posit-
ing of the binary of good and evil as an endemic feature of
Soviet life. While the use of such binaries can deprive indi-
viduals of agency in that they are construed as having “alleg-
edly subscribed to ‘communist values’ either because they
were coerced to do so, or because they had no means of
reflecting upon them critically,”62 it has been proposed that
even critical readers uncomfortable with where Solzhenitsyn
situated various individuals (including himself) within this
binary nonetheless accepted it in their refutations.63 The Lit-
tle Grain, particularly in its opening chapters, divides readers
Agency Abroad and at Home 91

and leaves them stranded, their dislocation from the text


emerging from an unwillingness to engage the work on such
terms. If the conviction and pride of the “calf” drew from
understanding how to outsmart Soviet authorities, in their
absence and in facing unfamiliar territories and new chal-
lenges (foreign press corps, legal concerns, Japanese food),
the “grain” remains outspoken, but dislocated from his
bearings. By his own admission, he makes mistakes. At other
times, he admits none when we think he should. By turns
resisting and yielding to the text, one critic who had not yet
read the work to its conclusion described it as “interesting,”
“at times irritating,” and displaying a “negative charm.”64
Another writes that the serial publication of the work over
five years “does not facilitate dialogue between the writer
and reader,” adding that, in any case, “it seems Solzhenitsyn
did not anticipate this dialogue” because “The Little Grain
(like The Oak and the Calf) likely was written for himself,
rather than for us.”65
By the conclusion of The Little Grain, however, Solzhenit-
syn joins in Cavendish’s municipal celebration of Vermont’s
two hundred years of statehood and appears very much
at home. And as he follows news of the fall of the Berlin
Wall, the dawn of perestroika, and the dropping of criminal
charges against him in Russia, his plans for return begin. The
protracted serial publication of The Little Grain was stra-
tegic: if the reader was “exiled” from the text along with
the unrooted exiled writer at its start, the reader yields to its
resolution, which coincides with the author’s return.66 Such
mediations have the effect of gradually reshaping Solzhenit-
syn’s rhetorical—as well as physical—exile over time and see-
ing it to its end. If Solzhenitsyn appeared out of touch with
readers when he returned to Russia in 1994, by the time of
the publication of the last installment of The Little Grain in
2003 his return to the reader was well under way.
In their continuation of the narrative project of return, the
short stories and poems published after Solzhenitsyn’s repa-
triation are constructed so as to speak on behalf of voices and
values that were denied any place within the Russian cultural
92 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

discourse of the mid-1990s. Solzhenitsyn visited seventeen


cities during his eight-week return journey from Vladivo-
stok to Moscow, and he quotes the disenfranchised voices
he heard all across Russia’s expanse—“No one needs our
city at all” (ves’ gorod nash nikomu ne nuzhen)—in the travel
diary he kept as his train traveled westward. At the same time
he described his encounter with the post-Soviet landscape:
“Through this entire journey, already three weeks’ time, I
am overwhelmed by the sweep of Russian spaces. I had the
sense that this was one of a series of blessings sent by God.
And I felt clearly that in Moscow it would be completely dif-
ferent: overrun with hostile forces.”67
The contrasting values Solzhenitsyn encountered upon his
return prompted discourses that simultaneously negotiated
placement and displacement. In 1995, three years before the
first installments of The Little Grain began to appear serially
in print, the journal Novyi mir published the “Binary Tales,”
begun the year before his departure from the United States
and completed after his journey across Russia. As noted
above, the figure of the traveler in the stories emblematizes
the dislocation of the returned exile and post-Soviet citizens
alike, with both in search of a cohesive identity. Both strive
to “construct authenticities” in the shared belief “in a truer,
more meaningful existence somewhere else.”68 In the “Binary
Tales,” travel and transitoriness, however, signify an absence
of meaning. While the term “binary” in English suggests
either positive or negative correspondences between the two
parts of each story, the neutral Russian “dvuchastnyi,” literally
“bipartite” or “two-part,” may equally take into account the
lack of easy resolution, reflected in the melancholic absences
at the center of the tales. Their structure demonstrates that
while certain dislocations have the potential to be resituated
and settled, others remain open to the melancholy of vanish-
ing sites of production and interpretation.
The “Binary Tales” consist of eight short stories, each in
two parts. The first two, “Ego” (1994) and “On the Extremes”
(1994–1995) are set in Tambov during the 1920–1921 peas-
ant rebellion against the Bolsheviks. The first part of “Ego”
Agency Abroad and at Home 93

(the title derives from the protagonist’s nickname), follows


the activity of Pavel Ektov, an organizer of the peasant rebel-
lion until his arrest; the second details his imprisonment and
torture in Moscow and return to Tambov, where he is forced
to identify participants in the rebellion and condemn them
to death. “On the Extremes” begins with the childhood and
military training of Georgii Zhukov. It later depicts an aged
Zhukov, compelled to write his memoirs to protect his rep-
utation for posterity. Ironically, while determined to write
“only the truth” in hopes that others might learn from his
experiences, he is obliged to include a reference to Leonid
Brezhnev, whom he never knew during the war, before his
memoirs can be published. The only one of the “Binary
Tales” completed before Solzhenitsyn’s return, “The Young
Generation” (1993) tells a story of similar ethical compro-
mise. A professor changes a student’s grade from “fail” to
“pass” when the student protests that he will not be able
to enter the Komsomol or receive his stipend. When later
arrested, the professor is interrogated by his former student
and released from a sentence to labor camp or death only
after informing on his colleagues under duress. The first two
stories are based on research materials that Solzhenitsyn had
intended to incorporate into The Red Wheel. Their compact
form and juxtaposition with “The Young Generation” helps
to foreground an issue familiar to readers of Solzhenitsyn:
how institutions of power in the Soviet era compromised
individuals who sought to situate themselves ethically with-
out harm to others or themselves.
The next two stories in the collection explore the appropria-
tion of art by institutions of power. “Nasten’ka” (1993–1995)
depicts two possible fates for a young woman in the 1920s
and 1930s. “Apricot Jam” (1994) concerns one man’s fate
as seen from two perspectives. The first part of each story
describes human suffering: a young woman is raped by a local
Komsomol leader and raises a daughter on her own; a prisoner
describes his torture in a letter of appeal he sends to a writer.
“Nasten’ka” concludes with a literature instructor resigning
herself to teaching ideology over art. “Apricot Jam” reveals
94 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

the recipient of the letter (unnamed, but recognizable as the


writer Aleksei Tolstoi) discussing its literary merits over tea
and jam with a guest on the veranda of his summer home.
The final three stories are set in the post-Soviet period.
“At the Fractures” follows the professional paths of two men
through the Soviet period and their difficult adjustment to
privatization in the early 1990s. “It Makes No Difference”
depicts two men in positions of power who are advised that
events have a momentum of their own, and any effort to stop
them is futile. By this rationale, a high-ranking official of
the post-Soviet era allows the ecological destruction caused
by the long-term construction of a hydroelectric plant to
continue. The autobiographical “Zheliabug Settlements”
details the author’s wartime experiences with his sound-
ranging unit among the Zheliabug region’s residents, and
his return to the region in 1995 to find war survivors living
in poor conditions.
If the reader had to seek out the cracks in the monolithic
foundation of The Red Wheel to allow it to become both sub-
ject and object of the interpretive act, that break is literally
inscribed in the “Binary Tales” between the two parts of each
story. All the stories center upon absence: the absence of an
ethical choice in saving one’s skin or substituting another’s;
the vain wish for salvation in art that is ideologically compro-
mised; the lack of institutional structures and individual will
to provide social support and ecological conservation. Fig-
uring their own situation in these absences, the tales reveal
their involvement in the difficult conditions they depict. In
this new era of self- and national definition, is meaning con-
stituent upon absence, inscribed in the forms of a vanishing
past and endangered locales?
Confronted with such conditions, Solzhenitsyn’s writing
of return seeks out situated communities in their particular
social and cultural contexts. The “Binary Tales,” and espe-
cially the suffering they describe, cannot be left to hang in
the gap between their parts, nor do they acquire meaning
in simple juxtaposition to the cultural discourse of “empti-
ness” Solzhenitsyn finds dominant in both Russia and the
Agency Abroad and at Home 95

West.69 Looking to the second part of the autobiographi-


cal “Zheliabug Settlements,” we see that memory does not
suffice to fill these voids. When in 1995 the narrator and
his traveling companion, his now retired former lieutenant
colonel, follow the paths taken by their regiment fifty-two
years earlier, the narrative gives itself over to reminiscences.
They pass a long neglected cart on the side of the road with
three wheels remaining—an echo of the burning ammuni-
tion wagon in The Red Wheel—in ruins, but surrounded by
new growth. His companion recalls a fellow soldier’s birth-
day celebration near a deserted lake: “Yes, it was the Prussian
night,” he recalls, evoking Solzhenitsyn’s 1950 poem “Prus-
sian Nights,” drawn from his wartime experiences.70 The two
men encounter an elderly woman whom the narrator is cer-
tain he remembers, but even he is aware that this memory
does not bring resolution to their meeting: “It is strange. I
want to tell her something joyous about that time, but what
is there to be joyful about? Only our youth. Thoughtlessly
I repeat: ‘I remember you.’” He feels even more ineffectual
when she considers that he might be an official of some sort:
“Why have you come to visit us? What sort of announce-
ment do you have?” He can only reply that they are passing
through to “see old places.”71
The narrator’s ineffectuality stems from his transitoriness.
During his brief stop on the road, he looks for his past—he
even finds the traces of it—but is unable to engage with the
concerns of the here and the now, personified in the figure
of the anxious old woman who questions a local adminis-
trator about her pension and the availability of food. Her
conditions and the administrator’s promise to her (“I will
personally deal with all questions concerning you, our vet-
erans, and our mothers. If I can’t handle it, then we’ll go to
the regional level. We won’t involve Moscow, we don’t have
to”), attest to a self-sufficiency and rootedness that stands in
stark contrast to transience of the traveler.72 Neither he, nor
any visiting official from Moscow (as seen in “It Makes No
Difference”) can reclaim past experiences or otherwise par-
ticipate meaningfully in their space.
96 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

“Zheliabug Settlements” presents only the melancholic


hope for meaningful interaction with an authentic soul, with
resolution remaining out of reach. For his own part, reject-
ing the position of the dislocated visitor, Solzhenitsyn care-
fully constructed the narrative of his own travels, keeping a
notebook of his journey and allowing two simultaneous film
recordings of his passage to record the concerns voiced by the
people he encountered along the way.73 “While I am travel-
ing through the provinces, I have the goal of meeting exclu-
sively with the local people,” he wrote in an April 26, 1994,
letter to then-president Boris Yeltsin, stipulating that no one
from Moscow should be sent to meet him or accompany him
on his trip.74 Solzhenitsyn’s insistence upon documentation
of his encounters with “real people” without interference
from Moscow reflects a desire to overcome a twin crisis of
identity—his and the nation’s—by demarcating the territo-
ries of the local and authentic and representing them in his
work.75 “Zheliabug Settlements,” the travel diary, and film
cameras all call attention to the crisis of counting “among
my friends Russian spaces, the Russian provinces, small and
medium-sized towns”76 while acknowledging a need to reac-
quaint oneself with them.
The “production of locality” Solzhenitsyn engages in
here may strike some readers as similar to the character-
ization of writing by critics of ethnographic practice, as “a
kind of technology of power that exercises dominant rela-
tions through representation.”77 Arjun Appadurai observes
that among the processes that accompany the production of
locality is the tendency of its discourses to be “drawn into
the very localization they seek to document.”78 Following
this argument, one may propose that in the opposition of
threatened discourses and dominant ones, there is encoded
yet another act of domination in which the marginalized is
made to conspire in the writer’s project. To continue this
line of thought and to paraphrase Appadurai, the very act
of producing locality is paradoxical: the producer of local-
ity authorizes himself to describe and defend particular dis-
courses yet evinces no reflexivity, or awareness of the effect
Agency Abroad and at Home 97

his own presence has on the discourse. In these terms, it


might be said that writing becomes less about locality and
more about the production of locality.
While critics of ethnography explore this issue in the inter-
est of reconceiving ethnographic writing practices, I note it
here because it assists in critically historicizing Solzhenitsyn’s
writing of return and its reception. The problem of nonreflex-
ive complicity has long been identified with Solzhenitsyn’s
work, implicating the author in power relations that affili-
ate his voice with authority. This problem is often touched
upon in polemical contexts, and typically emerges when Sol-
zhenitsyn’s constructions of identity move from the local to
the national. Thus, despite his interest in historical contex-
tualizations of constructions of identity—as in Two Hundred
Years Together, a two-volume history of Russian-Jewish rela-
tions that grew out of his research for The Red Wheel—the
distinctly modern perspective of such projects in their avoid-
ance of problematizing identity as an object of study in itself
leads to particular challenges. Vladimir Voinovich raises simi-
lar concerns about essentializing discourses in Solzhenitsyn’s
work, and at the same time expresses fears that Solzhenitsyn
has become a victim of his own self-orientalization.79
Such arguments have ramifications for the reception of
Solzhenitsyn’s project of return in that they draw attention to
Solzhenitsyn’s constructions of identity and the oppositional
structures he inscribes into them. The localized identities that
remained inaccessible to the traveling writing subject in the
“Binary Tales” become emblematic of the nation as a whole
in the later works Russia in Collapse (Rossiia v obvale, 1998)
and the prose poem “Miniatures.” In Russia in Collapse
besieged constructions of cultural value in a deterritorialized
post-Soviet space depict a nation threatened with extinction.
“How are we to live?” “Why are we alive?” “What does it
mean to be Russian today?”80 Questions about survival and
identity voiced by the people Solzhenitsyn met during his
journey across Russia make up the entirety of “At the Rup-
tures of Russia’s Spaces,” the compellingly titled first chapter
of Russia in Collapse. In subsequent chapters Solzhenitsyn
98 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

responds to these questions and makes proposals for Rus-


sia’s future: the observer-traveler of the “Binary Tales” now
points the way.81
Responses to such constructions of identity and the types
of power relations they imply have been mixed. Solzhenit-
syn’s biographer Liudmila Saraskina identifies 1998, and the
publication of Russia in Collapse in particular, as the moment
when Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return became relevant to
Russian reading audiences.82 The critic Viacheslav Kuritsyn
ironically makes himself complicit in discourses that con-
struct identity to chastise the “Great Writer of the Russian
Land” for his sweeping indictment of “the Soviet system for
giving rise to totalitarianism; Americans, for throwing out
their refrigerators when they could get them fixed; and the
new Russia for being in collapse.” Kuritsyn then embraces,
with more than a hint of irony, this constructed image in all
its essentialism: “We love [Solzhenitsyn] because he fought
for necessary things, because he opened our eyes, because
he’s an awesome writer, and just because he’s our Solzh
and no one else has as awesome a Solzh as we do.”83 Andrei
Zorin identifies Solzhenitsyn’s refiguring of his preexilic
binary constructions after his return as responsible for such
discourses: “The author, having structured his life’s work on
a single opposition, now unexpectedly speaks in the voice
of the majority of the unintegrated, the frightened, those
who were not capable of accepting and recognizing the long
awaited social changes.”84
In the state of cultural crisis Solzhenitsyn calls the “third
Time of Troubles,”85 his writings and extratextual activity of
return constitute an active cultural system in which the pres-
ervation of a threatened and marginalized Russian cultural
tradition occupies a central position. This system is main-
tained through his recent writings, in particular, the prose
poem “Miniatures” (“Krokhotki,” 1996–1999), which refig-
ure the binary oppositions that organize the preexilic “Min-
iatures” (1958–1960) to call attention to threatened cultural
discourses. The same objective also informs Solzhenitsyn’s
considerable efforts to provide support to Russian artists
Agency Abroad and at Home 99

and cultural figures through his Center for Russian Culture


Abroad, an archive and cultural center opened in Moscow in
2005, and the founding of a literary prize in his name that
is awarded to cultural figures whose work possesses “high
artistic merit, promotes Russia’s self-understanding (samo-
poznanie), and makes a substantive contribution to the pres-
ervation and careful development of the tradition of Russian
literature.”86 Since 1998, the Solzhenitsyn Prize has been
awarded to contemporary prose writers and poets, the phi-
lologist Vladimir Toporov, and in 2004 to the director Vladi-
mir Bortko and actor Evgenii Mironov for their work on the
television adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
In Solzhenitsyn’s construction of return from The Lit-
tle Grain to the “Binary Tales,” and from the prose-poem
“Miniatures” to the television adaptation of The First Circle,
marginality and preservation become more deeply encoded.
Despite the overwhelming alienation of The Little Grain,
which occasionally shocks in its overdetermined character-
izations of entire nations, Solzhenitsyn avoids any association
between the condition of exile and marginality, an association
that, in his view, would render his life’s work meaningless.87
However, after briefly occupying the position of the traveler
in his encounter with the small towns and cities of Russia’s
center and east to experience their marginalization firsthand,
Solzhenitsyn begins to speak on their behalf in the “Minia-
tures.” Similarly, the serialized television adaptation of The
First Circle, like other teleserialy that preceded it, emerges in
response to the marginalization of literary discourses, includ-
ing Solzhenitsyn’s own.

From Subjective History to Collective Story


It is in the “Miniatures,” the prose poems composed between
1996 and 1999, that Solzhenitsyn establishes a situated, if
marginalized, point of enunciation for his writing of return.88
Returning to the genre he last practiced from 1958 to 1960,
Solzhenitsyn here addresses present concerns in a way he
could not in the “Binary Tales.” The 1996–1999 “Minia-
tures” are notable for their relationships to previous works,
100 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

including the earlier “Miniatures,” but also the more recent


“Binary Tales.” The contextual forces that mediate them are
evident, given their autobiographical elements, references
to post-Soviet conditions and intertextual allusions, along
with Solzhenitsyn’s admission that he “could not write them
there.” They anticipate certain readings derived from their
literary and historical context and “family resemblance” to
earlier works,89 but also recontextualize previously employed
motifs within a confined textual space to represent the strug-
gle of localized practices and traditions against contemporary
economic and cultural developments.
The 1958–1960 “Miniatures” center upon binaries of
physical and cultural space and the dichotomy of body and
spirit.90 Open spaces contrast with closed ones (“Lake Seg-
den,” “Breathing,” “Sharik”); holy spaces contrast with sec-
ular, Soviet ones (“The Poet’s Ashes,” “Travels Along the
Oka River”); and weak, helpless beings display a vigor for
life (“The Elm Log,” “A Bonfire and Ants”) that, in contrast
with human activity, makes the advances of industry and tech-
nology appear foolish (“The Duckling”). In nearly every short
prose poem, restricted access to nature, the desecration of holy
spaces, and emphasis on material achievement over spirituality
is presented as the result of decades of Soviet rule. The histo-
ricity of the texts and their depiction of a violent confrontation
between disappearing traces of a past, “authentic” culture and
Soviet modernization place them squarely within the frame of
Solzhenitsyn’s preexilic writing.91
In reading the 1996–1999 “Miniatures,” one is struck
foremost by the recurring motif of the author’s advancing
age and mortality (“Aging,” “The Curtain”), and closer
inspection reveals how this theme relates to the collection’s
overall recasting of the binary structures of the 1958–1960
prose poems. In the 1958–1960 collection, one encounters
“a Manichean struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’” and an
unambiguously anti-Soviet stance on the part of the writer.92
The 1996–1999 “Miniatures” speak on behalf of local-
ized or threatened voices becoming pushed to the margins
by more dominant contemporary discourses. We may thus
Agency Abroad and at Home 101

read “Remembrance for the Departed” as a refiguration of


the early prose poem “We Will Never Die,” a cry of pro-
test against cemeteries becoming overrun with exhortatory
Soviet placards or bulldozed to make way for stadiums or
amusement parks. The denunciatory tone of “We Will Never
Die” gives way in “Remembrance for the Departed” to a
meditative commemoration of the dead that acknowledges
prayer as a discourse that exists outside of polemical struc-
tures and the general discourse of contemporary society.
Rather than challenge conventional binary structures, as
did the “Binary Tales” and The Little Grain, the 1996–1999
“Miniatures” orient the opposition of good/evil toward the
territory of cultural geography, creating oppositions such
as dominant/marginalized, national/local, and global/
national, with the writer identifying with the latter set of
values in each binary and arguing for its wider representa-
tion.93 The dividing slash in Solzhenitsyn’s refigured bina-
ries is dynamic; it elicits a nudge, or even a forceful push
toward initiating change at the same time the prose poems
advocate for the preservation of past tradition. Nature, ruins,
and other threatened sites typically provide the locus for this
movement, illustrating the fragility of these spaces and the
traditions associated with them.
In this way the prose poem “The Rooster’s Song” func-
tions as a companion to “Zheliabug Settlements” in its
extension of the traveler’s malaise to entire generations.
The narrator of “Zheliabug Settlements” hears a rooster’s
crow, which is “always succulent, joyful, and promises life,
no matter what else is happening around,” as he recounts
his conversation with the old woman he recalled from his
past. The rooster’s exuberant song, however, is evoked to
create contrast with the heartache the narrator feels upon
having to leave the woman and continue on his way. The
prose poem “The Rooster’s Song” describes the collective
sickness of generations who have never heard the rooster’s
“bright, vibrant, succulent cry” due to “the depopulation,
desertion, and extinction of our villages.”94 It concludes
with the sentiment that Russians should live an untroubled
102 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

existence like the rooster, that is, as if the nation were not in
crisis, a condition that both texts indicate is nearly impos-
sible in Russia’s present state.
Similarly, the prose poem “The Larch” can be read
together with the binary tale “It Makes No Difference.” In
“It Makes No Difference,” the captain of a ship carrying a
visiting official from Moscow notes that larch logs do not
stay afloat, and ten years after the trees were felled in the per-
estroika era with no barges to carry the logs downstream, the
logs remain in the river. “You try lying around like that,” the
captain says, as the ship passes a barren slope once thick with
growth.95 “The Larch” recalls this motif (the wood is “too
dense to drag and float downstream”), but also notes the
tenacity of the tree, which “abandoned in water does not rot,
but hardens ever closer to the eternal quality of stone.” Not-
ing that in spring the tree returns to life with silky new foli-
age, the poet observes that “there are people like this too,”
illustrating the hope that a dormant source of strength might
be regenerated after the current crisis has passed.96
Elsewhere in the 1996–1999 “Miniatures,” culturally
privileged sites are in ruins and disappearing along with the
nation’s conscience. “Pernicious weeds” threaten to domi-
nate “good plants” (“Pernicious Weed”), women launder
clothes in the Volga River along a “false embankment” in a
nearly submerged city (“The Belltower”), even the “nervous,
fleeting whirlwind of contemporary life” threatens to take
over the calm just before sleep (“Nocturnal Thoughts”).97
As in “The Rooster’s Crow” and “The Larch,” the poems
alternate between hope—emblematized in the persistence of
these privileged sites or human will to preserve them—and
the retribution of conscience for those responsible for Russia’s
collapse. The latter impulse is especially evident in “Pernicious
Weed,” and “Lightning,” in which a tree split in two by light-
ning reveals a mind divided, and destroyed, by conscience.
The national allegory is put forward most explicitly in the
prose poem “Shame” (“Pozor”), in which the “Mother-
land” is overrun by corruption and the population reduced to
unbearable economic and spiritual poverty. The question of
Agency Abroad and at Home 103

Russia’s complete disappearance is raised (“it has happened,


nations of the earth have entirely perished”), then countered
with the writer’s observations of “those two dozen regions I
visited” where “living, generous of heart, native people” live.98
The 1996–1999 “Miniatures,” with their motifs of regenera-
tion and gaping wounds of fractured conscience, argue for the
persistence of cultural forms that will uphold spiritual life in
contemporary Russia and the status of Russian culture in the
world while deeply implicating those responsible for economic
and cultural corruption and producing the arrogant, duplici-
tous, and trite image of Russia that is projected to the world
outside its borders.
The binary constructions of place in these “Miniatures”
constitute rhetorical markers of return that simultaneously
advocate for preservation and reform. The image of the fra-
gility of the nation they endorse reflects the situated, rather
than fluid or hybrid, rhetorical position they enunciate. In
this connection, it is important to note that many of the
“Miniatures” are set in the garden of Solzhenitsyn’s Troi-
tse-Lykovo home on Moscow’s outer edge. We may recall
that Vassily Aksyonov placed a late example of his writing of
return in the Stalin-era Moscow apartment building where
he lived to explore certain nostalgic discourses and critique
others. The complex project of Solzhenitsyn’s return reveals
that the stable point of enunciation, his rhetorical “home”
in his allegorical construction of his homeland, balances on
fragile structures threatened with extinction, as well as on
textual precursors such as the 1958–1960 “Miniatures” and
the more recent “Binary Tales” whose figure of the traveler
and attendant narrative structures require active revision.
The “Miniatures” assume stable positions that perhaps not
all readers will claim as their own, but will recognize as a
stance central to Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return and critical
to the formation of a national narrative.

* * *

The television adaptation of Solzhenitsyn’s 1968 novel, The


First Circle (2006), is the author’s response to diminished
104 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

public engagement with literary texts. It is moreover a revis-


itation of the goals Solzhenitsyn set in exile for his histo-
riographical writing, that is, to draw attention to its own
textuality—in this case, the medium of the teleserial—to
articulate a way of approaching historical narratives from a
present-day perspective. The director Gleb Panfilov drew
heavily on Solzhenitsyn’s participation in the project: Sol-
zhenitsyn wrote the screenplay for the series, provided the
narrative voiceovers, and served as a consultant during the
filming to advise the crew on details of life in the camps and
the Marfino research institute staffed by prisoner-scientists.
Viktor Moskvin, director of the Center for Russian Culture
Abroad, described the screenplay as a distinct new work,99
which in effect approached the adaptation the way one might
a new edition of the novel as a companion to its two existing
print variants.100 Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna’s observation that
the serial’s attention to detail is such that it could be used as
a pedagogical tool about the period in which the story takes
place similarly accords the serial its own status alongside the
novel, while acknowledging that there was likely little over-
lap between audiences.101
Some reviewers who recalled reading samizdat editions of
The First Circle as their introduction to the work questioned
whether a widely advertised production for state television
could reproduce the novel’s oppositional structures.102 In
this view of the adaptation, opposition became recoded as
appropriation, so that Solzhenitsyn’s novel became co-opted,
along with other works by once-banned authors adapted
for television, as “signs of national conciliation and impe-
rial revival.”103 The appropriation of oppositional writing by
post-Soviet television represents an uneasy form of reconcili-
ation, a means of filling the representational gaps in an empty
post-Soviet national narrative with images, themes, and even
heroic models of opposition, drawn from the Soviet past.
Others acknowledged that the intended audience of the
serial included those who neither knew the novel nor the
historical conditions that gave rise to it. “I was watching
the film per the novel,” one critic writes, “whereas they were
Agency Abroad and at Home 105

watching a movie about life.”104 Perhaps for the benefit of


the latter audience, the film’s promoters relied on name and
face recognition: billboards advertising the program featured
close-up photographs of Solzhenitsyn and the lead actors
Mironov and Dmitrii Pevtsov, with the latter two portrayed
in character, but identified by name. The accompanying texts
on each poster read, “Solzhenitsyn wrote the screenplay”;
“Mironov is under guard”; “Pevtsov declassified the agent.”
The strangely literal equation of the writer and actors with
fictional characters based on real historical figures carries
over to the production itself. All convey the message, “this is
history,” referring to the television production itself as well
as the events it portrays.
The serial’s conflation of its own historical value with that
of the novel is reflected in the publicity statement released
by the television channel “Rossiia,” which simultane-
ously acknowledged the serial’s intention to rehabilitate a
neglected literary tradition, akin to Solzhenitsyn’s efforts on
behalf of the crumbling cultural sites memorialized in the
“Miniatures.” “We are obliged to enlighten and educate,”
the statement predictably begins, then continues, “in Russia
we have a twofold attitude to the classics—they are revered,
but little read. We hope that this adaptation will be for many
Russians a discovery of Solzhenitsyn.”105 Natal’ia Solzhenit-
syna’s speech on the occasion of awarding the Solzhenitsyn
Prize to Bortko and Mironov for The Idiot similarly empha-
sized this intent of the teleserial when she emphasized the
value of watching a Russian classic that helped “Russia for-
get about how ‘The Rich Cry’”—a reference to the Mexican
soap opera that dominated Russian television in the mid-
1990s—and stimulated a return to Dostoevsky’s novel.106
The serialized production of The First Circle, in the para-
dox David MacFadyen has described, promotes literary value
at the same time it performs its own methods of historical
representation, and in this way, shares the approach of other
recent teleserialy. In its relocation of the critical discussion
of Solzhenitsyn’s novel to the local sphere, however, it is
consistent with Solzhenitsyn’s reconsideration of the goals
106 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

of historiographical writing and its desire for community.


Solzhenitsyn’s novel traced the ethical development of its
protagonists and the actions that communicate their grow-
ing resistance to the state apparatus that enlists their coop-
eration by employing the oppositional strategy of subverting
the conventions of Socialist Realism. He rewrote the con-
ventional negative character type of the saboteur, and in the
figure of Innokentii Volodin, made him one of the novel’s
positive heroes.107 Such constructions are absent from the
adaptation, which replaces the subjective and questioning
voice of the narrator with the authoritatively situated voice of
the novel’s author. The novel is oppositional in its very con-
struction; the serial valorizes opposition. Viewers are encour-
aged to turn to the novel to produce individualized readings,
however, those who exclusively tune in to the serial need not
actively construct the world of the prisoners, but can glimpse
within its filmic representation an ideal of redemptive con-
structions of ethical behavior.108
Solzhenitsyn’s return entails advocating for disappearing
sites of cultural meaning, including his own literary works.
This interdiscursive struggle is reflected in the serial in a scene
of jarring temporal displacement. To emphasize the contem-
porary relevance of the story to viewers, an ideological debate
between two of the prisoner-scientists, which in the novel
takes place in the research institute’s only private space—the
restroom—is relocated to the present day, to the Sofiiskaia
embankment alongside the Kremlin. The sight of two uni-
formed prisoner-scientists locked in ideological debate against
the backdrop of contemporary Moscow’s billboards and traf-
fic illustrates the conflict of revisiting narratives whose ethical
imperatives of opposition are historically determined. Panfilov
noted that Solzhenitsyn initially disputed the shift in location
for this scene as “too postmodern,”109 perhaps for its sugges-
tion that the ethical choices made by Solzhenitsyn’s protago-
nists, and indeed himself and his colleagues, and that carried
the risk of imprisonment and the camps, would become the
stuff of conventional plots, a generalized portrait of “being
true to oneself” divorced from historical context.
Agency Abroad and at Home 107

Despite the conflicts raised by such interventions, or per-


haps because of the newfound sense of contemporary rel-
evance generated by them, The First Circle was the highest
rated program in the nation on the first day of its broadcast,
and even a week later continued to attract 15 million viewers
a night.110 Moscow bookstores were stocked with new edi-
tions of the novel, billboards advertising the serial lined the
city’s main roads, and the popular reception of Solzhenit-
syn was effectively changed one household at a time. One
reviewer even referred to the serial as “Solzhenitsyn’s return
to dialogue with the people.”111
In the self-constructed creative arc Solzhenitsyn has always
envisioned for his work, he had long foreseen return as the
destined resolution to exile.112 However, his refigurations of
the structures of his work in exile and return point to a series
of adaptations in his modes for narrative construction. In
shifting from historiographical discourses that instruct the
reader in how to write about history, to adopting the posi-
tion of a traveler in a familiar, yet profoundly changed home-
land, to a return to familiar genres that advocate for highly
marginalized, situated but threatened, spaces and discourses,
Solzhenitsyn’s example parallels the critical movement from a
broadly humanistic “literature” toward specific national “lit-
eratures.” This movement naturally creates its own conflicts
of reception. For those who idealize a single, global canon or
transnational discourses of transaction, the local and national
subjects Solzhenitsyn addresses following his return reflect
the inscrutable position of the national writer undaunted by
bearing this mantle. For a local readership negotiating the
tangled coexistence of cosmopolitan and national discourses,
Solzhenitsyn’s contributions toward the construction of
national identities and values raise important and complex
issues of identification and affiliation. These complexities
were illustrated by the writer Liudmila Ulitskaia’s comments
during a discussion of her work at the Moscow State Library’s
Center for Eastern Literature in April 2006, when she reiter-
ated her personal conflict with Solzhenitsyn’s characteriza-
tion of a close friend in The Little Grain while expressing
108 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

her admiration for Solzhenitsyn’s accomplishments on behalf


of Russian literature.113 While conflicts of identification may
emerge at the level of individual engagement with Solzhenit-
syn’s national ideals, his ideology of resistance to cultural
distortion and extinction and commitments to social and
cultural philanthropic projects resonate deeply. Responses to
Solzhenitsyn’s writing of return such as Ulitskaia’s reflect the
broadly shared sense of the fragility of the national values
his writing epitomizes. In provoking mediating voices of cri-
tique as well as enjoying critical and mainstream popularity,
Solzhenitsyn’s “emplacement” sustains the tension inher-
ent in the returned exile’s task of writing national narratives
amid heterogeneous cultural impulses.
4
Chapter 4

Authenticity, C amera, Action

F or Eduard Limonov, the “stolid, bourgeois, fat-assed word


‘exile’”1 summed up the world of Russian literature abroad
in the years following his departure from the Soviet Union
in 1974. Convinced that the success of his contemporaries,
including such figures as Joseph Brodsky and Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, could be attributed to Western readers’ anti-
Soviet sentiments and pedestrian tastes, rather than to the
writers’ literary achievements, Limonov took pains to disas-
sociate himself from personal and semantic associations with
exiles of any kind.2 The émigré literary milieu was for him
itself a “kind of exile,”3 and throughout his six years in New
York (1974–1980) and ten in Paris (1981–1991) Limonov
worked establish himself outside of its circle. In presenting
himself as an antipode to Brodsky, estranged from Russians
abroad and American society as a whole, Limonov impli-
cated himself in modernist formations of exile that privilege
detachment and alienation as conditions for legitimating his
art. Emphasizing his efforts to learn English and French,
insisting that he was a “normal writer” read by “normal peo-
ple” (read: nonémigrés), and boasting that he lived exclu-
sively on the royalties he earned from the sales of his books,4
the Limonov of the 1970s and 1980s sought recognition in
his identity as writer, free from any (acknowledged) literary
influences, and without national or political affiliation.
Fast-forward to 2001: Limonov has been living in Mos-
cow exclusively since 1994, the year he founded his radical
nationalist National Bolshevik Party. Arrested on suspicion of
110 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

smuggling weapons in a plan to forcefully take a region of


northern Kazakhstan populated largely by ethnic Russians, he
spent his first days in Lefortovo prison repeating the names
of, and affiliating himself with, the “great prisoners” who pre-
ceded him: “Sade, Jean Genet, Cervantes, Dostoevsky . . .”5 In
his March 2006 public lecture “Russian Literature and Rus-
sian History,” he enumerated another list of writers, those he
felt had fundamentally changed Russia’s literature and history.
Beginning with the seventeenth-century Archpriest Avvakum
(“our first author, rebel, and first writer of the Russian land”),
he went on to discuss works by Aleksandr Radishchev and
Nikolai Novikov (both “great Russian rebels” during Cath-
erine the Great’s reign); Nikolai Chernyshevskii, author of the
didactic novel What Is to Be Done?; the anarchist theoretician
Mikhail Bakunin; Vladimir Lenin; Evgenii Zamiatin, author of
the antiutopian novel We; and lastly, Limonov.6
From embracing his social and literary displacement to
integrating himself into particularly defined canons, Limonov
moved from an exilic state of homelessness to stable, situated
spaces within selected communities and narrowly defined
national traditions. This transition accompanied a change of
profession, which in turn required a shift in rhetorical strate-
gies. In his pre-exilic period, Limonov utilized descriptions
of his clothing, and his ability to make his own clothes in par-
ticular, as a metaphor for his facility in learning to write and
adeptly fashion his image into that of the writer as “national
hero.” In exile, self-fashioning continued to function as the
overriding principle that organized Limonov’s creative activ-
ity. Dismissing other writers as created by their circumstances
rather than by their acquired skills and talents, Limonov
continually redefined his persona, creating himself anew by
entangling myths with autobiography and changing “masks”
from one novel to the next.7 Following a brief transitional
period when he traveled between Paris and Moscow, he then
became shaped by his wartime experiences as a volunteer sol-
dier in Bosnia from 1991 to 1993, and finally, accepted the
title of “Leader” in 1994 following his return. Along the
way, the self-made writer gave way to a political figure whose
Authenticity, Camera, Action 111

abilities were “genetically” inherited from his “mother and


father”8 and who affectively proclaimed, “There is no doubt
that I know my fate. That is in itself evidence of a miracle . . .
I must continue and fulfill my fate.”9 In moving toward a
construction of authenticity predicated upon notions of
preordained heroism and greatness, Limonov’s narratives
of return generate a nationalist imaginary in which he, like
the self-defined “heroes” before him, is destined to become
inscribed into subjectively organized histories and canons.
His emplacement following his return entails the continual
revelation of an authentic self, and his numerous recent auto-
biographical accounts of his political awakening in various
media exploit this mediated process for all it is worth.
Limonov’s construction of exilic authorial identities and his
subsequent rejection of them to reveal an ostensibly authentic
self announces a crisis in the writing of exile and return and
its study. It has been evident from the outset of the present
study that the homeward movement of return may lead to
the exploitation of certain originary constructions of national
identity. Limonov’s example foregrounds such concerns in
his efforts to consolidate power through violence and hege-
monic discourses of patriarchy and misogyny, as well as the
highly regimented discourses of biography and canon forma-
tion. Limonov presents a compelling study of return, and the
number of recent studies devoted to his trajectory attests to
his intrigue. To study Limonov’s ideological positions within
the context of his return, however, is it is necessary to engage
them reflexively: when return arrives at highly reactionary for-
mations, even when they are arrayed in opposition to certain
reactionary state positions as Limonov’s are, to what extent
are these constructions merely a reflection of what he pur-
ports to overthrow? Does the study of return reach an impasse
when foundations and origins are invoked to discredit exile
and authenticate projects of self-mythologization?
Having disaffiliated himself from quasi-autobiograph-
ical exilic identities constructed upon practices of self-
fashioning—including his down-and-out, bisexual, exilic
protagonist Eddie—Limonov now asserts his “inherited”
112 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

and “authentic” qualities, among them, an exaggeratedly


heteronormative sexuality, which he defines in narrative
forms that exploit hierarchical and patriarchal structures.
Limonov’s aggressive refiguration of his sexual identity
is a compensatory gesture through which he strives to
make up for his exilic lack from all directions at once. The
exile whose woman was stolen from him and who sought
love in sexual liaisons with men can, following his return
to Russia, claim to have an excess of women, but at the
same time, he debases women to construe them exclusively
as man’s Other—creatures existing solely for the sake of
being exploited by patriarchal regimes of power. Limonov’s
superabundance of success, his “victories” in diverse cul-
tural arenas achieved after his return, similarly compensate
for other exilic losses. Lack in the arena of literary celebrity,
acknowledged in Limonov’s 1986 poem “Envy” directed
to Brodsky, is recompensed through the discursive vio-
lence of biography in the reimagining of the late Brodsky in
Limonov’s most recent memoirs.
Limonov’s acts of refiguration after his repatriation,
then, posit violence as a necessary feature of his return.
In this chapter, I look to how Limonov’s project of auto-
biographical self-imagining, begun before his emigration
and continued productively throughout, reflects this shift
toward narrative violence following the transitional period
from 1991 to 1993 when Limonov literally took up arms
in an act of self-redefinition. The criminal charge on which
Limonov went to prison emblematizes the cultural trope
of abduction I will use, following William H. Epstein, to
elucidate Limonov’s forcible takeover of his past authorial
personae, and the subsequent involvement of the writing
of the politician Limonov with certain hegemonic cul-
tural practices, such as canon formation and biography (as
distinct from autobiography).10 His tactics of female sub-
ordination are shown to be entwined with rationales for
narrative and national domination. Limonov’s faithfulness
to narrative function and self-emplacement within such
hegemonic discursive structures reveals an overdetermined
Authenticity, Camera, Action 113

narrative subject who becomes bound to these formations.


In conclusion, I address Limonov’s recourse to nostalgia
as the self-censorship of violence, a maneuver that conflicts
with the primordial arguments of his rigid politics and nar-
rative structures and at strategic moments allows Limonov
access to his former exilic selves.

Fa s h i o ning the Natio nal Hero


Limonov began his project of self-fashioning during his
first, preexilic Moscow period (1967–1974), when he com-
posed the poems he distributed in samizdat and eventu-
ally published abroad in the collection Russkoe (1979). The
poems feature a nascent image of the author that becomes
fully developed in the later works, and a number of themes
that will become stable motifs in Limonov’s exilic writing—
doubles and heroism among them—make their first appear-
ance here. Most significantly, the motif of the young poet’s
acquired skill as a tailor is introduced. His self-taught trade
parallels his humble origins as a poet, and the modes of self-
presentation that allowed a fledgling poet from the artistic
underground of Kharkiv, Ukraine, to relocate to Moscow
and present his poetry on its own terms are grounded as
much in the sartorial as they are in the lyrical.
The metaphor of the tailor carefully wrought by Limonov
in his early poetry is germane to an investigation of the
construction of an exilic persona in Limonov’s biographi-
cal legend as it is encountered in his quasi-autobiographical
narratives and in extratextual arenas. In his exilic texts and
public self-presentations, Limonov fashions the persona of
the self-taught writer who emerges ex nihilo: shunning the
émigré literary establishment and tradition, claiming no liter-
ary influences, and striving for assimilation into the literary
life of his adopted countries, he presents himself as an inde-
pendent literary phenomenon.
An early poem, “Three Long Songs” (“Tri dlinnye pesni,”
1969), features references to sewing as part of the poet’s
quotidian existence:
114 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

I set off to buy thread at the haberdashery. A crush. sweatiness.


And all the women are old.
...
I brought the fabric home. Laid it on the floor. Cut out from it
a pair of trousers. And the sun went down long ago. Birds sing
so quietly in the mugginess.
...
To sew trousers requires patience. Length one hundred six
centimeters. Now we separate the length of the stride. And I
will get twelve rubles.
Food for death.
O, how I wish not to die!

       . !".  


. 
# $  

 .
...
% 
  .   . &    . '

     .         .
...
(   #   . )
 

.
         . * "    .
+  
.
&     "
!11

The descriptions of the appearance and smell of the crowd


in the shop, the poet’s methodological approach to sew-
ing, and his anticipation of monetary compensation all indi-
cate that sewing is an occupation distinct from writing. The
divided image of the poet as one involved with mundane
activities (shopping, doing laundry, bathing, sewing) while
composing verses as he walks through the woods does not
achieve synthesis (“I’ve never composed in rooms”) despite
the formal act of joining these two personae in verse. The
struggle to fuse his two identities only draws greater atten-
tion to the separation between the two halves of his existence.
Toward the conclusion of the poem, the poet bemoans his
lack of viability in either realm, claiming he would exchange
his ability to write verses for a stronger body.12
A later poem, “The noise of this ode is for fabrics”
(“Tkaniam etoi ody shum,” 1973–1974), suggests that the
poet has succeeded in fashioning a coherent image. Function-
ing as a metaphor for the poet’s aptitude for self-presentation,
Authenticity, Camera, Action 115

sewing is removed from its role in the poet’s everyday life to


become a part of the overall conception of his artistic method.
The poem exhibits the formal traits and solemn, bombastic
tone characteristic of classical odes to celebrate the occasion of
the poet’s creative awakening. The second stanza of the poem
reveals that the poet’s identity is not yet formed:

An ancient salesman. Gray streaks


brings me a bolt of cloth
Allow me? For a coat?
I’m nervous—who am I—who?

(% 
  . %

  
  

/ ? 0  ?
1  
—  — ?)13

Having selected a bolt of cloth brought to him by a sales-


man, he nervously anticipates the act of cutting, as the raw
form of the cloth approximates that of his persona: both
require the expert hands of the salesman to take their first
form. The elderly salesman’s role as a mentor who assists in
the creation of the lyrical persona is continued in the third
stanza, when his hands “mystically” locate the place to cut.
Born from the cloth with the help of his mentor, the persona
remains unformed (“He cuts the cloth / my scrap crawls
off”; 
    /    ) but has
acquired a specificity that is lacking in the previous stanzas.
“I” finally stands apart from “he,” “them,” and the bolt of
cloth. The next two stanzas depict the young poet clothed
in the fabric that has been fashioned into a garment by his
own hands (“It fits! / . . . / You looked him up and down
/ the Russian clothed in the narrow cloth”; %! / . . .
/    

 /        ).14


The interface of cloth and skin is a creative birth celebrated
with family and friends, in the mirror and in verse.
By May 1974, when he wrote the epic prose poem “We Are
the National Hero” (“My—natsional’nyi geroi”), Limonov’s
self-tailored clothing has become an integral part of his literary
persona. Amid stanzas hailing the appearance of the poet and
116 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

his second wife, Elena Shchapova, in the West and their hyper-
bolic history-making accomplishments, Limonov includes a
reference to his “Coat of the National Hero”: “The national
hero loves form-fitting suits. Famed is Limonov’s remark-
able coat, sewn together by the poet from pieces of cloth.
The outer surface of the coat consists of 114 pieces of cloth.
The coat is equipped with the initials of the national hero ‘L’
and ‘E.’”15 “We Are the National Hero,” although written in
Moscow before Limonov’s emigration, first appeared in print
in the West in the large-format album Apollon-77 edited by
the émigré artist Mikhail Shemiakin. The young poet with an
interest in the self-promoting potential of extraliterary materi-
als found a compatible forum for his image and poetry in the
collection, presenting himself and several other poets featured
in the album as members of the poetry group “Konkret.”
In fact, the photograph of the poets included in the album
served as the very pretext for Limonov to fabricate the group’s
existence and write a statement of its putative creative prin-
ciples.16 This early attempt on Limonov’s part to manipulate
his photographic iconography and augment his literary status
through fabrication of the “Concrete movement” was easily
unmasked.17 Unlike “Konkret,” which in Limonov’s words,
“came together in order to come apart,”18 the National Hero
would reappear in later works Limonov wrote abroad. A 1974
photograph taken in Moscow of Limonov wearing the hand-
tailored Coat of the National Hero, standing with his hands in
his pockets behind a nude Shchapova who sits on a silver tray
on the floor, allows us to follow the trajectory of Limonov’s
methods of personal mythmaking, in particular, his acknowl-
edgement that when the signifying potential of the National
Hero has been exhausted, an exilic authorial identity must be
constructed in its place.19
In It’s Me, Eddie (1979), Limonov’s explosive novel-
memoir written after his arrival in New York, a photographic
self-portrait adorns the wall of the narrator’s cubicle in the
Hotel Winslow: “On the walls . . . my own photograph
against a background of icons and a brick wall, with me
holding a thick volume, perhaps a dictionary or a Bible and
Authenticity, Camera, Action 117

wearing a 114-patch blazer tailored by me, Limonov, mon-


ster out of the past.”20 The iconic photograph of the “Hero”
in his coat appears in Diary of a Loser (Dnevnik neudachnika,
1982): “To decorate the new apartment I hung on the wall
among everything else an old photograph in which a nude
Elena sits on a tray and I stand behind in the coat of the
national hero.”21 In the photographs affixed to the poet’s own
walls, the coat, as an emblem of masculine literary invention,
becomes an object of self-reflection. The National Hero’s
inability to circulate outside of the apartment and beyond
the poet’s past is illustrated in a string of vivid obscenities in
It’s Me, Eddie. “We Are the National Hero” has been trans-
lated into English and “published nowhere,” its sole reader
the current lover of his now ex-wife Shchapova, an Ameri-
can economist who “could not have cared less about Elena’s
ex-husband’s literary works,” who likely “preferred to fuck
Elena rather than read her husband’s literary works,” and
was the kind of person who “need[ed] literature like a cunt
needs a door.”22
The National Hero is rendered sterile on exilic territory,
relegated to photographs in the poet’s own room and an
unpublished manuscript and contrasts with the productivity
of the brash exilic protagonist “Eddie”—who dominates the
quasi-autobiographical New York narratives It’s Me, Eddie,
Diary of a Loser and His Butler’s Story—and with Limonov’s
own act of self-presentation at a 1990 press conference in
Belgrade. At the conference, in the course of enumerating
the various jobs he held in Ukraine and Russia, he demon-
stratively declared that he “became a tailor, began to sew
trousers”: “This fact Eduard visibly recalled with pleasure.
At least, during the press conference he did not restrain from
displaying his suit (‘Look, the lining is many-colored’), which
he sewed for himself in Paris. To applause, someone in the
audience asked, ‘Have you ever sewn for a Russian writer?’
I sewed for artists and journalists. I remember that I sewed
trousers for Bulat Okudzhava, Ernst Neizvestnyi . . . The
only official press about me in the Soviet Union appeared
in Literaturnaia gazeta, where it stated that there is such a
118 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

poet who also sews trousers.”23 The performative act of pub-


licly exposing the lining of his self-made garment resembles
Limonov’s autobiographical narratives of self-revelation, in
that he appears to, and often does, reveal candid details of his
private life, but only in carefully staged forums in which he
is able to control the construction of his image. The perfor-
mance also came at a transitional time in Limonov’s career:
he had made his first return trip to Russia by this time and
begun a regular regime of travel between France and Rus-
sia, but had not yet joined the Serbian volunteer army or
announced his final repatriation. After 1991, the figure of
Limonov the tailor, who sewed trousers and clothed him-
self in self-designed garments, no longer functioned as a
productive metaphor for the writer’s work.24 When we next
encounter the National Hero, his photograph, along with
photographs of “Konkret,” “Eddie,” and “Oskar,” is cata-
logued in the album Limonov in Photographs, with Commen-
tary Written by Limonov Himself! (Limonov v fotografiiakh s
kommentariiami, napisannymi im samim! 1996), a photo-
graphic archive of the author’s Kharkiv childhood and liter-
ary past and visual document of his gradual evolution toward
his political present as today’s “Leader.”25
Along with his sartorial self-presentations and other extra-
textual public forums that allow Limonov to control his
identification, and later disassociation, with his literary pro-
tagonists, Limonov has collaborated with publishers to con-
struct the paratextual frames for his work. During his exilic
period he encouraged the conflation of his authorial persona
and protagonists by entering into the zone of the peritext
that is usually perceived as “the direct and principal (but not
exclusive) responsibility of the publisher.”26 An example of
Limonov’s involvement in peritextual forms is provided by
the American edition of It’s Me, Eddie published by Grove
Press (1983), which features a photograph of the author on
its front cover. The likeness of the author featured below
his name and the declamatory title It’s Me, Eddie, is addi-
tionally framed by the subtitle “A Fictional Memoir” visually
reproducing the merging of autobiography and fiction that
Authenticity, Camera, Action 119

characterizes the narrative structure of the text. Similarly, a


severely edited version of the novel that appeared in the Paris
journal The Ark (Kovcheg) in 1979 features on its first page
a photograph of Limonov wearing the enameled cross worn
by his protagonist, a further example of how his manipula-
tion of paratextual forms would encourage the reader’s con-
flation of author and hero, memoir and fiction.
The Glagol Publishers edition of It’s Me, Eddie (1990),
the first edition of the novel to be commercially distributed
in Russia, recontextualizes the presentation of the author’s
autobiographical and aesthetic intent, as it appears a decade
after the events of the novel purportedly took place and the
persona of Eddie was abandoned by the author. Aleksandr
Shatalov, founder of Glagol Publishers and publisher and edi-
tor of Limonov’s literary works from 1989 to 1996, presents
the edition as an opportunity to introduce the author and
his novel to a Russian audience unfamiliar with his work.27
The blurb appended to the title page describes the work
as an autobiography that brought Limonov “international
fame.” The monumental image of the author as an estab-
lished literary figure is carried over into the preface to the
novel, written by Shatalov, which begins: “Limonov is called
the enfant terrible of Russian literature.” The first pages of
this introduction to Limonov suggest that he has secured
a reputation and place within the Russian literary tradition
while abroad, despite his never having been officially pub-
lished in Russia. Shatalov also cites from reviews of the novel
published in the Wall Street Journal and Publisher’s Weekly to
introduce It’s Me, Eddie as Limonov’s “most popular novel.”
Considering the function of the preface—“to get the book
read and to get the book read properly”28—it is also signifi-
cant that Shatalov notes, “I ask forgiveness in advance for
making comparisons between the author of the book and its
hero; only I am vindicated by the fact that Limonov himself
leads his readers to such a comparison, though this practice
is in essence both crude and false.”29 Shatalov advocates the
separation of the author from his protagonist while reveal-
ing Limonov’s intent to conflate them, in effect, anticipating
120 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

the Russian reader’s response to the text and issuing correc-


tives to potential misreadings. In addition to suggesting a
place for the novel and its author within the Russian literary
canon, the preface moreover demands that readers recog-
nize Limonov’s practice of inhabiting the persona of his
protagonist through the process of writing and initial publi-
cation, then abandoning it in favor of another. The message
to the Russian reader is clear: if Limonov was once Eddie,
he is no longer.
Limonov constructed his paratextual relationship to the
protagonist of his later exilic novel The Torturer according
to a similar pattern. The 1986 edition featured a photograph
of Limonov posing as his protagonist Oskar, dressed in the
leather and chains of a professional sexual sadomasochist and
standing over a nude handcuffed woman. Limonov claimed
that the picture was taken “for the hell of it” but neverthe-
less insisted upon its publication along with the other, more
conventional portraits of émigré writers in A. Mirchev’s 15
Interviews.30 The post-perestroika Glagol edition of The Tor-
turer (1993) excludes the photograph, and like the Glagol
edition of It’s Me, Eddie, features a portrait of the writer con-
temporaneous with the date of republication, again with the
intention of discouraging belated autobiographical readings.
The blurb appended to the title page introduces The Tor-
turer as “one of the novels by Eduard Limonov in which the
protagonist is not the author, but an invented personage,”31
and the appendix written by Shatalov makes clear that Oskar
“does not resemble Limonov in appearance.” Although Shat-
alov cites an interview in which Limonov claims the novel is
a “variant of his own life,” he admits only that “the theme of
emigration is favored by the author and thus we find many
motifs that also refer to his other works.”32 The volume’s
paratextual apparatus also includes Aleksandr Donde’s article
“Eduard, Edik, i Edichka,” one of the first studies to separate
Limonov from his autobiographical hero Eddie.33 Finally,
two reviews of the novel from the Russian-language press—
one positive, the other negative—are included. Published in
Russia after Limonov’s emergence as a soldier and politician,
Authenticity, Camera, Action 121

the fragmented image of the author presented here attempts


to perpetuate Limonov’s reputation as a writer and creative
figure at a time when the author was working to abandon the
profession once and for all.
The most effective use of photographs as a means of
narrating Limonov’s political development and discourag-
ing outdated associations between the author and his lit-
erary protagonists is found in Limonov in Photographs. In
its form and purpose, Limonov in Photographs can be said
to resemble the poet Vladimir Maiakovskii’s 1930 photo-
graphic exhibition “Twenty Years of Work.” Maiakovskii’s
influence on Limonov’s work has been noted frequently34
and Maiakovskii’s yellow tunic, which became an integral
part of the poet’s image and work, can be viewed as a pre-
cursor to Limonov’s Coat of the National Hero. Calculated
to produce an effect on the audiences at Maiakovskii’s read-
ings, the striped yellow tunic, sewn by Maiakovskii’s mother
at the poet’s insistence, “has been written about more than
Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry”35 and is a powerful emblem
of the poet’s integration of textual and extratextual strategies
of self-presentation. A photograph from 1913 documents
the appearance of the boldly clothed Futurist poet: Maia-
kovskii, hands in his pockets, looks straight into the cam-
era lens, his frank gaze and the bright sleeves and collar of
his shirt intended as an affront to the viewer.36 The garment
also becomes incorporated into the poet’s work, in the 1914
essay “About the Various Maiakovskiis” and the poem “The
Fop’s Tunic”:

I will make myself black trousers


Of the velvet of my voice.
Yellow tunic of three yards of sunset sky.37

When the postrevolutionary Maiakovskii wished to present


his new principles and image, he organized the exhibition
“Twenty Years of Work,” which displayed his collections
of Futurist poetry published from 1912 to 1914, note-
books of newspaper articles and reviews from 1926 to 1929
chronicling his reception, and posters and photographs, all
122 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

intended to document his career in such a way that the image


of the author as a Soviet poet for the masses would appear
its apotheosis. At the opening of the exhibition, Maia-
kovskii announced his new orientation. “I am very glad that
all those first-class, spit-soiled aesthetes are not here,” the
poet declared. “There are no writers? Excellent! . . . I am
happy that Moscow’s youth is here. I am happy that you are
reading me!”38 In her study of the evolving significations of
the yellow tunic in Maiakovskii’s strategies of self-creation,
Svetlana Boym observes that “from a seemingly insignificant
article of everyday life, the yellow blouse turns into a ‘literary
fact’ and then into a cultural emblem which starts affecting
the poet’s daily existence.”39 Maiakovskii’s tunic had become
a “transgressive metaphor” in his biographical legend that
served to “excessively personify,” and thus “depersonalize,”
the poet despite his efforts to refashion his image in subse-
quent years.40 With “Twenty Years of Work,” Boym contin-
ues, Maiakovskii aimed “to present his new and distinctly
Soviet iconography . . . he wished to author his own antiau-
thorial image, to impersonate the new myth and even docu-
ment it photographically.”41
Limonov in Photographs and Anatomy of a Hero use pho-
tographs accompanied by self-authored inscriptions to docu-
ment Limonov’s career and archive the various iterations of
his literary personae in the biographical past. In contrast to
Maiakovskii, Limonov reconfigures his authorial image not
to satisfy the demands of the literary establishment, but to
announce his departure from literature altogether. As the
inscriptions to the photographs in Limonov in Photographs
indicate, Limonov identifies himself over the course of his
career as “poet”; “Edichka” (Eddie), the author “in the role of
Oskar”; and finally as “the thinker and his AK-47,” and “vol-
unteer in the order of military police.”42 The author’s literary
personae give way to the soldier, journalist, and politician.
In the later photographs that dominate the collection,
Limonov poses variously with his then-girlfriend Liza,
extremist political figures (among them Jean-Marie Le
Pen, Vladimir Zhirinovskii, and Radovan Karadzic), and
Authenticity, Camera, Action 123

the Serbian paramilitary leader Arkan, among others. Inter-


spersed among these snapshots are several professionally
staged photographs that feature Limonov holding a small
grenade known as a limonka (the diminutive form of limon,
or lemon). The explosive device is an illustrative emblem for
the writer. Limonka is the name of the National Bolshevik
Party’s newspaper, and a play on the writer’s name; it simul-
taneously invokes the potential for real violence and the sym-
bolic violence of Limonov’s incarnation of every level of his
collective party at once.43
As part of his subordination of the literary to the political,
or more accurately to “the people,” Limonov must destroy
his past literary models. As Limonov tended to keep his pre-
exilic and exilic literary influences for the most part unnamed,
this process did not entail a prolonged and awkward renun-
ciation of his literary idols. Given his postrepatriation inter-
est in inserting himself into selected canons, however, it is
telling that Limonov explicitly acknowledges Maiakovskii as
a model in his first, provisional narrative of return in prepara-
tion for his unmasking and later destruction. In A Foreigner
in the Time of Troubles (Inostranets v smutnoe vremia, 1992),
the transitional novel-memoir that recounts his first return
trip to Russia in 1989 and to his parents’ home in Ukraine,
he states that he felt compelled to gradually “remove the
masks from the faces” of the personages he depicted and “in
the end throw out several of the masks altogether.”44 Along
with the real friends and public figures Limonov portrays, he
unmasks his admiration for Maiakovskii for the first time. His
protagonist, loosely based on his earlier literary self, is keen
to display himself to his audience at a poetry reading in Mos-
cow: “Look at me as I am—at my full height,” he demands,
and the expression he uses to refer to his stature (vo ves’ rost)
parallels the title of Maiakovskii’s 1930 poem “At the top
of my voice” (“Vo ves’ golos”). He considers showing off
before the five thousand in attendance (“I present my com-
pact form to them abroad in the finest way, no worse than
Steve McQueen presented his. And I had no more opportu-
nities than you did at birth, comrades!”) but decides against
124 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

it. Instead, he greets the audience in the manner of his pre-


decessor: “Hello, Russians!—he said, and stuck his hands in
his pockets, as Maiakovskii used to do.”45
This step toward disassembling his literary persona was
followed by a November 26, 1993, walk-in exhibition of
Limonov’s life and work held at the Maiakovskii Museum,
housed in Maiakovskii’s former apartment in Moscow. The
Limonov on display at the temporary exhibit—and indeed,
Limonov literally displayed himself reading a newspaper in a
roped-off exhibition space—was another fleeting transitional
figure, a temporary persona soon to catalogued among
his past selves. The invitation to the exhibit announced a
“memorial-literary exhibition, dedicated to the life and work
of the writer . . . during his lifetime.”46 At the same time the
exhibit was intended as a publicity heavy happening for the
returned writer and Moscow’s bohemian set, it provided a
deeply contextualized setting for Limonov to dismantle his
authorial persona and mark the end to his creative method of
appropriating identities and disaffiliating himself from them.
Limonov figuratively kills his former literary self in the same
apartment where Maiakovskii literally committed suicide.
He even adopted a final, nonsignifying “death” mask: in the
photograph of Limonov that accompanied one review of the
exhibit, he has covered his face.47 He would reveal it the fol-
lowing year under the flag of his National Bolshevik Party.
Having archived his literary personae and memorial-
ized them in a photographic album and museum exhibi-
tion, Limonov announces his change in orientation. In the
period following his return, the poem “We Are the National
Hero” becomes refigured as a prophecy in which the young
Limonov foresees his own biographical present. A number of
the “heroic” achievements described in “We Are the National
Hero” and Diary of a Loser, in his view, were prescient and
programmatic statements, which “I, indeed, have fulfilled,”
he proclaims in his 1998 memoir Anatomy of a Hero.48 “It
is said that in moments of crisis Heroes hear ‘angels’ voices’
that advise them what to do next,” he intones. And in 1991,
having reached middle age and acquired French citizenship,
Authenticity, Camera, Action 125

a new wife, and a measure of literary fame, Limonov would


claim to hear those angels say, “There are magnificent oppor-
tunities for a hero there.”49 At that time, Limonov traveled
to Sarajevo with a Serbian volunteer army, where he would
be filmed shooting rounds from a machine gun into the city
in the company of the Bosnian Serb war criminal Karadzic.
Deliberately overlooking his previous trips to Russia between
1989 and 1992, he states that he returned to take his “first
steps in the motherland” on March 26, 1994, as leader of his
new party. The literary hero and memorialized transitional
figure were on this day effectively relegated to the past.
Having exhibited his own “Twenty Years of Work” and
committed to the life of a national political hero, Limonov
now calls Maiakovskii a “poseur”: “In Volodya’s life there
was no emigration, no war, no jail—the most terrifying trials
that can fall to a man’s lot. So I look upon him from a dis-
tance as upon a naïve child; from the height of my 58 years,
upon him, fortunate, famous, and weak. His life ended at 37,
and my literary strengths at that age were only beginning.”50
Limonov’s reevaluation of Maiakovskii is part of an extended
project of recontextualizing his own literary past in which he
subordinates his identity as writer to his current profession
of “hero.” In claiming to overtake Maiakovskii, then taking
over Maiakovskii’s life and work with a dismissive biographi-
cal sketch, Limonov removes the bases for comparison with
his literary mentor in a bid to replace him in the canon of
revolutionary poets.
The prophetic mode Limonov adopts here is a transparent
echo of what Pierre Bourdieu has called the “oracle effect.”
Having understood that the posturing of his delinquent and
transitory literary alter egos was not conducive to claims of
authority that can speak on behalf of “the people” or “the
nation,” Limonov abolishes the individual personality in
favor of a transcendent and prophetic delegate of national
interests. Bourdieu observes that the “ordinary individual
must die in order for the moral person to come into being;
die and become an institution. Paradoxically, those who have
made themselves nothing in order to become everything
126 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

can invert the term of their relation and reproach those


who are merely themselves.”51 The violence that accompa-
nies the oracle effect “destroys” Maiakovskii and legitimates
Limonov’s claims about the prophetic nature of his earlier
exilic narratives. As I will demonstrate in the remainder of
this chapter, however, it cannot kill “Edichka,” the exilic
protagonist-cum-autobiographical subject who established
his reputation abroad.
The bombastic “We Are the National Hero,” according to
Limonov, prophesies a number of his future achievements,
among them, his (unsuccessful) bid for a seat in the Duma in
1995 and his acquaintance with Salvador Dali in New York.
The Diary of a Loser exhibits a “rehabilitated” Eddie, who
in fragmented journal entries alternates between descriptions
of his new social outlook (“the times when I fucked the male
strangers I happened to meet . . . and lived on welfare—that
time has passed”) and heroic calls for revolution. In these
calls, Limonov audaciously claims, his younger self foresaw
his later volunteer military activity in Sarajevo from 1991
to 1993 and the Georgian republic of Abkhazia in 1992.52
His Butler’s Story, his tale of working as a housekeeper for a
wealthy entrepreneur, anticipated his need “to found a party
or a religion if one wishes to write books.”53 In contrast,
Limonov identifies It’s Me, Eddie, which has been called “the
quintessential book of the third wave emigration,”54 only
as a “socio-political novel” and claims not to have reread
it, orienting the reader to his more recent prison writings
instead.55 The question of why Limonov does not attempt to
address the rupture between It’s Me, Eddie and the present,
as he does with “We Are the National Hero” and all of other
works set in New York—Diary of a Loser, His Butler’s Story,
The Torturer, and 316, Point “B”—prompts a closer exami-
nation of the conflict between the opposition of violence and
national interest that structures Limonov’s project of return.
As the incarnation of the collective body of the National Bol-
sheviks, Limonov draws authority from the self-constructed
hierarchies and emblems of his party. As such, his past is sig-
nificant only insofar as it can prophecy the future. Limonov’s
Authenticity, Camera, Action 127

recuperation of past narratives thus becomes limited to those


works that purport to destroy Eddie or presuppose a move
from the individual to the collective. As I will demonstrate
below, this recirculation of his literary past is distinct from
the nostalgic appropriation of Eddie that makes it resistant to
postexilic recontextualization and allows Limonov strategic
access to his past selves.

E xc i s i ng Exil e, Co nstruc ting Authenti ci ty


It’s Me, Eddie outraged nearly everyone who read it upon
its release, and it continues to resist Limonov’s efforts to
subdue it following his return. To undo its exilic constructs
and transform its destitute and desperately lonely quasi-auto-
biographical protagonist into a monolithic and authoritative
“hero,” Limonov strives to neutralize and gain control over
his quasi-autobiographical protagonist’s “failures” and trans-
gressive behaviors, namely, his failed marriage to Shchapova
and his sexual encounters with men. It is through appeals to
misogyny, extreme nationalism, heteronormative sexuality,
and the literary canon that Limonov attempts to overtake
“Eddie, a character in pink shoes with 13 centimeter-high
heels, a white suit, a cross around his neck,” who, Limonov
once wrote, “cannot be removed from literature.”56 In con-
struing Limonov the political thinker as the biographer of
Limonov the writer, it becomes possible to view the irrepa-
rable rupture between “Eddie” and today’s “hero” as, to cite
Epstein, a “wound” that is “metaphorically associated with
that which is repressed and excluded—woman in patriarchal
culture, the racial subject in an imperialist society, the under-
class in a capitalist economy, gays and lesbians in heterosexual
culture.”57 By leaving the wound open—that is, by acknowl-
edging (through omission) his difficulty in writing Eddie into
his political biography—Limonov associates the novel and its
past authorial alter ego with the pain of his wife’s betrayal,
homosexual liaisons, and now-deceased friends, in particular,
the late Brodsky—whose role in Limonov’s life and work, as
Limonov has conceived it, is arguably greater several years
after Brodsky’s death and Limonov’s political conversion
128 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

than when the two poets were acquainted. Limonov revisits


these episodes and the figure of Brodsky in his prison memoir
In Captivity among the Dead (V plenu u mertvetsov, 2003)
to recontextualize them within his present ideological posi-
tions and inscribe his present writings and behaviors within
certain hegemonic cultural practices.58 By affiliating himself
with social positions that contribute to the devaluation of
women and leave no room for social difference, he strives to
create the collective consensus that Edichka “has no relation
to the grey-haired, honorable writer sitting before you.”59
In the exilic territory of It’s Me, Eddie, the narrator-
protagonist Eddie considers “aliens”—that is, those whose
“lives were not very settled”—to be his “comrades in mis-
fortune.”60 Exile defines all the figures with whom Eddie
associates: his fellow busboys at the hotel restaurant where
he finds his first job; Chris and Johnny, the homeless African
American men he seduces into sexual encounters; Carol, an
avowed communist and student of Russian; his classmates,
all fellow immigrants and students of English; and his few
Russian friends, who live in conditions as meager as his own.
Exile unites all the marginalized figures who populate the
novel and the departure of Eddie’s estranged wife for an
American man leads him to bury his sorrows and seek com-
fort in his fellow exiles and the streets of New York.
“Treat Elena, Eddie-baby, as Christ treated Mary Mag-
dalene and all women who sinned. No, treat her better,”
Eddie says during a day of shopping with Elena after their
divorce.61 His doting attention to her every whim yields the
realization that despite his suffering, he can still love: “When
Eddie fell apart he was nevertheless happy; though sick, he
has within him Love. Envy him, gentlemen!”62 It’s Me, Eddie
has been characterized as a novel about love, but it can also
be brutal in its depictions of women. Eddie tried to strangle
Elena in a blind rage following her infidelity and his friend
Alexander approves of the violent act (“you strangled her,
you should’ve finished her off”).63 Eddie’s desperate love,
violence, and occasional moments of happiness, however, do
not constitute grounds for common homosocial bonding of
Authenticity, Camera, Action 129

the sort that the postrepatriation Limonov requires for his


“Civilization of Heroes.”
A desperate search for a departed, beloved woman also
drives the plot of A Foreigner in the Time of Troubles, the
transitional first novel of return published before Limonov’s
self-declared moment of political return in 1994. The pro-
tagonist of A Foreigner in the Time of Troubles is an “eter-
nal traveler,” an unsettled figure staying in a hotel in his
own homeland, an “alien among aliens.”64 Although named
“Indiana Ivanovich,” a nod to the film hero Indiana Jones,
traces of Eddie are discernable in the autobiographically
based protagonist65 who once again experiences a woman’s
infidelity and is driven to despair. He travels to Russia, not for
glory, but to search for her after she disappears there without
a trace. Upon seeing her engaged in sexual acts with her own
brother, Indiana rushes to a restaurant for a drink. Forcing
himself past the head waiter (“an Eastern type”) who asks for
his last name, and confronted for not having a reservation,
Indiana displaces his rage onto the “Eastern” waiter (“Stalin
is my last name!”) and violently pummels him in the face
using both fists. Passersby witnessing the scene, who “per-
haps are also ready to vent their ill will on someone,” rush
to stop him.66
The urge to commit violence in It’s Me, Eddie, the first
novel of exile, and A Foreigner in the Time of Troubles, the
first novel of return, emerges from what Limonov posits as a
recurrent scene: one man losing to another in the battle over
a woman. In his study of biographical narrative as abduction,
Epstein observes that in the “recurrent generic scene” of two
men competing “over the body of a woman,” the woman
functions as “an excluded other, an abjected and abducted
object of exchange whom they must defile and repress in
order to repair the break between them and reinforce their
homosocial bond.”67 This bond is never established in either
It’s Me, Eddie or A Foreigner in the Time of Troubles and
leaves both narratives untethered; the first leaves Eddie a
marginalized outcast on the outskirts of society and the latter
depicts the protagonist’s return to France with his love, able
130 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

to articulate his heroic dreams only in a bedtime “fairy tale”


in which a suffering nation “strove toward a sterile abstract
notion of justice, not understanding that might is the highest
form of justice.”68
In Anatomy of a Hero and the later prison memoir In Cap-
tivity among the Dead, Limonov revisits his failed marriage
to rewrite his relationship with Elena following his adoption
of patriarchal and misogynist discourses—recontextualizing
their relationship to retroactively reclaim his masculinity. In
Anatomy of a Hero he writes, “If twenty years ago I believed
that Elena was a degenerate, that it was SHE who was a
betrayer, that I had no luck with women, now I know that all
women by nature are base and degenerate. There are many
degenerate men, but if in men this is a defect, a genetic defi-
ciency, in women, it is their essence.”69 His references to the
work of the fascist philosopher Julius Evola reveal the basis
for his reclassification of Eddie as a “socio-political novel”
about the “treachery of women,” and become reflected in
statements that retroactively sum up all the broken relation-
ships Eddie chronicles. “It is sad and tragic to recognize that
woman is . . . a creature with whom it is impossible to live
equally,” Limonov opines, while going on to describe all
women as belonging to a matriarchal tribe of pantheistic,
chthonic, communally oriented creatures. When he makes
reference to Elena again, it is to defile her by construing her
as a woman with no social value or achievements to call her
own. He recounts her January 1998 phone call from Rome,
where she lived with her husband, the count Gianfranco di
Carli. She allegedly begs Limonov to marry her in a call that
came, in his words, twenty-two years too late: “Fuck, Lena,
you’re no countess, but a woman who has accepted defeat,
who only understood after twenty two years that the man
who cut his veins on your account, the man who wrote a
passionate book about you—a cry of pain and despair—was
the only one, the most outstanding one.”70 Using terms that
betray the patriarchal construction of Anatomy of a Hero,
Limonov describes the scene as a “victory,” albeit a “late,
unnecessary, unproductive” one.71 It’s Me, Eddie is overcome
Authenticity, Camera, Action 131

by reducing its object of desire to a recuperated, deflated,


and ultimately defeated, middle-aged woman.
Limonov revisits Elena again in his prison memoir In Cap-
tivity among the Dead, this time, to implicate all men in his
attitudes toward her and toward women in general. In the
chapter “My Penelopes,” he compares his past longing for
her loyalty to that of an “officer toward his fellow officer.”
When she left him, he “lost a brother.”72 Elena is consistently
referred to as if male (“I was proud of her as a coarser brother
is proud of his handsome, delicate, elegant brother”), and
their past relationship is recast within explicitly military terms
(with reason, Limonov claims, as both he and Elena were
children of officers) to heighten their homosocial bond and
appeal to the presumably male reader’s incomprehension as
to how he could be betrayed by his “brother-officer.” Even
their sexual activity, described in graphic detail in It’s Me,
Eddie, is dismissed as “not the most important thing . . .
I valued her friendship.” Then, in a final tale of comeup-
pance and dismissal, he describes an encounter with Elena at
an exhibit of her artwork in Moscow in 1996, twenty years
after the events depicted in It’s Me, Eddie. He sees her upon
entering the gallery, “a fat, tall, swollen, appetite-driven,
elderly woman dressed in poor taste.” Limonov arrives with
his current girlfriend, twenty-three years old and “thin as a
shoelace.” He further claims that in photographs taken at
the event, he and Elena “look like mother and son.” “The
idol that I myself created with my book It’s Me, Eddie has
been toppled,” he writes.73
Overturning this idol serves a second purpose: to reclaim a
heteronormative sexuality after the depictions of homosexual
liaisons in It’s Me, Eddie led to speculation that Limonov
himself was gay or bisexual. Andrei Rogachevskii concisely
expresses how sexuality functions within the exilic constructs
of It’s Me, Eddie: “He detests capitalist society for the hypoc-
risy of its moral values and denigrates them by saying ‘I am an
outcast even sexually, because I do not want to have anything
in common with your enslaving ethics.’”74 If the exilic Eddie
sought, in part, to disrupt conventional social structures
132 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

through relationships with men, the Limonov we encounter


after his return will profess to extremes of heteronormative
behavior to engage male collaboration in the denigration of
the transgressive sexuality exhibited by his past literary self.
In “My Penelopes,” he enumerates the age of every woman
with whom he has had a serious relationship: “Anna,” his
first wife, “was twenty-seven when [he] took her”; seven
years later he “took” Elena at twenty-one; eleven years later
he met the twenty-four old Natasha; Liza—who attended
the gallery exhibition—was twenty-three; and Nast’ia was
sixteen. “This means E. Limonov has done very well with
the ladies,” he boasts.75
Recontextualizing the exilic thematics of It’s Me, Eddie
within later writings that situate him firmly within the set of
radical-nationalist social values he has established since found-
ing his party, Limonov subjugates his persona’s sexual past
to his present. He is further driven, however, to demonstrate
his emplacement in structures of authority, in particular, Rus-
sian literary history and the literary canon. If in In Captivity
among the Dead Elena functions as an abjected object, the
late poet Brodsky emerges as a vindicator. Limonov’s appre-
ciative comments about Brodsky in In Captivity among the
Dead are surprising in light of Limonov’s numerous abusive
public statements and publications about him, which were
well documented in emigration and continued until Brod-
sky’s death in 1996, when the National Bolshevik Party
newspaper Limonka published an unflattering obituary.76
During the discussion of Brodsky’s presentation “The Con-
dition We Call Exile” (read in absentia) at a December 1987
conference of writers in exile, Limonov described Brodsky,
who had recently received the Nobel Prize, as belonging to
“the beginning of the twentieth century. That’s why he’s
so prized, he’s so good, he’s a dead poet.”77 Limonov fre-
quently characterized Brodsky as a modernist aesthete, and
therefore “dead,” during Brodsky’s lifetime; in his prison
memoirs Limonov resurrects the deceased Brodsky, and in
his conversations with “Brodsky,” retroactively interpellates
himself into the late poet’s legacy.
Authenticity, Camera, Action 133

Limonov’s unexpected praise for Brodsky centers around


violence and the denigration of women. In his 2000 Book
of the Dead (Kniga mertvykh), Limonov includes an appre-
ciative essay in which he emphasizes, above all, the two
poets’ affinity for one another. They bonded, he claims,
when Brodsky invited Limonov to a restaurant to show him
a highly critical article that attacked them both. Limonov,
being quite used to criticism (and indeed, reveling in it after
the publication of It’s Me, Eddie), was indifferent to the arti-
cle, but Brodsky was visibly upset. “I’d give him one in the
mug if I didn’t have a bad heart,” Brodsky allegedly said.
Limonov promised, in the event of meeting the critic, that
he would give him two good heavy blows, one on behalf of
Brodsky. “When we parted on the street, I had the sense he
didn’t want to leave . . . I think we even hugged,” Limonov
claims.78 Limonov also alleges that he and Brodsky shared
women while they lived in New York (on one occasion Brod-
sky purportedly sent over to him a “healthy, tall, big-assed
girl” who “likes to fuck”). Limonov then mitigates his earlier
criticisms of Brodsky (after, of course, reiterating them all
in the essay): “Of all the writers of my time, he is the only
one I ever competed with . . . I think it influenced me, that
the poet Brodsky was writing in my time. I went into prose,
where I didn’t have any competitors.” And although Brod-
sky’s dislike of It’s Me, Eddie and refusal to write a public-
ity blurb for it as it went into publication remained a sore
point that Limonov would later turn to his own advantage
by mocking the dated Petersburg slang Brodsky used in his
critical evaluation of the manuscript, here Limonov regrets
that Brodsky did not live to see him return to Moscow “to
see [his] subsequent victories.”79
Limonov later “resurrects” Brodsky in his prison cell in
In Captivity among the Dead to further establish a place
for himself within Brodsky’s legacy. In the course of their
dialogue, “Brodsky” states what Limonov cannot—that in
Limonov’s current system of values It’s Me, Eddie remains a
point of vulnerability that threatens to overturn his carefully
reconstructed biographical legend:
134 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

In your dossier it is written: “Author of It’s Me, Eddie, in which


there is a scene of homosexual sex and the protagonist copulates
with a Black man in a vacant lot. The best way to break the
prisoner Savenko [Limonov’s given surname] is to constantly
remind him of gays, of the theme of ‘gays in prison,’ about
sodomizers and the sodomized. Savenko might be intimidated.
Then in exchange for some kind of favor . . . he’ll admit his guilt,
or partially admit it, in court.” [Your cellmate’s] role is to intim-
idate you by constantly reminding you of your Achilles heel.80

The novel, along with all literature, however, is eventually


deemed irrelevant over the course of the conversation. Both
Limonov and “Brodsky” agree that the writer is a “pitiful fig-
ure,” “archaic,” a “disgusting type.” “Brodsky” continues to
defend poetry as an eternal form (“a pity you stopped writing
verse”); Limonov declares his final departure from literature
altogether. In agreement with a news correspondent’s ear-
lier suggestion that “if Limonov and his National Bolshevik
Party come to power, their first plan of action should be—on
the basis of his program—to banish the writer Limonov from
Russia,”81 Limonov declares at the conclusion of his conver-
sation with “Brodsky,” “I am not a writer. I am a reporter of
my own life.”82 Brodsky’s rejection of It’s Me, Eddie becomes
an opportunity for Limonov to bond with no less of a figure
than “Joseph Brodsky” to revisit, then discredit, the sexual
and textual body of the exilic Eddie.
If, according to Laurence Rickels, photography “shrinks
and embalms” its subjects while monumentalizing them,83
biography can, following Epstein, “reaffirm cultural emi-
nence” at the same time it inflicts “interpretive violence”
upon lives.84 We have seen Limonov engage in the produc-
tion of photo albums that catalogue and archive his past
selves as a means of denying their present autonomy. With
The Book of the Dead and Le monstres sacres (Sviashchennye
monstry, 2004), Limonov turns to biography, a genre he had
not practiced until his return, to deny several biographical
subjects, including Maiakovskii and Brodsky, their status as
autonomous subjects. As a genre that seeks to delimit the
extradiscursive activity of others, biography—particularly
in the hands of a practitioner like Limonov—functions as
Authenticity, Camera, Action 135

another controlling discursive regime. It wreaks “violence in


the guise of interpretation,”85 allowing Limonov to deter-
mine the reception of It’s Me, Eddie after his return, recon-
textualize his relationship with Brodsky, and above all, assert
his affiliation with hegemonic cultural practices and discur-
sive formations that lend authority to his present positions.
In this project, his work has been assisted by the biograph-
ical film Russkoe (dir. Aleksandr Veledinskii, 2004), based
loosely on Limonov’s autobiographical works that chroni-
cle his Kharkiv years, Memoirs of a Russian Punk (Podrostok
Savenko, 1982) and The Young Scoundrel (Molodoi negodiai,
1986). As in the memoirs, the protagonist of the film, “Ed,”
begins his adolescence as a budding young poet. In its devia-
tions from its source texts, however, the film discloses its
debts to historico-generic conventions as well as the bio-
graphical imperatives to which Limonov now subscribes. As
concerns the former, the film follows a well-trodden plot: the
writer is committed to a psychiatric ward. Ed escapes with
the help of his petty criminal partners, but the film makes no
effort to escape convention, with the anticipated gallery of
characters in the institution performing their expected roles.
As concerns the latter, not only does the young poet already
foresee his need to transcend literature to become a legend-
ary figure, but in a dream sequence his older self makes a
brief appearance, wearing the characteristic goatee and dark-
framed glasses that distinguish Limonov’s appearance today.
Set in a prison cell surrounded by characters from his past,
the scene foreshadows the “extraordinary man” young Ed
is to become. In another aggressive gesture of biographi-
cal revisionism, the film skips from Ed’s youth in Kharkiv to
his adult self in prison and back, excising altogether Eddie-
baby’s exilic adventures on the Lower East Side.

* * *

Consistent with his current practices and Limonov’s self-


proclaimed departure from literature, his antiutopian novel
316, Point “B” must be approached with an eye toward
Limonov’s present agenda. The novel, set in the year 2015,
136 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

was begun in 1982 in Paris and completed only in 1997 in


Moscow, well after Limonov’s decision to pursue a nonliter-
ary career. As such, it reflects Limonov’s transitional ambi-
tions: its hero, Ippolit Luk’ianov, is a Russian émigré writer
living in New York who eventually becomes one the most
powerful political figures in the world. Luk’ianov physically
resembles the “chief of the Department of Demographics,”
Saul Jenkins, and is explicitly identified as his double.86 The
motif of the double recurs throughout Limonov’s exilic
poetry (“My negative hero,” 1981), short stories (“The
Double,” 1985), and novels (The Torturer) and emerges
from an autobiographical impulse that posits, as Robert Por-
ter has argued, “the two possible resolutions of the riven
personality that was Eddy.”87 Luk’ianov may be compared
with other doubled protagonists in Limonov’s work, but it
is particularly productive to note the characteristics of 316,
Point “B” that distinguish it from the rest of Limonov’s fic-
tion. First and foremost, it differs in genre, but Limonov
violates the conventions of the traditional antiutopian novel
to produce an ideological novel constructed according to his
heroic-autobiographical principles that functions as a correc-
tive to his previous exilic narratives and biographical legend.
Ultimately, 316, Point “B” should not be read so much as
a social commentary or literary response to earlier utopian
visions as an ideological polemic with his former literary self.
The novel begins seven years after a nuclear war between
the United States and Russia, and Luk’ianov has just turned
sixty-five years old. According to Demographic Law article
number 316, point B, all citizens must voluntarily report for
extermination at the age of sixty-five. Determined to live,
and in constant fear of the patrols that randomly check citi-
zens’ identity cards, Luk’ianov goes into hiding, but is even-
tually apprehended by a young lieutenant. To this point, the
structure of the novel resembles that of traditional dystopian
fiction. Set in a place and time far removed from the author’s
own, the “deficiencies in the future” are intended as criti-
cism of the “deficiencies of the present.”88 It is in this con-
nection that Shatalov compares Limonov to George Orwell.
Authenticity, Camera, Action 137

If, Shatalov argues, Orwell’s novels were a warning against


the threat of a newly wrought totalitarianism in the Soviet
Union, Limonov’s response to Orwell, an essay titled “Dis-
ciplinary Sanatorium” (“Distsiplinarnyi sanatorii,” 1989),
indicates that in the present day Russia could fear the same
threat from America.89
“Disciplinary Sanatorium” is a feeble critique of Orwell’s
1984 that primarily provides a platform for Limonov’s revi-
sionist historical views and nationalist ideology. It begins with
an attack on 1984: “Its plot is stupid,” its protagonists “lack
ambition,” and its author is “insufficiently talented” to pres-
ent a compelling vision of the future.90 The goal of Limonov’s
essay is to present a “more accurate” sociological study of the
Western world and the Eastern bloc countries through the
analogy of the sanatorium, whose inhabitants correspond to
social groups found in contemporary society. The doctors
and nurses in power keep their patients in a medicated, con-
trolled state either by force (as in the former Soviet Union)
or by providing them with an endless chain of material goals
toward which the patient must continually strive (the West).
The lowest in the social hierarchy of Limonov’s sanatorium is
the “victim,” whom, he believes, Orwell and all “sanatorium
countries” have chosen to valorize.91
From this outline of Limonov’s “sociological study,” it is
clear that the ideological aims of 316, Point “B” will con-
tradict the exilic narratives that chronicled the experiences
of social outcasts and outsiders, including Limonov’s own
exilic alter egos. Consequently, many of the motifs tradition-
ally associated with the antiutopian novel have been consid-
erably distorted in 316, Point “B” as their function becomes
adapted to autobiographical myth, rather than exclusively
social or political correctives. The protagonist is saved from
immediate execution by the young lieutenant, who recog-
nizes Luk’ianov’s resemblance to Jenkins. After the assassina-
tion of the president of the United States, the lieutenant kills
Jenkins, the favored candidate to occupy the Oval Office,
and replaces Jenkins with his double, Luk’ianov, who is con-
cerned only with the opportunity to live past sixty-five. In
138 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

the end, the Russian émigré Luk’ianov (masquerading as


Jenkins) is elected president of the United States.
One of the most important source texts for antiutopian
literature since the end of the nineteenth century has been
Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,”92 which
the atheist Ivan Karamazov relates to his devout and saintly
brother Alyosha. In the legend, Christ reappears on Earth
during the Inquisition, only to be imprisoned by the Grand
Inquisitor, who visits Christ in his cell and explains to him
why his reappearance will destroy all the work of the church
for the previous fifteen centuries. The Grand Inquisitor states,
“We corrected your deed and based it on miracle, mystery,
and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once
more led like sheep . . . Have we not, indeed, loved man-
kind, in so humbly recognizing their impotence[?] . . . Why
have you come to interfere with us now?”93 The Inquisitor
then reveals that for eight centuries the church has forsaken
Christ, and that its leaders have proclaimed themselves the
“sole rulers of the earth.” In doing so, they have convinced
men that “they will only become free when they resign their
freedom to us, and submit to us.” Men, he argues, do not
want freedom, but happiness, “and we shall give them quiet,
humble happiness, the happiness of feeble creatures.”94
The “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” has been described
as “probably the most important text for the genre” of
antiutopia in that its “allegorical form gave it a universal-
ity which permitted a selective and flexible application to
a wide variety of targets.”95 The meetings between D-503
and the Benefactor in Evgenii Zamiatin’s We, the Control-
lers and the rebels in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,
O’Brien and Winston Smith in 1984, and in the context
of contemporary Russian literature, the delayed memory
of the conversation between Colonel Urchagin and Omon
Krivomazov in Viktor Pelevin’s Omon Ra (1993), all reflect
the influence of Dostoevskii’s allegory. The similarly staged
meeting between Luk’ianov and Jenkins invokes, but does
not follow, this tradition. Jenkins, the author of article 316,
point “B” that has condemned Luk’ianov to death, meets
Authenticity, Camera, Action 139

with Luk’ianov to reveal the nature of his power: “I am the


author of article 316, point ‘B.’ And this law forced you out
of your cockroach’s crevice . . . if you look honestly at the last
days of your life, you’ll see that they’ve been brighter, stron-
ger, more intense, than all the sixty five years you lived in a
daze.”96 Jenkins argues that the law has improved the qual-
ity of Luk’ianov’s life, that “the government is sacred,” and
the Nietzschean superman is in fact the state itself. Although
the monologue ends without further elaboration, Jenkins’s
speech (and much of “Disciplinary Sanatorium” as well) is
clearly intended as an elaboration of Friedrich Nietzsche’s
thesis that the “meaning of all culture is the reduction of the
beast of prey ‘man’ to a tame and civilized animal.”97 Unlike
the novels of Zamiatin and Orwell, in which the protago-
nist speaks against the tyranny of the status quo imposed by
the state, Limonov does not provide his protagonist with
a voice of protest against his interrogator; on the contrary,
Luk’ianov says only, “Do what you will with me” and “I do
not argue with you.”98 Limonov also violates the conven-
tions of the antiutopian novel by eliminating Jenkins at this
stage in the narrative so that Luk’ianov may take his place.
Assuming the role of Jenkins, Luk’ianov is not only elected
president, but encouraged to tighten the yoke of discipline
that controls the populace.
By the end of the narrative Limonov’s work hardly resem-
bles an antiutopian novel at all, but an assortment of motifs
familiar to the reader from Limonov’s exilic writing. In
those works, Limonov used the motif of the double as an
emblem of the dual nature of the exilic condition. In The
Torturer, two émigrés are revealed to be the two hypostases
of a single subject, a situation resolved when one murders
the other. In the short story “The Double,” the writer “Edu-
ard Limonov” meets his double, a pedophilic priest, in New
York City. In 316, Point “B,” the émigré hero ultimately is
not threatened by the presence of his double; on the con-
trary, the presence of a double allows him to live. Moreover,
if Luk’ianov assumes his double’s place, it is not in a social
hierarchy determined by poetic talent, material wealth, or
140 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

sexual prowess; eschewing any celebration of the marginal


status of the émigré, Limonov instead relocates him into the
highest ranks of the political hierarchy. The reinvention of
the exile in 316, Point “B”—from social outcast and marginal
figure to political leader and champion of national security—
is an effective allegory for Limonov’s self-constructed fantasy
of his own development.
Over the course of this chapter I have illustrated the
various strategies by which Limonov disposed of his exilic
personae and recreated himself as a political leader. Being an
inexperienced political newcomer with a larger reputation as
a literary provocateur, Limonov initially presented himself as
an oppositional figure who challenged the status quo. The
reduction in linguistic capital that accompanied his change
of profession demanded his further reliance upon publicity
stunts that communicated his political dispossession at the
same time they acknowledged the power of the elected offi-
cials they targeted. He embarked upon a twofold strategy
that balanced disorder and provocation, expressed in the
form of public demonstrations that targeted selected politi-
cal “enemies,” and strict control of his image intended to
promote and sustain his heroic persona among his young
followers. He appeared, on the one hand, to have transposed
the creative tactics of self-presentation characteristic of his
exilic period into a professional sphere bound by strict social
protocols, and on the other to have stifled his writing persona
into a limited repertoire. While this strategy generated pre-
cisely the two sets of responses he intended—denunciations
of his controversial political positions and activity, and servile
devotion from his young acolytes—it is simultaneously a dif-
ficult balancing act and a creative deadlock.
In concluding my treatment of Limonov’s constructions
of exile and return, I wish to call attention to the impasse
that Limonov’s own tactics of opposition create for his work.
Bound to essentializing hegemonic discursive structures
of prophecy, biography, patriarchy, and heteronormativity,
Limonov’s narrating self is overdetermined and unable to
remove itself from its limited sphere. On occasion, however,
Authenticity, Camera, Action 141

Limonov finds refuge in nostalgic reveries that move beyond


his rigid rhetoric of return and seek to emplace his narrat-
ing self in its former exilic literary contexts. Through these
reminiscences, Limonov maintains the viability of his exilic
alter ego Eddie to retain access to the more universal reach
of the literary identities that he can no longer inhabit within
his regimented practices of return.

Conventions of Opposition
Limonov is aware that by integrating himself into his chosen
social and discursive hierarchies, he is literally and figuratively
putting his life at risk. He has predicted that a bullet, not a
pen, will write the “epilogue of [his] life.”99 At public events
he surrounds himself with tracksuit-clad young men from
his National Bolshevik party who serve as his bodyguards.
Along with Limonov, these men felt the ire of a hostile audi-
ence during Limonov’s 2006 lecture “Russian Literature and
Russian History,” and together with the special police forces
patrolling the lecture venue, they acted to scatter the crowd
and hurriedly push Limonov into a waiting car when a sudden
series of explosive sounds erupted on the street as Limonov
left the building. Limonov now sees himself as Jenkins, the
eliminated leader, not Luk’ianov, his fortunate émigré looka-
like.100 In his conversation with “Brodsky,” Limonov’s body
is in the process of being transmuted into bronze, simulta-
neously killing him and rendering him immortal.101 He par-
ticipates in the construction of his own monuments: he has
penned the introduction to his three-volume collected works
(in which he envisioned his life’s “epilogue”), collected and
published his albums of photographs, and concluded My
Political Biography—his 2002 account of his political awak-
ening—with a conventional “scene from a classic novel” con-
sisting of his first steps into his prison cell.
This infatuation with biography and self-monumental-
ization does not allow for the interpretive spaces of agency,
only genetic and generic inevitability. Such imperatives may
lead to the interpretation of his work exclusively within the
institutional boundaries of biography, as is the case with
142 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

Veledinskii’s 2004 film. Like Limonov’s politics, biographi-


cal imperatives also situate Limonov within the dynamic
interplay between institutionalized forces and their opposi-
tion. Limonov’s trajectory from writer to politician, exile
to emplaced, calls to mind the opposition between absolute
agency in his project of self-fashioning and his acceptance
of his allegedly inevitable fate. As long as Limonov remains
the author of both of these projects of self-mythologization,
he will continue his autobiographical reconstructions of the
past from the perspective of the present.
In disclosing his need for an exilic past to juxtapose to
his present, constructing an antipode in Brodsky—interna-
tional man of letters and exile of no return—and juxtaposing
agency to essentialized inevitability, Limonov implicates him-
self in his need for opposition, even if he generates the oppo-
sition himself. The titles of his book-length political tracts,
Limonov versus Zhirinovskii (1994) and Limonov versus Putin
(2006), are emblematic of this need, as is his development
of the “self-interview” (interv’iu s samim soboi), a genre he
practices when he “want[s] to answer particular questions
and no one poses them to me . . . or when I need to curse
my enemies.”102 It is also revealed in his avowed problematic
relationship with online forums, where diverse communities
of forum contributors hiding behind user names and avatars
prove too diffuse and anonymous an antagonist to attack.103
Limonov directly engages the responses his online publica-
tions generate, and just as the political discourses of those
in power are necessary for him to produce his own opposi-
tional writings, he takes refuge in his own hegemonic dis-
courses when online readers post their attacks. Examples of
his replies show him taking recourse in his inherent talents
(“nobodies, young and old, all despise genius”)104 and ascrib-
ing his critics’ hostile comments to sexual inadequacy. “Is it
jealousy? Do you also want such a biography and wives, such
talented and tragic beautiful women?” he responds to one.105
Limonov’s current writings and activities ironically demon-
strate that they are often merely an expression of those very
discourses he claims to oppose. As of yet, Limonov has not
Authenticity, Camera, Action 143

devised a way out of this impasse, but continues to assert his


position within the conventional political and cultural hierar-
chies of gender, genealogy, and canon.
There are times, however, when one senses that Limonov
wishes he could embrace the extraordinary otherness that
was Eddie, and the rigid positions of narrative control that
he now espouses are occasionally interspersed with nostalgic
fantasies of the marginal or unfulfilled status of the past. The
voluminous prison writings—Limonov claims to have writ-
ten eight books during his two and a half year long incar-
ceration—are rife with reminiscence and speculation as to
what might have been. Had he married the woman he lived
with during the summer of 1981 he spent in California, he
muses, he may not have found himself in prison (“I would
have published, written books in English about people like
Limonov”).106 Elsewhere, he acknowledges that his com-
mitment to the political sphere, however much notoriety it
might generate, excludes him from enacting the universal-
izing cultural border crossings of exile that characterized his
literary production and provided potential access to interna-
tional fame.
Limonov’s symbolic violence, for all of its purported
authority and institutional power, is challenged by the
author’s nostalgia. Nostalgia emerges precisely when one
can’t go home again, and the endlessly desiring Eddie, with
his ability to shift from marginal to marginally empowered by
constructing and subverting his identity at will, constitutes
a highly performative identity to which Limonov—having
exhaustively documented his return on his own terms—can
no longer access in life, but only in narrative. Nostalgia,
according to John J. Su, “encourages an imaginative explora-
tion of how present systems of social relations fail to address
human needs.”107 While it may seem unlikely, Limonov’s nos-
talgic imaginings emphasize a spirit of accommodation and
reconstruct a history effaced of the institutionalized Soviet-
era dictates that led to his exile and the subsequent violence
of his return. The ethical commitment that Su associates
with nostalgia—the creation of stable communities among
144 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

the dispossessed—helps to elucidate Limonov’s resurrection


of Eddie. In the impossible transposition of Eddie’s years
in exile, the 1970s and 1980s, onto an imagined and idyllic
1960s, Limonov’s nostalgic vision puts forward a universal
narrative of idealized self-creation, in which diverse figures
share the dream of becoming transcendent national heroes
of international renown without recourse to violence.
In My Political Biography, Limonov outlines a primordial
model of nation formation to argue that transnational rela-
tions and cultural exchanges are an artificial invention that
contradicts human nature. “Cosmopolitanism in the con-
temporary world is a fiction,” Limonov asserts, citing the
prevalence of war and the venality of market capitalism in
support of his views. “Only in the highest echelons, in the
world of industry or in the cases of musicians with names of
world-renown is cosmopolitanism possible. At the level of
simple, everyday life, nations regard each other, at best, with
wariness.”108 As is evident, however, Limonov does not see
himself or his activities as ordinary or on the level of every-
day life. Having described himself rubbing shoulders with
Truman Capote, Richard Avedon, Dali, Andy Warhol, and
The Ramones in New York and having erected textual mon-
uments unto himself following his return, he cannot now be
content to portray himself as any less important than those
renowned industrialists, musicians, and celebrities.
Although he excludes politics and literature from his list of
cosmopolitan cultural arenas, perhaps due to his belief that
commitments in these realms should be exclusively national
and divorced from the world of commerce and the arts,
he is acutely aware that his name only entered into inter-
national cultural circulation through his literary past. Les
monstres sacres, the collection of biographical sketches he
wrote in prison, concludes with a revealing passage. “The
blessed 1960s!” he exclaims—Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey
Bogart, and Elvis Presley are still alive, Iurii Gagarin has just
orbited the earth, it is the era of Michelangelo Antonioni
and Jean-Luc Godard, of hippies and communes, and “on
30 September 1967, Limonov arrived in Moscow with a
Authenticity, Camera, Action 145

large wooden suitcase, ready to conquer the city.” In keep-


ing with the discursive institutionalization of biography, he
concludes the passage with a description of a painting of his
now-deceased idols. A smiling Elvis serves coffee to Marilyn
and Bogie. Another personage is sitting with them; Limonov
does not recall who it is, but suggests that Gagarin would
fit right in. “And in so far as I am an artist, the author of
the many-personaged canvas Les monstres sacres, I have the
right . . . to inscribe myself—Eduard Limonov—next to the
Russian general,” he proclaims.109 In what is yet one more
dramatic biographical revision, Limonov reidentifies himself
as an artist to insert himself into the company of those who
transcended the banality of the institutions that generated
or commemorated their international fame. Limonov may
believe that he has now transcended the limits of literature
to achieve a place of greater cultural importance. But sitting
next to Gagarin and sharing coffee with Marilyn could not
be the newly arrived Kharkiv poet with so much yet to prove,
nor the grey-haired goateed National Bolshevik leader who
prefers to be canonized alongside Chernyshevskii, Lenin, and
Bakunin, but only Eddie-baby, who having changed from his
many-colored coat of the National Hero into his best white
suit and black lace shirt, stopped to pose for posterity before
returning to Moscow where his future was unfolding.110
4
Chapter 5

The End of Exile—


The End of Retur n?

In her discussion of Joseph Brodsky’s refusal to return to


Russia, Susan Sontag described where the poet chose to live
as “elsewhere” and Russia as “the great elsewhere to which he
could not, would not, out of pride, out of anger, out of anxi-
ety, ever return.”1 At home between two elsewheres, Brod-
sky’s determination to remain in a home situated out of place
may be construed, in part, as his unwillingness to unravel his
hard-won exilic discourses and construct a rhetoric of return.
To return is to confront issues of home and exile, familiar-
ity and difference, and belonging and displacement all over
again. It entails the arduous task of discursively reconstructing
the narrativizing self and the grounds for its existence. It also
entails subjecting one’s work to cultural processes that orga-
nize the rhetorical structures of the writing of return in ways
over which one may have little control.
The narratives of return treated in this study stimulate
an awareness of the contingency of claims to representing
national identity. These claims are entangled within strate-
gies of self-presentation and cultural positioning, as well as
within broader cultural dynamics and power structures that
in themselves are involved in shaping identity and culture.
If efforts to reduce the state’s role in defining the terms of
exile by emphasizing the individual exile’s agency in creat-
ing, or even escaping, his own exilic condition have been
the subject of much scholarly attention, it is fair to say that
148 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

return is no more the exclusive domain of the writer’s agency


than it is subject to other processes of cultural production.
What I hope to have demonstrated over the course of this
book is that while physical and narrative returns intended
to dismantle exilic modes and reorient the repatriated writer
to new strategies and audiences are initiated and shaped by
the writers themselves, the patterns inherent to the rhetor-
ical refiguration of narratives of exile into those of return
locate it among the organizing structures that give shape
to cultural products. The awareness that writing practices
associated with return are embedded within such organiz-
ing structures guides the reader toward an understanding
of their doubly constructed character. On the one hand, we
have seen in each case that transitional narratives of return
that center upon tropes of travel and dislocation eventually
give way to representations of a stable and rooted identity
affiliated with notions of home and nation. On the other
hand, as the variety of narratives of return in this study has
illustrated, whether and how the repatriated writer resists or
complies—or is made to comply—with narrative outcomes
for return that affiliate the writer with certain national dis-
courses reflects the writer’s construction of his own power as
well as his location within the historical and cultural moment.
In her examination of stories of return, Amy K. Kamin-
sky cites the postexilic writer José Donoso and his need to
write about the conditions of his repatriation. The return of
exiles to Chile preceded the end of dictatorship, and Kamin-
sky observes that Donoso “complains of feeling compelled
to write about that reality even though he would, artistically,
rather be elsewhere.”2 In a 1987 interview, Donoso describes
his predicament: “It is impossible to write about anything
else. We are all condemned to this. I cannot stand writing
about it, but nonetheless I cannot write about anything else.
I find myself so completely obsessed by this problem that I
have no other option. May it be damned! But what other
option is there?”3 Donoso’s response resonates with the per-
sistent and ongoing structuring demands of homecoming.
It presents a familiar disjuncture, one that is encountered
The End of Exile—The End of Return? 149

in Vassily Aksyonov’s regime of travel between Moscow and


Biarritz, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s blistering criticisms of
Russia’s state of collapse, in Eduard Limonov’s observation
upon returning for the first time in 1989, that he “didn’t
like Russia at all.” To commit to return, as Donoso’s remarks
make clear, and as Aksyonov, Solzhenityn, and Limonov
all acknowledged after their initial provisional narratives of
return, is to continually confront one’s writing predicament.
Along with these rhetorical structures, the processes by
which Aksyonov’s cosmopolitan strategies of multiple posi-
tioning begin to intermingle with increasingly local construc-
tions of home, Solzhenitsyn’s figuration of return comes to
advocate for threatened national discourses, and Limonov’s
political opposition becomes a form of self-othering that is
in fact dependent upon reigning ideologies, are simultane-
ously an effect of agency and the ideological limits imposed
upon narratives of return. Such limits are often imposed from
outside of literature and constitute a regime of interpretive
regulation in relation to which narratives of return must be
construed. Current cultural dynamics, such as nostalgia for
the prerevolutionary and Soviet eras and the attendant weak-
ening of Russia’s civil society, contribute perspectives that may
inflect readings of narratives of return and the motives of their
authors. It has become commonplace to invoke nostalgia as
one of the dominant symbolic practices in post-Soviet Russian
culture, and while there has been much scholarly emphasis
on the strange comforts and unrealizable potentials of today’s
nostalgic longing for a glorious Soviet past, it is also the case
that contemporary echoes of exilic voices of dissent can be
heard in response to such nostalgic formations.
Aksyonov’s 2004 novel Voltairians and Voltairiennes
offers a fictionalized representation of Voltaire as an advi-
sor to Catherine the Great, with the philosopher hoping to
modulate the empress’s enlightened despotism by assisting
her in the construction of a “liberal empire.” When asked
about his hopes for the novel, Aksyonov responded, “If
people cannot be saved from their imperial complex, then
perhaps together with this complex a dose of the idea of
150 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

liberalism can be administered.”4 In other words, having


perceived the popular nostalgia for the Soviet era and more
distant imperial past, Aksyonov drew upon traditional meth-
ods of resistance by invoking the social role of the author
in both eras: as a voice of protest against an authoritarian
state, and a gentle advisor who uses the public medium of
literature to espouse both praise and counsel.5 The return
of such authorial strategies indicates that nostalgia seeks to
reinstate not only institutional histories but the methods of
opposition that rose against them. By repositioning literature
as a medium for generating social reform, the author locates
himself against—and within—the frame of the imperial novel
to dictate its reception. In promoting such a reading, how-
ever, there is a danger that both the frame of the novel and
the author figure considered responsible for its construction
can become appropriated into structures conducive to an
inescapable cycle of nostalgic reconfiguration. If the author
becomes entirely subject to nostalgic reading strategies, he
risks becoming romanticized along with the social agenda
that the explicitly nostalgic frame of the novel was intended
only to embellish.6
In contrast, Limonov institutionalizes himself by taking on
the title of “leader” and “hero.” These titles, and the attendant
notions of authority and greatness they evoke, are accompa-
nied by an awareness of lack. Limonov’s “victories” inevita-
bly bear the rhetorical traces of an absence of power. Still, his
sizable and undeniable popularity among disaffected youth,
along with Garry Kasparov’s invitation to unite the National
Bolshevik Party and Kasparov’s own anti-Putin campaign to
form the alternative party the Other Russia, demonstrates that
his interrogations of existing power structures are not only
the product of evolving methods of self-presentation, but a
response to the increasingly institutionalized ideas of nation
that emerged under the Putin administration. Youth organiza-
tions founded in a show of support for Vladimir Putin, such
as Ours (Nashi) and Young Guard (Molodaia gvardiia), func-
tion as a direct descendant of the Komsomol in that they offer
future careers within the political establishment.7 Meanwhile,
The End of Exile—The End of Return? 151

Limonka features the regular column “Our Political-Prisoner


Brothers,” a list of all party members currently serving prison
terms. It is perhaps inevitable given such a comparison that
categories of exclusion endow Limonov with authority among
youth whose unfulfillable desires lead to romantic self-identifi-
cation with a movement entirely predicated upon opposition.
Limonov’s occasional nostalgic escapes to his years of exile
in New York constitute a form of individualized resistance
against institutionalizing forces of his own making, as well as
against a nationalism that has appropriated all but the most
private forms of nostalgia to its own ends. His case exemplifies
the complex trap of weaving an “authoritative” narrative of
return in response to powerful external institutions of ideo-
logical regulation.
Solzhenitsyn articulates the rhetorical limits of the narra-
tive project of exile when he ceases to write novels. His narra-
tives of return have been associated with dominant figures of
power and location, but their difficult reception reveals that
they remain a locus for competing constructions of identity.
An example of the contentious relationship between narratives
of return and the extraliterary reception imposed upon them
can be found in the recent news. In December 2008, Russian
president Dmitrii Medvedev renamed Moscow’s Great Com-
munist Street in honor of Solzhenitsyn. There are many who
consider the renaming an appropriate restoration of national
pride and identity. Many others challenge the state’s appropri-
ation of Solzhenitsyn’s legacy. Still others, such as the street’s
elderly residents, complain that the renaming requires them to
reregister their passports before they can collect their pensions.
Communist groups have taken issue with the commemoration
of an avowed anticommunist. During the years Solzhenitsyn
spent in exile, no one could have imagined that a street in
Russia’s capital would one day be named in his honor. But the
renaming raises questions about how Solzhenitsyn’s resistance
during critical moments of Russia’s history and, somewhat
more ironically, how his recent advocacy for marginalized
places and values, can be compatible with such restorative ges-
tures. This conflict is only accentuated by the fact that just two
152 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

months prior to the installation of the new signs on Solzhenit-


syn Street, a proposal to reinstate the toppled and vandalized
statue of Felix Dzerzhinskii, founder of the secret police, was
being discussed in the Duma.8
It has been my contention throughout this book that the
returned writer generates narratives of return in the interest
of constructing a stable collective history and identity. The
case studies demonstrate, however, that the writing of return
can be subjected to readings originating from a position of
“belonging” as well as of dislocation. The writing of return
also proposes besieged constructions of the author and the
nation, constructions that may themselves harness nostalgic
forms toward achieving an established cultural location from
which questions of national belonging can be addressed.
John S. Su has argued that nostalgia “has provided a means
of expressing resistance for individuals who otherwise lacked
the power to change their circumstances more directly.”9 If
for Su, nostalgia can facilitate a discussion of “ethical ideals
in the face of disappointing circumstances,”10 for the writers
treated in my study it is a strategy for the creation of com-
munity that can be appropriated by any individual or institu-
tional producer or consumer of cultural products.
The degree to which narratives of return are subject to
structuring forces and constant reassessment also raises the
question of when and how the writing of return will end.
To pose this question is to consider how to responsibly dis-
cuss the contingencies of biography and their relationship to
the writer’s body of work. Aksyonov passed away on July 6,
2009, after suffering a severe stroke in January 2008. Col-
lections of his recent work are in production and will be
published posthumously, and while future receptions of his
work remain as yet undetermined, his narratives of return as
yet continue to travel from reader to reader. Solzhenitsyn’s
death on August 3, 2008, has not resulted in the codifica-
tion of his reception. The question of who defines the nation
and how is ongoing. Returning exiles, along with emerging
literary voices, continue to have their say in the process. I
have tried to present the positions the returned exiles have
The End of Exile—The End of Return? 153

articulated through their writing of return, and in so doing,


addressed their relationship to the writing of exile as well
as to their historical and cultural context. With the cultural
moment and interpretive context of the writing of return
still in progress, and the study of exile and diaspora still a
nascent and growing field, it is not yet the time to subju-
gate the writing of return to the chronology of biography
or vice versa. In exploring the relationships between them, I
have tried to show that narratives of return are as valid and
significant a creative impulse as narratives of exile, that the
double nature of their constructedness reveals the potentials
and limitations of agency, and that their study can generate
a kind of criticism that foregrounds reading and comparative
literary and cultural study as means of facilitating interdisci-
plinary communication.
As an interstitial mode of production, the writing of return
coincides with the end of exile and other processes associ-
ated with lives being lived and adapting to change. It neces-
sitates a reconsideration of the boundaries of exile, agency,
and literature. As long as these complex interactions are open
to discussion, the modes of writing, reading, and living that
inform narratives of return will orient readers toward criti-
cal and creative engagement with its texts. The academic
response to this emergent modality may take the form of
performative criticism, as practiced by Svetlana Boym, as a
means of moving away from the privileging of the “death of
the author,” and by Lynne Huffer as a challenge to nostalgia
and a way to stimulate ethical models of social and discur-
sive activity.11 It may stimulate further study of the affinities
between biography and theory in what Vitaly Chernetsky has
called the “new ‘autobiographical turn’” in contemporary
Russian and Ukrainian letters.12
The examples I have discussed in this study, for all their
specificities, nonetheless have relevance to the exploration
of return in other contexts. As other scholars have demon-
strated, when exile ends and its writing goes home, we do
not suddenly drop our engagement with it. On the contrary,
our investigations may be as varied as the lived and narrated
154 Locating Exiled Writers in Contemporary Russian Literature

experiences of return that we encounter. The diachronic


frames, rhetorical structures, and cultural mechanisms that
contribute to the construction of return in the Russian con-
text and impose certain limits upon it are accompanied by
cultural studies that see not only the writer, but readers and
other agents and venues of cultural production, as capable
of generating meaning. If the former frames and practices
suggest that there is an end to return, the latter continue to
open its disciplinary and conceptual boundaries and contrib-
ute to its vitality as an object of study.
Notes

Chapter 1
1. On the discursive rupture that accompanied the Soviet collapse,
see Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No
More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
2006).
2. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Con-
temporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993).
3. Chow refers more specifically to “a deeply ingrained Oriental-
ism in the field of East Asian studies” when she defines “Orien-
talist melancholia,” that is, the sense of loss and anxiety some
scholars have associated with the emergence of contemporary
Chinese literature that, in their view, does not “rise to the gran-
deur of [its] cultural past.” Chow identifies this phenomenon
with the twofold marginalization of Asian studies—the evalua-
tion of classical Asian literature as an arcane “specialty” and the
concomitant disregard for contemporary Asian literature. See
Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Con-
temporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993),
3–4, 124–27.
4. John Glad identifies Valery Tarsis as the first writer to be deprived
of his citizenship upon deportation to the West in 1966 and the
theatre director Iurii Liubimov among the last in 1984. See
John Glad, ed., Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad
(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993), 21; and John Glad, Russia
Abroad: Writers, History, Politics (Washington, DC: Birchbark
Press and Hermitage Publishers, 1999), 394. This wave of emi-
gration is traditionally designated as the “Third Wave,” with the
First Wave coming in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917, and the Second Wave after the Second World War.
5. See Arnold McMillin, “The Effect of Exile on Modern Russian
Writers: A Survey,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 34 (1991),
20; and Glad, Russia Abroad 383–94.
156 Notes

6. See Elena Tichomirova, ed., Russische zeitgenössische Schriftsteller


in Deutchland. Ein Nachschlagewerk, vol. 367 (München: Verlag
Otto Sagner, 1998); Martin C. Putna and Miluše Zadražilová,
Rusko mimo Rusko. Dějny a kultura ruské emigrace 1917–1991, 2
vols. (Brno: Petrov, 1994); Martin Tucker, Literary Exile in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991).
7. Examples of such collections include Wolfgang Kasack, “Lexikon
der russischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Vom Beginn des
Jahrhunderts bis zum Ende der Sowjetära,” Arbeiten und Texte
zur Slavistik (München: Verlag Otto Sagner im Kommission,
1992); Wolfgang Kasack, Die russische Schriftsteller-Emigration
im 20. Jahrhundert. Beiträge zur Geschichte, den Autoren und
ihren Werken, Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik, ed. Wolfgang
Kasack, vol. 62 (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner in Kommission,
1996); Peter Vail’ and Aleksandr Genis, Sovremennaia russkaia
proza (Ann Arbor, MI: Ermitazh, 1982); Boris Lanin, Proza
russkoi emigratsii (Tret’ia volna): Posobie dlia prepodovatelei liter-
atury (Moscow: Novaia shkola, 1997).
8. Examples include John Glad, Literature in Exile (Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 1990); Olga Matich and Michael Heim, eds.,
The Third Wave: Russian Literature in Emigration (Ann Arbor,
MI: Ardis, 1984), V. P. Skobelev, Vasilii Aksenov: Literaturnaia
sud’ba (Samara: Samarskii universitet, 1994); N. A. Skobelev,
ed., Literatura “Tret’ei Volny.” Sbornik nauchnykh statei (Samara:
Samarskii universitet, 1997); William Phillips, “Writers in Exile
III: A Conference of Soviet and East European Dissidents,” Par-
tisan Review 51.1 (1982); William Phillips, “Writers in Exile,”
Partisan Review 50.3 (1983); William Phillips, “Intellectuals and
Social Change in Central and Eastern Europe,” Partisan Review
59.4 (1992); Georges Nivat, ed., Odna ili dve russkikh liter-
atury? Mezhdunarodnyi simpozium, sozvannyi fakul’tetom sloves-
nosti zhenevskogo universiteta i shveitsarskoi akademiei slavistiki
(Geneva: L’Age d’Homme, 1978); “Diapazon,” Von! Izgnanie
kak iavlenie literatury XX veka, vol. 1 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
“Rudomino,” 1992); and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Iz putevykh
zapisei, 1994,” Mezhdu dvumia iubileiami, 1998–2003 (Mos-
cow: Russkii put’, 2005), to name only a few.
9. See Glad, ed., Conversations in Exile; Feliks Medvedev, Posle
Rossii (Moscow: Respublika, 1992); A. Mirchev, 15 interv’iu
(New York: Izdatel’stvo im. A. Platonova, 1989); and Iaroslav
Mogutin, “Amoral’nyi moralist,” 30 interv’iu (St. Petersburg:
Limbus Press, 2001).
Notes 157

10. Other journals established abroad include Vremia i my (Tel Aviv/


New York), Grani (Frankfurt am Main), Dvadtsat’ dva (Tel
Aviv), Kovcheg (Paris), Novyi zhurnal (New York), Tret’ia volna
(Paris), and Ekho (Paris).
11. Hamid Naficy, “Framing Exile: From Homeland to Homep-
age,” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of
Place, ed. Hamid Naficy (New York: Routledge, 1999), 4.
12. Zinovy Zinik, “Anyone at Home? In Pursuit of One’s Shadow,”
Eurozine 2007 http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-10-31
-zinik-en.html.
13. Aksyonov was in Moscow when he suffered a debilitating stroke
in January 2008. He remained in treatment there until his pass-
ing in July 2009.
14. In this respect, my study works alongside Nico Israel’s Out-
landish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora (Stanford: Stan-
ford UP, 2000) as an exploration of rhetorical representations
of place. Israel identifies shared rhetorical practices that con-
tribute to a “rhetoric of displacement” in the works of Joseph
Conrad, Theodor Adorno, and Salman Rushdie.
15. Nico Israel uses the term “exilic emplacement” to refer to
the “double movement” of “setting-up and up-setting—that
applies to both the question of the displaced subject and to
the writing of displacement.” As “displacement begs the ques-
tion of emplacement,” I have used the term “emplacement” to
refer specifically to the narrative constructs of return that undo
exilic writing (Nico Israel, Outlandish: Writing between Exile
and Diaspora [Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000], 15.
16. Seidel uses the subjunctive “if” as a rhetorical marker of exile,
noting that exile “names a figure and establishes a narrative
ground” (Exile and the Narrative Imagination [New Haven,
CT: Yale UP, 1986], 1).
17. Kaminsky, After Exile, xi.
18. Kaminsky, After Exile, 29
19. To include diasporic writers, as well as to account for a condition
in which “exile itself . . . is marked by notions of home,” Amy
K. Kaminsky refers to “postexiles” and a literature “after exile.”
See Amy K. Kaminsky, After Exile: Writing the Latin American
Diaspora (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999), 2–3. As the
writers I treat do not figure their condition as diasporic or dis-
placed, I do not refer to their work as postexilic, although their
writing of return might be included, along with diasporic writ-
ing, under the broader rubric of postexilic literature.
158 Notes

20. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Commu-


nism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2006), 9, 11, 7.
21. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Commu-
nism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2006), 219.
22. Ella Shohat, “By the Bitstream of Babylon: Cyberfrontiers and
Diasporic Vistas,” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and
the Politics of Place, ed. Hamid Naficy (New York: Routledge,
1999), 225.
23. Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” Nation
and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge,
1990), 63.
24. Yurchak, Everything was Forever, 8.
25. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf. Sketches of Liter-
ary Life in the Soviet Union, trans. Harry Willetts (New York:
Harper & Row, 1980), 444.
26. Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination, xi.
27. The phrase is taken from the title of Modest Kolerov’s collec-
tion of interviews with Russian cultural and social analysts about
the new images of power and stability that emerged under
Vladimir Putin’s rule (Modest Kolerov, Novyi rezhim [Moscow:
Dom intellektual’noi knigi i Modest Kolerov, 2001]).
28. See Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism, especially
chapter 2, for a discussion of the ramifications of these changes
for Eastern European literature.
29. On the emancipatory potential of nostalgic writing, see John
J. Su, Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP, 2005).

Chapter 2
1. From the introduction to an interview with Aksyonov (Igor’
Shevelev, “Legkaia popytka nebesnogo chuvstva,” [2001]
http://ishevelev.narod.ru/int2001.htm). The interview was
reprinted without Shevelev’s introduction, “Normal’naia
zhizn’, delennaia na dva,” in Zenitsa oka (Moscow: Vagrius,
2005, 432–46).
2. These works include The Egg Yolk (Zheltok iaitsa, 1991), Gen-
erations of Winter and The Winter’s Hero (the trilogy Moskovs-
kaia saga, 1991–1994), The New Sweet Style (Novyi sladostnyi
stil’, 1997), Caesarean Illumination (Kesarevo svechenie, 2001),
Notes 159

Voltairians and Voltairiennes (Vol’ter’iantsy i vol’ter’ianki,


2004), American Cyrillic (Amerikanskaia kirillitsa, 2004),
A Decade of Slander (Desiatiletie klevety, 2004), The Pupil of
the Eye (Zenitsa oka, 2005), Moskva kva-kva (2006), and Rare
Earths (Redkie zemli, 2007).
3. The announcement was made by Leonid Shkurovich of Eksmo
publishers at a March 14, 2006, reception celebrating the pub-
lication of the novel at the Russian Cultural Foundation in
Moscow.
4. Peter Vail’ and Aleksandr Genis, Sovremennaia russkaia
proza (Ann Arbor, MI: Ermitazh, 1982), 81. See also Ser-
gei Kuznetsov, “Obretenie stilia: Doemigrantskaia proza V.
Aksenova,” Znamia 8 (1995), 206–10.
5. Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” Cosmopoli-
tics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah
and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998), 250.
6. Cheryl Walker describes persona criticism as a “form of analysis
that focuses on patterns of ideation, voice, and sensibility linked
together by a connection to the author . . . that allows one
to speak of authorship as multiple, involving culture, psyche,
and intertextuality, as well as biographical data about the writer
(“Persona Criticism and the Death of the Author,” Contesting
the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biog-
raphy and Biographical Criticism, ed. William H. Epstein [West
Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1991] 109).
7. Anatoly Gladilin describes himself writing such narratives when
he was a young man with “typically Soviet brains,” (Anatoly
Gladilin, The Making and Unmaking of a Soviet Writer: My
Story of the “Young Prose” of the Sixties and After, trans. David
Lapeza [Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1979] 32).
8. Viktor Erofeev, Muzhchiny (Moscow: Zebra E, 2001), 144.
9. Vassily Aksyonov, “Half-way to the Moon,” Half-way to the
Moon: New Writing from Russia. Eds. Patricia Blake and Max
Hayward (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965), 86.
10. Similar journeys of self-discovery characterize other works that
depict travel within Russia’s borders, such as “Surplussed Bar-
relware” (“Zatovarennaia bochkotara,” 1968) and In Search of
a Genre (V poiskakh zhanra, 1978). I am grateful to Konstantin
Kustanovich for pointing out to me the confluence between the
works of this period.
11. Kustanovich identifies three “transitional periods” that define
the narrative techniques encountered in Aksyonov’s works:
160 Notes

1960–1963, 1963–1979, and 1979 to the period of glasnost


(The Artist and the Tyrant, 16–43).
12. Konstantin Kustanovich, The Artist and the Tyrant: Vassily
Aksenov’s Works in the Brezhnev Era (Columbus, OH: Slavica
Publishers, 1992), 24–27.
13. Though emphasis is no longer on romantic reading practices
but the shift in perspective, some readers continued to emu-
late Aksyonov’s protagonists. One reader states, “In my youth
Aksyonov’s story ‘Little Whale, Varnisher of Reality’ made a great
impression on me. I wanted to have such a child and communi-
cate with him in the same way . . . I had many children for that
reason . . . Thank you Vassily Aksyonov!” (Nina Gorlanova, “Ob
intelligentsii, strategii uspekha i literatury,” Vremia novostei 11
[Jan. 26, 2005, http://www.vremya.ru/print/116876.html]).
14. Marina Balina identifies the critical role of subjective passages
in travel prose of the 1960s and 1980s (“A Prescribed Journey:
Russian Travel Literature from the 1960s to the 1980s,” Slavic
and East European Journal 38.2 [1994] 261–70).
15. Balina, “A Prescribed Journey” 261.
16. Gladilin, The Making and Unmaking of a Soviet Writer, 72–77.
17. Balina, “A Prescribed Journey” 262–63.
18. D. Barton Johnson, “Aksënov as Travel Writer: ‘Round the
Clock, Non-Stop,” Vasiliy Pavlovich Aksënov: A Writer in Quest
of Himself, ed. Edward Możejko (Columbus: Slavica, 1986),
182; Kustanovich, The Artist and the Tyrant 28, 31, 34.
19. The playwright Viktor Slavkin expressed a similar sentiment
during a 2006 television interview, when he revealed that the
tie he was wearing was one Aksyonov had brought back as a
gift from one of his many trips abroad as a young man. While
acknowledging that the tie itself was not particularly notewor-
thy, Slavkin observed that the words “Made in Scotland” on the
label brought a rush of associations with them that could only
emerge in the Soviet context (Viktor Slavkin, Apokrif, rec 31
May 2006, Kul’tura, St. Petersburg, 2006).
20. Balina, “A Prescribed Journey” 263.
21. Balina, “A Prescribed Journey” 263.
22. Johnson, “Aksënov as Travel Writer” 37.
23. Vasilii Aksenov, “Iaponskie zametki,” Na polputi k lune (Mos-
cow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1966), 98; Vassily Aksyonov, “Japanese
Jottings,” The Steel Bird and Other Stories (Ann Arbor, MI:
Ardis, 1979), 108.
Notes 161

24. Aksenov, “Iaponskie zametki.” 106; Aksyonov, “Japanese Jot-


tings.” 108.
25. Vassily Aksyonov, “Lungs and Gills,” Salmagundi 72 (Fall 1986):
206, 208.
26. Vassily Aksyonov, “Lungs and Gills,” Salmagundi 72 (Fall 1986):
209.
27. Vasilii Aksenov, “Pod nebom znoinoi Argentiny,” Zhal’, chto vas
ne bylo s nami (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1968), 279.
28. Vassily Aksyonov, “Residents and Refugees,” Under Eastern
Eyes: The West as Reflected in Recent Russian Émigré Writing,
ed., Arnold McMillin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 42.
29. Aksyonov, “Residents and Refugees,” 42.
30. Aksenov, “Pod nebom znoinoi Argentiny,” 264, 279.
31. Aksenov and K. P. Piotrovskii, Zaiavka na literaturnyi stsena-
rii po odnoimennomu rasskazu V. Aksenova, RGALI f. 2453
Mosfil’m, op. 1 ed. khr. 751, p. 1; Aksenov and K. P. Piotro-
vskii, Avtorskaia dogovor s Aksenovym, V.P. na ekranizatsiiu rass-
kaza, RGALI f. 2453 Mosfil’m op. 1 ed. khr. 755, p. 3.
32. At a 1 August 1962 meeting to discuss a plan to film Aksyonov’s
story “Halfway to the Moon,” one member of the screenwriting
and editing committee referred to Aksyonov as “not only a prose
writer, but a screenwriter” (Iu.V. Trifonov, Stenogramma zaseda-
niia khudozhestvennogo soveta ob”edineniia po obsuzhdeniiu zaiavki
A.I. Ladynina na postanovku rasskaza V.P. Aksenova “Na polputi k
lune,” RGALI, f. 2453 Mosfil’m, op. 5, ed. khr. 1259, p. 5).
33. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Dis-
placement (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 3.
34. Kaplan, Questions of Travel, 28.
35. Kustanovich, The Artist and the Tyrant, 42.
36. Vasilii Aksenov, “Kruglye sutki non-stop,” V poiskakh grustnogo
bebi (Moscow: Konets veka, 1992), 51.
37. See Kustanovich for a discussion of despair and conformity in
relation to the quasi-autobiographical protagonist of The Burn
(The Artist and the Tyrant, 92–101).
38. Vassily Aksyonov, The Burn, trans., Michael Glenny (New York:
Vintage, 1985), 405.
39. Bill Thomas, “My Dinner with Vassily and Tatyana,” Los Ange-
les Times 27 Sept. 1992, 26.
40. Vassily Aksyonov, In Search of Melancholy Baby, trans., Michael
Henry Heim and Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Random
House, 1987), 188.
162 Notes

41. Vassily Aksyonov, In Search of Melancholy Baby, trans., Michael


Henry Heim and Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Random
House, 1987), 78.
42. Aksenov, In Search of Melancholy Baby, 145.
43. Aksenov, In Search of Melancholy Baby, 152–53.
44. Vasilii Aksenov, “Kapital’noe peremeshchenie. Vystuplenie v Spaso-
Khaus, Noiabr’ 1989,” Voprosy literatury. August (1990), 73.
45. Vassily Aksyonov, “The Stepson of Capitalism,” trans., John
Kendal, The Louisiana Conference on Literature and Per-
estroika, ed., Märta-Lisa Magnusson (South Jutland: South
Jutland UP, 1989), 42.
46. Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl,” trans., Paul Blackburn, The Slaying of
the Dragon: Modern Tales of the Playful Imagination, ed., Franz
Rottensteiner (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 23.
47. Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl,” trans., Paul Blackburn, The Slaying of
the Dragon: Modern Tales of the Playful Imagination, ed., Franz
Rottensteiner (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984),
26, 27.
48. Priscilla Meyer, “Aksenov and Soviet Literature of the 1960s,”
Russian Literature Triquarterly 6 (1973), 573.
49. Vassily Aksyonov, The New Sweet Style, trans., Christopher Mor-
ris (New York: Random House, 1999), 194.
50. Vasilii Aksenov, Redkie zemli (Moscow: Eksmo, 2007), 21, 43.
51. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” Cosmopoli-
tics, eds., Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1998), 97–98.
52. William Phillips, “Writers in Exile III: A Conference of Soviet
and East European Dissidents,” Partisan Review 51.1 (1982),
11–12, 24, and passim.
53. Olga Matich and Michael Heim, eds., The Third Wave: Russian
Literature in Emigration (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), 31.
54. Vasilii Aksenov, “Luchshee sostoianie literatury—emigratsiia,”
Sem’ dnei, 1984, 21. Aksyonov eventually begins to disassociate
himself from the term “dissident” by demonstrating that the
dissident, like the exile-astronaut, has limited resources in the
West. Dissidence is “a literary phenomenon rather than a politi-
cal one,” he asserts, “the dissident as literary hero is within the
framework of classical drama: deprived of his negative antipode,
he loses all his strength. He collapses.” A similar image of the
Soviet writer-dissident as classical hero is evoked in the 1992
essay “A Winged Endangered Species,” in which Aksyonov
regards his earlier self as Laocoon, fighting a constricting
Notes 163

monster. When he found himself in the West, he “kept perform-


ing the same motions, stretching the same, now-absent snake
monster” until he took stock of his new situation. Aksyonov
redefines and broadens the semantic range of a seemingly famil-
iar term to reveal that its conventional connotations do not
apply to the once-known, now unknown writer. Moving from
imposed, Western journalistic constructions of identity to liter-
ary emblems of exilic alienation to structure the reception of his
cosmopolitan persona in the West, Aksyonov shifts strategies
again when his exilic works begin to appear in Russia.
55. Vasilii Aksenov, ““My—Shtatniki!” Kul’t Ameriki v Sovetskom
Soiuze,” Krokodil 1 (1988), 14.
56. In 2004 Aksyonov reexamined the Krokodil incident and cited
a number of occurrences that suggest the letters may have been
commissioned by the Party and written in imitation of public
denunciations that regularly appeared in Soviet print publica-
tions (Vasilii Aksenov, Desiatiletie klevety [Moscow: Izografus/
Eksmo, 2004], 8—10).
57. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: U of Min-
neapolis P, 1996), 58, 61. Aksyonov acknowledges other dif-
ficulties that emerged from the republication of his earlier
unpublished work in Russia following the reforms of pere-
stroika. In February 1991, when the tumultuous events leading
toward Boris Yeltsin’s election and the attempt to oust him out
of office occupied newspaper headlines, Aksyonov’s 1979 story
“Quest for an Island” appeared in print for the first time in the
February 27, 1991 issue of Literaturnaia gazeta (The Literary
Gazette). The story was prefaced by an introduction in which
Aksyonov commented upon the gap between his concerns at
the time of writing and the historic events taking place at the
time of publication. By publishing the story now, he noted, “I
hope to turn the attention of the reader to matters of literature”
(Vasilii Aksenov, “Pravo na ostrov,” Literaturnaia gazeta 27
Feb. 1991, 11).
58. Vassily Aksyonov, “Not Quite a Sentimental Journey,” The New
Republic. 16 April 1990, 22.
59. Vassily Aksyonov, “Not Quite a Sentimental Journey,” The New
Republic 16 Apr. 1990: 21.
60. Aksyonov makes this statement in reference to the 2002 novel
Caesarean Illumination (Shevelev, “Legkaia popytka nebes-
nogo chuvstva,” 439; Igor’ Shevelev, “Normal’naia zhizn’, del-
ennaia na dva,” Zenitsa oka [Moscow: Vagrius, 2005], 458).
164 Notes

61. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Trans-


nationality (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), 81.
62. Vasilii Aksenov, “Amerikanskim pisatelem ia ne stal,” Inostran-
naia literatura 1 (2003), 282; Vasilii Aksenov, “A v Moskve
menia bili stulom po golove,” Moskovskii komsomolets 15–21
Feb. 1999, 5.
63. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Con-
temporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993),
124–27.
64. John Glad, ed., Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad
(Durham and London: Duke UP, 1993), 70.
65. Philippe D. Radley, “Review of Moskovskaia Saga,” World Lit-
erature Today 69.2 (1995), 387.
66. Vassily Aksyonov, Generations of Winter (New York: Vintage,
1995), 5.
67. The Russian critic Natal’ia Ivanova alone mentions the role of
irony in A Moscow Saga (“Kliukvennaia poliana. O teleseriale
‘Moskovskaia saga’ i ne tol’ko o nem,” Nevesta Bukera (Mos-
cow: Vremia, 2005, 245). Irony is evident throughout the text,
particularly in the self-referential narratorial digressions, as in
“Not long ago, we were reading War and Peace—for the first
time since childhood, we must admit, and not at all in con-
nection with the beginning of War and Jail but for pure read-
ing pleasure—and came upon a number of Tolstoy’s thoughts
on the riddles of history, which sometimes touch us joyfully
by their similarities with our own thoughts but which at other
times lead into a blind alley” (294).
68. Aleksei Zverev, “Bliuzy chetvertogo pokoleniia,” Literaturnoe
obozrenie 11–12 (1999), 17. See also Iurii Nikonychev, “Saga
gogi i magogi. Chto poluchilos’ u kumira 60-kh: Legenda ili
‘myl’naia opera?’” Knizhnoe obozrenie 32 (1999), 8. Aksyonov
discusses A Moscow Saga as a potential bestseller in “Vasilii
Aksenov ob amerikanskoi tsenzure, avangarde, kino i namerenii
izdat’ svoi bestseller,” Moskovskie novosti 3 Oct. 1993, B6.
69. David MacFadyen, “Literature Has Left the Building: Rus-
sian Romance and Today’s Television Drama,” Kinokultura 8,
(2005) www.kinokultura.com.
70. Peter Finn, “A Small Window onto a Shadowed Past,” The
Washington Post 2004, A25. See also, Igor’ Kamirov, “Televi-
denie ne zhaleet sebia dlia reabilitatsii Stalina,” Utro (2004).
Aksyonov has said that he did not collaborate with the direc-
tor on many aspects of the production (Iurii Stroikov, “Vasilii
Notes 165

Aksenov: Ia pishu teper’ tolstye knigi, a chitaiut lish’ tonkie,”


Komsomol’skaia pravda 29 Sept. 2004).
71. Igor’ Shevelev, “V memuarakh rabotaet lozhnaia pamiat’ . . .”
Zenitsa oka (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 461.
72. Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination, 10.
73. Vasilii Aksenov, Negativ polozhitel’nogo geroia (Moscow:
Vagrius/Izograf, 1996), 142.
74. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Dis-
placement (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 58.
75. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Dis-
placement (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 58.
76. Mark Zaichik, ed., V Izrail’ i obratno: Puteshestvie vo vremeni i
prostranstve (Moscow: Vagrius, 2004).
77. Vasilii Aksenov, “Foreword to Novyi sladostnyi stil’,” Znamia
5 (1997), 9. Also quoted in Andrei Vasilevskii, “Aksenov est’
Aksenov est’ Aksenov,” Novyi mir 1, January (1998), 206.
78. Nico Israel, Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 83.
79. Israel, Outlandish: Writing between Exile and Diaspora, 84.
80. Aksyonov, The New Sweet Style, 213–14. Also noted in Lee Sie-
gel, “Dante Parks Cars in Los Angeles,” New York Times 28
Nov. 1999, 9.
81. Aksyonov, The New Sweet Style, 381.
82. The Russian title Kesarevo svechenie is a pun on “caesarean sec-
tion” (kesarevo sechenie), suggesting the difficult and rewarding,
collaborative act of enacting the writer’s and reader’s rhetorical
return.
83. Natella Boltianskaia, “Interv’iu s Vasiliem Aksenovym,” (2002).
84. Igor Shevelev, “Legkaia popytka nebesnogo chuvstva,” Zenitsa
oka (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 439; Vasilii Aksenov, “Vasilii
Aksenov: Russkie chasto khodiat mimo moego doma,” 2002.
Pavel Basinskii, “Aksenov i aksenovshchina,” Literaturnaia
gazeta 48, 1–7 Dec. 2004, 13.
85. Vera Tsvetkova, “Vol’ter’iantsy, vol’ter’ianki i desiatiletie kle-
vety,” Nezavisimaia gazeta (2003).
86. Aihwa Ong, “Flexible Citizenship among Chinese Cosmopoli-
tans,” Cosmopolitics, eds., Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998), 152.
87. Vaksino’s patronymic is “Apollinarievich,” a reference to the five
protagonists in The Burn, who all share the same patronymic,
and the six protagonists in Our Golden Ironburg (1972), as well
166 Notes

as the protagonist of In Search of a Genre (1978). On these


works, see Kustanovich, The Artist and the Tyrant, 92–110.
88. Vasilii Aksenov, Kesarevo svechenie (Moscow: Eksmo, 2002), 77.
89. Vasilii Aksenov, Kesarevo svechenie (Moscow: Eksmo, 2002),
578, 583.
90. Timothy Brennan, “Cosmopolitans and Celebrities,” Race and
Class 31.1 (1989), 7. During a 1991 trip to Moscow, Aksyonov
characterized himself similarly: “My arrival here is not merely a
visit to an exotic country; every time [I return] it is a return to
the self. I am in a somewhat inbetween state, but I think this is
quite typical in the contemporary world. Millions of people live
in this way these days, and I am one of these millions” (Vasilii
Aksenov, “Chelovek, kotoryi vozvrashchaetsia k sebe,” Kuranty
4 Jan. 1991, 5).
91. Vasilii Aksenov, “Legkaia popytka nebesnogo chuvstva,” Zenitsa
oka (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 441.
92. In a 22 January 2002 interview at the radio station Echo of Mos-
cow, Aksyonov attributed the American book market’s lack of
interest in translating and distributing Caesarean Illumination to
the “crisis of the novel.” The critic Andrei Nemzer described The
New Sweet Style and Caesarean Illumination as “ideally suited
to [Aksyonov’s] beautiful agenda,” if somewhat inaccessible to
the popular and critical reader alike (Andrei Nemzer, “Roman,
eshche roman,” Vremia novostei (2002), vol. 175).
93. Vasilii Aksenov, “Chudo ili chudachestvo?” Oktiabr’ 8 (2002).
94. See also Aksenov, “Amerikanskim pisatelem ia ne stal,” Boltian-
skaia, “Interv’iu s Vasiliem Aksenovym.”
95. Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” 259.
96. The first event was a public reading at OGI on 21 February
2006 following the publication of an excerpt from Moskva kva-
kva in the journal October. The second commemorated the pub-
lication of the book edition and was organized by Aksyonov’s
publisher Eksmo (see note 3).
97. His response—an emphatic “no” in both instances—was
defended at the second event by Aksyonov’s friend and former
exile Vladimir Voinovich, who noted that removing all refer-
ences to Stalin from literature would not resolve the prob-
lem of nostalgia in contemporary Russian society, but rather,
these references, like the past itself, should inspire reflection.
Voinovich’s own novel Monumental Propaganda (2000)
addresses the problem of nostalgia in the comic, yet sympa-
thetic, figure of an ardent Stalinist who discovers a life-like
Notes 167

statue of Stalin in a trash heap and brings it home, where it


stands until the present day.
98. Mariia Sveshnikova, “Vasilii Aksenov: Eto naslazhdenie—pisat’ o
Rossii,” Strana.ru (Moscow: 2006); Stroikov, “Vasilii Aksenov: Ia
pishu teper’ tolstye knigi, a chitaiut lish’ tonkie,” (26).
99. Critics have pointed to historical inaccuracies in the novel,
among them the anachronistic appearance of the towers of
Moscow State University, which were not completed until Sep-
tember 1953, and have similarly noted Aksyonov’s pronounce-
ments that such anachronisms are “unimportant,” as the novel
is not a history book, but about urban myths (Galina Iuzefov-
ich, “Literaturnaia kunstkamera,” Ekspert (2006), vol. 7; Vera
Kopylova, “Kva-kva, Moskva,” Moskovskii komsomolets 28 Mar.
2006, 6; Igor’ Shevelev, “Ozhog zheltka,” Vzgliad (2006);
Vadim Nesterov, “Moskvu zatovarilo,” Gazeta.ru (2006).

Chapter 3
1. Nina Khrushcheva, “Solzhenitsyn’s History Lesson,” The
Nation, 3 May 1999, 33; D. M. Thomas, Alexander Solzhenit-
syn: A Century in His Life (New York: St. Martins, 1998),
484; Michael Nicholson, “Solzhenitsyn, Exile and the Genius
Loci,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 33:2–4 (1999), 327;
Aleksandr Sokurov, Uzel (Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn), (Russia,
1999). In response to suggestions that there was as yet no Rus-
sian reader for The Red Wheel (in Lev Pirogov, “Khozhdenie v
narod,” Literaturnaia gazeta 24 [14 June 2000], quoted in
Kathleen F. Parthé, Russia’s Dangerous Texts: Politics between
the Lines (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 202; Solzhenitsyn states
that “only time will tell, after my death, to what extent the pri-
mary work of my life—the epic work The Red Wheel—will have
been read” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Interv’iu s Peterom Kho-
lenshteinom,” Mezhdu dvumia iubileiami, 1998–2003 (Mos-
cow: Russkii put’, 2005), 55–56).
2. Zhorzh Niva, Solzhenitsyn, trans., Simon Markish (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1992), 143.
3. David Gary Shaw writes, “Coming at the end of a long and pow-
erful tradition of stressing the role of society over the individual,
postmodernism attempts to undermine the relevance of the tra-
ditional subject, the substratum of the historian’s conventional
individual agent. The relevance of historiography itself has been
put into question because of its close connection with such old
168 Notes

paradigms” (David Gary Shaw, “Happy in Our Chains? Agency


and Language in the Postmodern Age,” History and Theory 40,
December (2001), 2.
4. Shaw notes, “For many contemporary theorists agency is a term
of the past, distinctly part of the problem, hooking into domi-
neering solutions of modernity: bourgeois capitalism, imperial-
ism, paternalism, sexism” (David Gary Shaw, “Happy in Our
Chains? Agency and Language in the Postmodern Age,” His-
tory and Theory 40, December (2001), 2.
5. For an extensive discussion of such claims, and Solzhenitsyn’s
responses, see Ericson (Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World,
[Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1993], 175–212).
6. Stanley Fish, “Biography and Intention,” Contesting the Subject:
Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and
Biographical Criticism., ed., William H. Epstein (West Lafay-
ette: Purdue UP, 1991), 13. For an example of an approach to
Solzhenitsyn’s work that construes the author function as a set
of modes that structure his works and endow them with inten-
tion—in effect inscribing the agency and intentions of these
modes upon the persona of the author—see James M. Curtis,
Solzhenitsyn’s Traditional Imagination (Athens: U of Georgia P,
1984). Curtis observes in Solzhenitsyn’s writing an oscillation
between the metonymical and the metaphorical (pace Jakobson),
a dialectic, he argues, that informs not only Solzhenitsyn’s works,
but organizes his biography and is writ large, for example, in the
writer’s vacillations between elitism and democracy.
7. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Commu-
nism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006), 1.
8. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Tri otryvka iz ‘Dnevnika R-17,”
Mezhdu dvumia iubileiami 1998–2003 (Russkii put’, 2005), 25,
26.
9. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Postscript to the Russian Edition
Abroad of August 1914,” Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record,
ed., Leopold Labedz (Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1973),
260. In his recent autobiography The Little Grain Fell between
Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn expresses concern upon arriving in
Canada in 1974 that he “was already 56 years old, and the prin-
cipal work on The Red Wheel had not yet begun” (Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, “Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov
[Chast’ pervaia, 1974—1978],” Novyi mir 9 (1998), 111.
10. Georges Nivat refers to the symmetry of Solzhenitsyn’s oeuvre,
in which small forms, such as the prose poem “Miniatures” and
Notes 169

“Binary Tales,” bookmark the large forms (Zhorzh Niva, “Poe-


tika Solzhenitsyna mezhdu ‘bol’shimi’ i ‘malymi’ formami,”
Zvezda 12 [2003]).
11. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Krokhotki,” Novyi mir 1 (1997), 99.
12. Sokurov, Uzel (Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn).
13. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hop-
kins UP, 1978), 169.
14. David Simpson, Situatedness, or Why We Keep Saying Where
We’re Coming From (Durham: Duke UP, 2002). Simpson
responds to the thesis of Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice
with the observation that literature “may not necessarily make
us more sympathetic to the situated lives of others” (141).
While he notes that “it must seem churlish to dispute Nuss-
baum’s conviction that judges and juries would be assisted
in their decision making by a good reading habit,” he also
adds that “writers such as Stowe, Lawrence, and Solzhenit-
syn among many others have effected powerful conjunctions
between works of fiction and the events of national cultures,
and we might do well to remember such moments in the con-
text of our generally more negative current estimate of the
power of the written word” (139).
15. Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice. The Literary Imagination
and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 12.
16. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “One Book, One Chicago,” (Chicago:
City of Chicago, 2006).
17. The original Russian text reads, “3    

  
  
   
   4   5, "  #   
" ,      
   
  ,
"       

   —
 
" ,    
     $,
  ,    ” (Solzhenitsyn, “One Book,
One Chicago”).
18. Nicholson, “Solzhenitsyn, Exile and the Genius Loci,” 327.
19. Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag
Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000), 196.
20. Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survi-
vors, 193, 194.
21. For a brief account of the varied reception of One Day, see Eric-
son, Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World, 46–53.
22. Solzhenitsyn, “Postscript to the Russian Edition Abroad of
August 1914,” 260–61.
170 Notes

23. Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (New York: W. W.


Norton and Company, 1984), 736.
24. In The Little Grain Fell between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn
describes his exile as such a rift, one that could threaten his
very creative existence: “It is a well known sentiment that many
lose the ability to write when outside of their motherland. Will
this happen to me? (Several western commentators have already
predicted that a spiritual death awaits me in the west)” (Sol-
zhenitsyn, “Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov
[Chast’ pervaia, 1974–1978],” 58).
25. See Scammell, 982–83; Nicholson, 326–27; and Thomas,
478–88.
26. Ankersmit writes that “narrative coherence may guarantee the
easiest access to the past but it obscures the authenticity of our
experience of it. What has been appropriated and mastered nar-
ratively is no longer accessible to historical experience” (F. R.
Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Meta-
phor [Berkeley: U of California P, 1994], 210).
27. Solzhenitsyn, “Tri otryvka iz “Dnevnika R-17,” 24.
28. Solzhenitsyn, “Tri otryvka iz “Dnevnika R-17,” 12. The
subtitle to each knot is “A Narrative in Measured Periods”
(Povestvovan’e v otmerennykh srokakh).
29. Linda Hutcheon describes such works as The White Hotel by
D. M. Thomas, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, and Salman Rush-
die’s Midnight’s Children, among others in The Poetics of Post-
modernism (New York: Routledge, 1988).
30. On Tolstoy and The Red Wheel, see Wachtel (1994). On Tolstoy,
Dos Passos, and Hemingway in Solzhenitsyn’s work, see Curtis
(1984). In the diary that accompanied the composition of The
Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn writes that even his method of designat-
ing with an apostrophe the numbers of the chapters that present
a review of events (a device that is not retained in the English
translations) was intended to distinguish his work from that of his
American predecessors: “The review chapters need not be sepa-
rated from the narrative ones: they are merely reinforced concrete
beams affixed to the bricks, and all go into the same structure”
Solzhenitsyn, “Tri otryvka iz “Dnevnika R-17,” 12.
31. Solzhenitsyn, “Tri otryvka iz “Dnevnika R-17,” 12.
32. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, trans., H. T. Willetts
(London: The Bodley Head, 1989), 742.
33. Solzhenitsyn does not hold only Soviet scholars responsible, not-
ing that “the distortion of Russian history began long before the
Notes 171

Communists took power” (“Foreword to the Series ‘Research


on Most Recent Russian History,’” Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii,
1762–1914, vol. 1 [Moscow: Russkii put’, 1995], 1).
34. Edward E. Ericson refers to August 1914 as an “archive novel,”
though he does not define the term (1993, 63). Andrew Baruch
Wachtel likens this structure to that of the medieval chronicle,
noting that in “reinvoking the chronicle form, Solzhenitsyn . . .
hopes also to escape demands for either aesthetically balanced
fictional texts or objective histories” (An Obsession with His-
tory: Russian Writers Confront the Past [Stanford: Stanford UP,
1994], 215–18).
35. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Author’s Note,” trans., H. T. Willetts,
November 1916 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).
36. Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, 302.
37. Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, 496.
38. Solzhenitsyn does not agree with the view that the prov-
erbs convey his own moral judgments of the depicted events
(A. V. Urmanov, Tvorchestvo Aleksandra Solzhenitsyna (Mos-
cow: Flinta, Nauka, 2004, 283–84).
39. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Interv’iu s Danielem Rondo dlia parizhs-
koi gazety ‘Liberas’on.” Publitsistika, vol. 3 (Iaroslavl’: Verkhne-
volzhskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1997), 206; Pearce (Solzhenitsyn:
A Soul in Exile (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), 252.
40. Solzhenitsyn used a similar device when writing his screenplay
for Tanks Know the Truth, which concludes: “I couldn’t believe
that this would ever see the screen, therefore I wrote it so that
a future reader could become a viewer even without a screen.”
41. Solzhenitsyn noted these qualities in Iurii Tynianov’s historical
novel The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar (1927), which treats the life
and work of the writer Alexander Griboedov.
42. Solzhenitsyn cites the image of the “subterranean moan,” the
“moans of the not quite dead, begging for graves” among the ele-
ments that help to convey the “truth” of Shmelev’s story (186).
43. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Teleinterv’iu na literaturnye temy s
N. A. Struve,” Publitsistika (Iaroslavl’: Verkhne-volzhskoe kni-
zhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1996), 429.
44. Solzhenitsyn, “Teleinterv’iu na literaturnye temy s N. A. Struve,”
421; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Oktiabr’ shestnadtsatogo (Paris:
YMCA Press, 1984), vol. 2, 587; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Avgust
chetyrnadtsatogo (Paris: YMCA Press, 1983), vol. 2, 545.
45. Solzhenitsyn, “Author’s Note.” He gave a similar version of
this statement in a 1976 interview: “fiction (vymysel), for the
172 Notes

artist, is a means of concentrating reality. It helps to concentrate


reality—that is its only role” (Solzhenitsyn, “Teleinterv’iu na
literaturnye temy s N. A. Struve,” 426).
46. Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Meta-
phor, 65. We may also look to the fact that Solzhenitsyn did not
only excerpt repetitive passages from historical documents, but
effaced autobiographical episodes between the first and second
editions of August 1914 in a process D. M. Thomas and Dan-
iel Rancour-LaFerriere have identified with the self-censorship
that accompanies condensation and displacement. See Thomas,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, 486–88; and
Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, “Solzhenitsyn and the Jews: A
Psychoanalytic View,” Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis,
ed., Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (Amsterdam: John Benjamins
1989), 143–44.
47. See Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Met-
aphor, 65.
48. Ankersmit asserts that historians’ narratives, as representations of
the past, cannot refer to the past, which is epistemically inacces-
sible (History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor, 66).
49. In this connection it is significant that the journalist who accompa-
nied Solzhenitsyn during his stop in Blagoveshchensk shared with
the author his story of navigating local bureaucratic channels to
locate and open the archive of materials concerning the Bamlag,
the Baikal-Amur railway camp in the Gulag system (Nikolai Belyi,
“Na zemle Bamlaga,” Literaturnaia gazeta 15 June 1994, 3).
50. One author notes with astonishment that Solzhenitsyn claimed
the problems Russia faced in the 1990s following the collapse of
the Soviet Union might have been avoided had The Red Wheel
been published earlier (P. K. Chekalov, A.I. Solzhenitsyn: Strikhi
k tvorcheskomu portretu [Nevinnomyssk: NGGTI, 2002], 143).
51. Richard Bernstein, “Books of the Times: A Teeming Literary
Palace in the Tolstoy Tradition,” New York Times 12 February
1999, 49.
52. Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna, “Inoe vremia—inoe bremia,” Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn as Writer, Myth-maker and Public Figure (Univer-
sity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: 2007).
53. Kalle Pihlainen, “The Moral of the Historical Story: Textual Dif-
ferences in Fact and Fiction,” New Literary History 33 (2002),
56. Ankersmit’s elaboration of this idea takes into account the
problem of referentiality as concerns The Red Wheel: “Insofar
as historical writing wishes to remain as true as possible to the
Notes 173

episodic character of historical experience, it will necessarily


repeat at the level of historical representation the features of
the fragmented, the contingent, and the isolated. No doubt the
microstorie, the history of mentalities, and Alltagsgeschichte,
with its interest in the insignificant details of daily life, best sat-
isfy these requirements within the compass of postmodernist
historiography” (1994, 211). It does not, however, account for
its aims for public utility.
54. Here we may note White’s assertion that no history is “found,”
but rather, is created in the very processes of writing.
55. Jürgen Pieters discusses this phenomenon in “New Historicism:
Postmodern Historiography between Narrativism and Heterol-
ogy,” 39.1 (2000), 28.
56. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Na obryve povestvovaniia,” Aprel’
semnadtsatogo, vol. 2 (Paris: YMCA Press, 1991), 1.
57. Such characterizations typically mention Solzhenitsyn’s twice-
monthly television program “Meetings with Solzhenitsyn.”
After several months on the air, the talk show was cancelled in
September 1995 for “purely commercial reasons . . . too many
people were bored with being harangued” (Pearce, Solzhenit-
syn: A Soul in Exile, 285–86; Thomas, Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
A Century in His Life, 528). Thomas notes that some saw a
political motive in the show’s cancellation. A press conference
called by Liudmila Saraskina, Boris Mozhaev, Stanislav Kondra-
tov, Semen Lipkin, Inna Lisnianskaia, and others accused the
management at Channel One of suppressing free speech (Klarisa
Pul’son, “Na ‘dikom pole’ i bez Solzhenitsyna,” Kul’tura 1995,
1). The critic Andrei Zorin saw a conflict between the goals
of the writer (“an orientation to future generations”) and the
instantaneity of television. Zorin describes tuning into the show
with interest on one of the first days of the Chechen conflict
only to encounter an academic discussion of labor conditions
for rural teachers, not an unimportant topic in itself, but one
that at the time was “fatally incompatible with the expectations,
moods, and feelings of most viewers” (Andrei Zorin, “Vrach ili
bol’?” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 1.3 (1999).
58. Sergei Korolev, “Derrida i Solzhenitsyn: Dekonstruktsiia
puteshestviia,” Donos v Rossii (Moscow: Progress-Mul’timedia,
1996); David Remnick, “Deep in the Woods,” The New Yorker
6 Aug. 2001, 33. The cover of the journal Stolitsa (1:1994)
featured a photograph of Solzhenitsyn’s face superimposed
on a costumed body next to the words, “Here comes the
174 Notes

master . . .” (vot priedet barin). The phrase was repeated in


the press frequently enough that Solzhenitsyn was compelled
to respond, “They say ‘he’s arrived, like a master-landowner’!
These are Moscow lies that some newspapers distribute!” (Irina
Samakhova, “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn v Novosibirske,” Literat-
urnaia gazeta 1994, 3). Solzhenitsyn’s return was also likened
to Tolstoy’s decision to leave his estate just before his death,
and Chekhov’s journey to Sakhalin, in that the writers tended
to Russia as if to a patient who is “seriously ill” (Konstantin
Kedrov, “Put’ Solzhenitsyna,” Izvestiia 24 May 1994, 7).
59. Nivat describes The Oak and the Calf as a “‘tactical’ master-
piece” (106). Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, 929–30.
60. See Novyi mir 4 (1999; 226–27) and Novyi mir 3 (2001; 222–
24) for responses from Aleksandr Dol’berg, Richard Pipes, and
others. The writer Liudmila Ulitskaia publicly expressed her
disappointment in Solzhenitsyn’s characterization of the late
Vadim Borisov, who was responsible for publishing the first
print editions of Solzhenitsyn’s work to appear in Russia (Liud-
mila Ulitskaia, “Vozmozhno li khristianstvo bez miloserdiia?”
Moskovskie novosti, 2003).
61. Edward J. Brown, “The Calf and the Oak: Dichtung and Wah-
rheit,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ed., Harold Bloom (Broomall,
PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001), 95, 96. Solzhenitsyn
does not consider The Oak and the Calf an autobiography, but
rather, a “report from the battlefield” (reportazh s polia boia).
Noting that The Oak and the Calf left “scorched earth” behind,
he writes of The Little Grain, “the second volume of these Notes
probably will have to lay around for a while” (Vot nyneshnemu
vtoromu tomu Ocherkov pridetsia, naverno, polezhat’ i polezhat’)
(Solzhenitsyn, “Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov
[Chast’ pervaia, 1974–1978],” 102).
62. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More:
The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 5.
63. Brown, “The Calf and the Oak: Dichtung and Wahrheit,”
109–12.
64. Natal’ia Ivanova, “Sezon skandalov: Voinovich protiv Sol-
zhenitsyna,” Znamia 11 (2002), 197–98.
65. Andrei Nemzer, “Nakanune: Zavershena publikatsiia “Ocherkov
izgnaniia” Aleksandra Solzhenitsyna,” Dnevnik chitatelia: Russ-
kaia literatura v 2003 godu (Moscow: Vremia, 2004), 279–80.
Notes 175

66. Nemzer notes, it is “necessary to read the ‘sketches of exile’—espe-


cially its final part” (Nemzer, “Nakanune: Zavershena publikatsiia
‘Ocherkov izgnaniia’ Aleksandra Solzhenitsyna,” 280).
67. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Iz putevykh zapisei, 1994,” Mezhdu
dvumia iubileiami, 1998–2003 (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2005),
30.
68. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Dis-
placement (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 64.
69. See “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness” in The Solzhenit-
syn Reader: New and Essential Writings, ed., Daniel J. Mahoney
and Edward E. Ericson Jr., (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2006).
70. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Zheliabugskie vyselki,” Rasskazy (St.
Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 505.
71. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Zheliabugskie vyselki,” Rasskazy (St.
Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 504.
72. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Zheliabugskie vyselki,” Rasskazy (St.
Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 511.
73. The BBC sponsored the trip and released its film as The Home-
coming (1995). Iurii Prokof’ev organized the trip and recorded
his film of it for the Solzhenitsyn family’s personal archive
(Mikhail Zakharchuk, “Cherez vsiu Rossiiu proekhal vmeste
s pisatelem Aleksandrom Solzhenitsynym kinooperator Iurii
Prokof’ev,” Podmoskov’e 17 Sept. 1994, 4).
74. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh
zhernovov. Chast’ chetvertaia (1987–1994),” Novyi mir 11
(2003), 97.
75. Kaplan discusses the need for documentation in the context of
tourism: “When tourists believe that they have found the ulti-
mate ‘real’ . . . the need for proof is especially pressing” (61).
Tourists, despite these encounters, go “home with the ‘old’
meanings confirmed” as a way of resolving “the crisis in deter-
mining reality” (60). Hannerz identifies tourists’ narratives as
a similar broadening of “habitats of meaning” through first-
time experiences that also find pleasure “in reporting on what
is familiar” (Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places
(London: Routledge, 1996), 26).
76. Solzhenitsyn, “Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov.
Chast’ chetvertaia (1987–1994),” 92.
77. Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displace-
ment, 61.
176 Notes

78. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: U of Min-


neapolis P, 1996), 182.
79. Vladimir Voinovich, Portret na fone mifa (Moscow: Eksmo,
2002), 62 and passim.
80. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rossiia v obvale (Moscow: Russkii put’,
1998), 7, 11.
81. While the “Binary Tales” have no precedent in Solzhenitsyn’s
oeuvre, Russia in Collapse is “a continuation of the series”
of works of historical and political analysis such as “Letter to
Soviet Leaders” (1973), “Rebuilding Russia” (1990), and “The
Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century (1998)
(Solzhenitsyn, Rossiia v obvale, backleaf page).
82. Elena D’iakova, “Zhizn’ s vlozhennoi tsel’iu,” Novaia gazeta
2008, http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/20/27.html.
83. Viacheslav Kuritsyn, “Solzhenitsyn posle vos’midesiati,”
Russkii zhurnal, ed., Boris Kuz’minskii (Moscow: Rudomino,
1999), 148.
84. Zorin, “Vrach ili bol’?”
85. Solzhenitsyn draws a comparison between the smuta, or Time
of Troubles (1605–1613) following the reign of Boris Godu-
nov, with the 1917 revolution (in his view, the second Time of
Troubles) and the era of perestroika.
86. Sergei Chuprinin, Russkaia literatura segodnia (Moscow:
OLMA Press, 2003), 334–35.
87. Note, for example, his reasons for settling in the United States
over Norway, a country that he had long admired but eventu-
ally considered too remote to support his work (“If you print
something in the Scandinavian press, it might be just barely
noticed in the world, or not at all”).
88. In his biography of Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Pearce writes that the
postexilic prose poems were, according to Natal’ia Solzhenit-
syna, “evidence that he was once more at peace with life. Some
were directly inspired by events in their own garden, such as a
storm that he had taken as allegorical inspiration for aspects of
human behavior. Solzhenitsyn had finally come home, artisti-
cally as well as physically” (312).
89. Adrian Wanner, Russian Minimalism (Evanston: Northwestern
UP, 2003), 17.
90. Wanner identifies the binaries “new and old, body and soul, mate-
rialism and idealism” in the 1958–1960 “Miniatures” (149).
91. Michael Nicholson finds textual correspondences between the
early “Miniatures” and the prose works “Matryona’s Home,”
Notes 177

The First Circle, and The Red Wheel (317–19). Wanner describes
the early “Miniatures” as “a completely ‘monological’ genre . . .
not meant to question or challenge the notions of poetry and
narrative prose, but to mobilize their resources for his moral mes-
sage” (149).
92. Wanner, Russian Minimalism, 149.
93. Nico Israel constructs a set of binaries (inside/outside, national/
extranational, center/periphery, West/East) to propose that
the displaced writers Conrad, Adorno, and Rushdie align them-
selves with the “weaker” term, which in effect allows them to
become “conceptual minus signs among a series of pluses or
emblems of power and location” (Outlandish: Writing between
Exile and Diaspora [Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000], 11). Sol-
zhenitsyn’s overriding concerns with cultural degradation pro-
duce a different set of binaries, and more important, prevent
him from accepting the marginal status of his terms, and drive
him to argue for their dominance.
94. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Petush’e pen’e,” Rasskazy (St. Peters-
burg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 567.
95. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Vse ravno,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg:
Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 419.
96. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Listvennitsa,” Rasskazy (St. Peters-
burg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 555.
97. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Likhoe zel’e,” “Kolokol’nia,” “Noch-
nye mysli,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006),
563, 559, 568.
98. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Pozor,” Rasskazy (St. Petersburg:
Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 562.
99. Steven Lee Meyers, “Toast of the TV in Russian Eyes: It’s Sol-
zhenitsyn,” New York Times 9 Feb. 2006.
100. James M. Decker approaches film adaptations of literary works
as editions as a means of avoiding conventional analyses that
present conflicting attitudes toward originality and fidelity to
the text (“Literary Text, Cinematic ‘Edition’: Adaptation, Tex-
tual Authority, and the Filming of Tropic of Cancer,” College
Literature 34.3 (2007).
101. Natal’ia Solzhenitsyna, “Solzhenitsyna: Vazhno uvidet’ svoiu
nedavniuiu istoriiu,” rec 26 Jan. 2006, BBC, Moscow, 2006.
102. Revekka Frumkina, “Naivnyi zritel’,” Novoe literaturnoe obozre-
nie 78 (2006).
103. These include Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and
Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The citation is from Elena
178 Notes

Prokhorova, “Gleb Panfilov: The First Circle (V kruge pervom,


2006),” Kinokultura 15 (January 2007).
104. Frumkina, “Naivnyi zritel’,” 28.
105. See the official website for The First Circle http://www
.vkrugepervom.ru/content.html?cid=8.
106. “Idiotu ot Solzhenitsyna,”Argumenty i fakty, 2004 (15: 1224).
107. Naum Leiderman, “Po printsipu antiskhemy,” Zvezda 8
(2001),193.
108. In this the production was assisted by the direction of Gleb
Panfilov, whose Soviet era films, particularly Theme (1979),
treat the confrontation between a successful writer’s conven-
tionality, another writer’s desire to emigrate to pursue artistic
freedom, and a third figure whose cultural values derive from
his immersion in national traditions. See Anna Lawton, Kino-
glasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1992), 21–22.
109. Gleb Panfilov, “Interv’iu,” Izvestiia 13 March 2006 http://
online.izvestia.ru/archive.pl?fl=a&id=235
110. Meyers, “Toast of the Television in Russian Eyes: It’s
Solzhenitsyn.”
111. Vera Maksimova, “Vozvrashchenie Solzhenitsyna k dialogu s
liud’mi,” Radio Maiak, Moscow, 2006.
112. Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, 852.
113. After decades of heaping verbal abuse upon Solzhenitsyn, Edu-
ard Limonov in March 2006 characterized Solzhenitsyn as “our
great man” during his public lecture “Russian Literature and
Russian History.” Admitting that he long subjected Solzhenit-
syn to attacks, Limonov here acknowledges his appreciation
for Solzhenitsyn’s work. Transcript of “Russian Literature and
Russian History” available at http://www.polit.ru/lectures/
2006/03/28/limonov.html.

C hapter 4
1. John Glad, Literature in Exile (Durham: Duke UP, 1990), 49.
2. Brodsky’s 1978 preface to a selection of poems published in
the émigré journal Kontinent helped to establish Limonov’s
name (Andrei Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study
of Russian Writer Eduard Limonov, Studies in Slavic Lan-
guages and Literature [Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press,
2003], 153). Brodsky also helped him get his first collection
of poems, Russkoe, published with Ardis Publishers in 1979
Notes 179

and introduced Limonov to Alexander Liberman and Tatiana


Iakovleva, the Condé Nast editorial director and his wife,
whose apartment was a social hub for émigrés in the arts (Alek-
sandr Zholkovskii, “Bunt ‘malen’kogo cheloveka,” Ogonek 41
[1991], 17; Andrew Meier, “Putin’s Pariah,” New York Times
2 Mar. 2008). Rogachevskii notes that “it is quite possible that
the proud Limonov could not forgive Brodskii precisely for this
assistance” (Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of
Russian Writer Eduard Limonov, 135). In an interview pub-
lished in 2005, Limonov stated “I had no need to envy [Brod-
sky’s] talent. I’ve always had my own . . . But without question
I envied Brodsky’s fate . . . It is such an unusual story, so rarely
had a foreign writer achieved such all-embracing, tremendous
success. That success—I envied” (“Golos vozhdia,” Butyrskaia-
sortirovochnaia, ili smert’ v avtozeke [Moscow: Emergency Exit,
2005], 64–65).
3. Eduard Limonov, “Thirteen Studies on Exile,” Literature in Exile,
ed., John Glad (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1990), 53.
4. Eduard Limonov, “Dialog s ‘normal’nym pisatelem,’” Ogonek
7.3264 (1990); John Glad, ed., Conversations in Exile: Rus-
sian Writers Abroad (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1993),
259–60, 266.
5. Eduard Limonov, Sviashchennye monstry (Moscow: Ad Margi-
nem, 2004), 6.
6. Eduard Limonov, “Russkaia literatura i rossiiskaia istoriia.”
March 23, 2006. Club Bilingua, Moscow. Transcript of lecture
at http://www.polit.ru/lectures/2006/03/28/limonov.html.
7. Aleksandr Shatalov, “Velikolepnyi mandarin,” Eto ia—Edichka,
vol. 2 (Moscow: Glagol, 1990), 9.
8. Limonov, “Golos vozhdia,” 64.
9. Eduard Limonov, Anatomiia geroia (Smolensk: Rusich, 1998),
6.
10. Epstein uses abduction as a trope to illustrate the violence inher-
ent to the genre of biography and its association with domi-
nant cultural practices in “(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the
Biographical Subject,” Contesting the Subject, ed., William H.
Epstein (West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1991), 217–36.
11. Eduard Limonov, “Tri dlinnye pesni,” Russkoe (Ann Arbor:
Ardis, 1979), 65–66.
12. Limonov, “Tri dlinnye pesni,” Russkoe, 81.
13. Limonov, “Tkaniam etoi ody shum,” Russkoe, 171–72.
14. Limonov, “Tkaniam etoi ody shum,” Russkoe, 171–72.
180 Notes

15. Eduard Limonov, “My—natsional’nyi geroi,” Apollon-77, ed.,


Mikhail Shemiakin (Paris: 1977), 60.
16. Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian
Writer Eduard Limonov, 14. See Mikhail Shemiakin, ed.,
Apollon-77 (Paris: Les arts graphiques de Paris, 1977), 43–46
for Limonov’s statement about the members and doctrine of
“Konkret.”
17. On the “‘Konkret’ hoax” see Rogachevskii, A Biographical and
Critical Study of Russian Writer Eduard Limonov, 13–15.
18. Eduard Limonov, Limonov v fotografiiakh, s kommentariiami,
napisannymi im samim! ego blizkie, ego roditeli, ego voiny, ego
zheny (Moscow: Stompo, 1996), 27.
19. It appears in Limonov v fotografiiakh, s kommentariiami,
napisannymi im samim! Ego blizkie, ego roditeli, ego voiny, ego
zheny, 24; and Limonov, Anatomiia geroia, and can be accessed
along with all the photographs collected in Anatomy of a Hero
at http://www.nbp-info.ru/new/lib/lim_anatomy/pic.htm.
20. Eduard Limonov, It’s Me, Eddie. A Fictional Memoir, trans. S.
L. Campbell (New York: Grove Press, 1983), 4, 218.
21. Eduard Limonov, Dnevnik neudachnika (New York: Index
Publishers, 1982), 169.
22. Eduard Limonov, It’s Me, Eddie. A Fictional Memoir, trans. S.
L. Campbell (New York: Grove Press, 1983), 233.
23. Eduard Limonov, “Eto ia—Edichka!” Komsomol’skaia pravda
3 (1990), 4.
24. Limonov still acknowledged his past work as a tailor during a
televised “literary evening” held in Moscow in February 1992.
While he reveled in the publicity offered to him by this public
forum (“television is our friend, if we know how to use it”), at
one point even encouraging the crowd to clap along as he sang
a Soviet era march, he stated that he remained active as a writer,
but no longer sewed his own clothes.
25. The same photograph appears in Anatomy of a Hero to the same
end.
26. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans.
Jane E. Lewin, Literature, Culture, Theory; 20 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1997), 16.
27. Although It’s Me, Eddie is the first work to be published by
Glagol publishers, its cover states that the novel is “Number
2” in a series. According to Shatalov, he adopted this strategy
to avoid the risk of arrest and censorship in the early years of
Notes 181

glasnost’ by suggesting that issue “Number 1” was published


without incident (Davrell Tien, “The Word According to
Glagol,” Index on Censorship 22.10 [1993]: 35). The strategy
is also reminiscent of Futurist publishing practice in its manipu-
lation of publication dates to suggest earlier literary origins and
thus, an established precedent.
28. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, 197.
29. Shatalov, “Velikolepnyi mandarin,” 7 (footnote).
30. The photograph appears in A. Mirchev, 15 interv’iu (New York:
Izdatel’stvo im. A. Platonova, 1989) with the note: “The pho-
tograph is published at the request of E. Limonov.” In a sepa-
rate interview, Limonov defends the photograph (“the book is
truly the story of a Pole who makes a career in New York as a
professional sadist”) and sarcastically responds to his critics: “of
course, it [the photograph] has almost no relation to literature.
The book was written at a desk after all” (Eduard Limonov,
“Pablisiti-Foto,” Iskusstvo kino 7 [1992], 80).
31. Eduard Limonov, Palach, vol. 16 (Moscow: Glagol, 1993), 4.
32. Aleksandr Shatalov, “Prilozhenie,” Palach (Moscow: Glagol,
1993), 287.
33. Aleksandr Donde, “Eduard, Edik i Edichka,” Palach, vol. 16
(Moscow: Glagol, 1993).
34. See Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian
Writer Eduard Limonov, 73–76, 77–118, for a survey of critical
statements on Maiakovskii’s influence on Limonov and analysis
of Limonov’s textual borrowings from Maiakovskii.
35. Wiktor Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky (New York: The
Orion Press, 1970), 54.
36. Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, 68.
37. Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, 68.
38. Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, 499.
39. Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of
the Modern Poet, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature,
vol. 41 (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1991), 140.
40. Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern
Poet,143–5.
41. Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern
Poet, 145, 147.
42. Limonov, Limonov v fotografiiakh, s kommentariiami, napisan-
nymi im samim! Ego blizkie, ego roditeli, ego voiny, ego zheny, 12,
16, 29, 38, 42, 48, 57.
182 Notes

43. Limonov identifies himself as the “editor of an explosive news-


paper” in the inscription to a photograph published in Anatomy
of a Hero.
44. Eduard Limonov, Inostranets v smutnoe vremia (St. Petersburg:
Amfora, 2007), 330.
45. Limonov, Inostranets v smutnoe vremia, 25–26.
46. I. Stomakhin, “Dzhinsy Limonova v Muzee Maiakovskogo,”
Megapolis ekspress 48 (1993).
47. On the exhibit, see Viktoriia Shokhina, “Nice to Meet You!”
Nezavisimaia gazeta 7 Dec. 1993.
48. Limonov, Anatomiia geroia, 4, 5. In turn, Limonov will later
write that Anatomy of a Hero, the work in which Limonov
makes these claims of prophecy, foresaw the death of his fourth
wife Natal’ia Medvedeva (Eduard Limonov, V plenu u mert-
vetsov [Moscow: Ul’tra Kul’tura, 2003], 317).
49. Limonov, Anatomiia geroia, 6, 8, 10.
50. Limonov, Sviashchennye monstry, 152. In a 2007 interview,
Limonov reiterated the need for the writer to have endured pre-
cisely these trials—war, prison, and emigration—that is, his own
experiences, to be a viable figure in today’s Russia. See Dmitrii
Gordon, “Eduard Limonov: ‘Ia ne takoi, kak Edichka, da i on,
estestvenno, ne podonok, prosto vozmushchennyi buntuiush-
chii . . .’” Bul’var Gordona 30 Oct. 2007.
51. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1994), 211.
52. Limonov will also claim to have foreseen the September 11,
2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York (Limonov,
V plenu u mertvetsov, 110). Maintaining his military metaphors,
he will state, “So many of the shots I fired in 1977 have been
so close, that it is sometimes unpleasant to reread [Diary of a
Loser] (Limonov, Anatomiia geroia, 6).
53. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 245.
54. Patricia Carden, “Limonov’s Coming Out,” The Third Wave:
Russian Literature in Emigration, ed. Olga Matich and Michael
Heim (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), 221.
55. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 257. See, for example, “Eduard
Limonov: ‘Ia ne takoi, kak Edichka, da i on, estestvenno, ne
podonok, prosto vozmushchennyi buntuiushchii . . .’” in which
twice his interviewer mentions It’s Me, Eddie, and both times
Limonov shifts the topic of discussion to his prison writings.
Notes 183

56. Eduard Limonov, “The Absolute Beginner ili pravdivaia istoriia


sochineniia “Eto ia—Edichka,” Eto ia—Edichka, vol. 2 (Mos-
cow: Glagol, 1990), 323.
57. Epstein, “(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical
Subject,” 219. Epstein writes that “traditional biographical nar-
rative habitually reenacts the scene of an abduction because,
in order to discursively repair the biologically irreparable frac-
ture (the alterity, the otherness, the discontinuity) between any
two human individuals (reified generically as biographer and
biographical subject), biography recesses the broken parts and
causes the gaping of a wound” (218).
58. Eduard Limonov, “The Absolute Beginner ili pravdivaia istoriia
sochineniia “Eto ia—Edichka,” Eto ia—Edichka, vol. 2 (Mos-
cow: Glagol, 1990), 323.
59. Gordon, “Eduard Limonov: ‘Ia ne takoi, kak Edichka.’”
60. Limonov, It’s Me, Eddie. A Fictional Memoir, 25.
61. Limonov, It’s Me, Eddie. A Fictional Memoir, 237.
62. Limonov, It’s Me, Eddie. A Fictional Memoir, 251.
63. Limonov, It’s Me, Eddie. A Fictional Memoir, 72.
64. Limonov, Inostranets v smutnoe vremia, 5, 189.
65. Limonov will later note that he “powdered up the protagonist
under the name ‘Indiana,’ but “later removed the powder from
his face and laid myself bare,” (Moia politicheskaia biografiia
(St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2002), 18.
66. Limonov, Inostranets v smutnoe vremia, 278.
67. Epstein, “(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical
Subject,” 219.
68. Limonov, Inostranets v smutnoe vremia, 329.
69. Limonov, Anatomiia geroia, 197.
70. Limonov, Anatomiia geroia, 433.
71. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 432.
72. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 325.
73. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 324.
74. Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian
Writer Eduard Limonov, 31. See also 30–32.
75. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 329.
76. See Rogachevskii, A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian
Writer Eduard Limonov, 135–38.
77. Glad, Literature in Exile, 111.
78. Eduard Limonov, Kniga mertvykh (St. Petersburg: Limbus
Press, 2001), 148.
184 Notes

79. Limonov, Kniga mertvykh, 161.


80. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 265.
81. Eduard Limonov, “Pridia k vlasti, lider Natsional-Bol’shevikov
Limonov vyshlet iz Rossii pisatelia Limonova,” Knizhnoe oboz-
renie 10 May 1994, 5; Iaroslav Mogutin, “Amoral’nyi moral-
ist,” 30 interv’iu (St. Petersburg: Limbus Press, 2001), 321.
82. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 270.
83. Laurence A. Rickels, Aberrations of Mourning (Detroit: Wayne
State UP, 1988), 357.
84. Epstein, “(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical
Subject,” 222.
85. Epstein, “(Post)Modern Lives: Abducting the Biographical
Subject,” 223–4.
86. Eduard Limonov, 316, Punkt “B” (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998),
124, 173–76, 271–72.
87. Robert Porter, Russia’s Alternative Prose (Oxford/Providence:
Berg, 1994), 170. On Limonov and doubles, see Rogachevskii,
A Biographical and Critical Study of Russian Writer Eduard
Limonov. 91–118. Rogachevskii describes Limonov’s short
story “The Double” as the “disclosure of Limonov’s basic cre-
ative principles” (94). One reviewer cites typological similarities
between Limonov’s nom de plume (limon = lemon) and the name
of his protagonist (luk = onion) as further support for an autobi-
ographical reading (Viktor Obukhov, “Sovremennaia rossiiskaia
antiutopiia,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 3.269 [1998], 98).
88. Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology
in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991), 143; quoted in M.
Keith Booker, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fic-
tion as Social Criticism, Contributions to the Study of Science
Fiction and Fantasy, vol. 58 (Westport, Connecticut: Green-
wood Press, 1994), 19.
89. Aleksandr Shatalov, “Krushenie mifov,” Ischeznovenie varvarov
(Moscow: Glagol, 1992), 5–6.
90. Eduard Limonov, “Distsiplinarnyi sanatorii,” Ischeznovenie
varvarov, ed. Aleksandr Shatalov (Moscow: Glagol, 1992),
201, 204, 205.
91. Limonov dismisses all efforts to record the horror of the Holo-
caust and Stalin’s purges as contributing to a “cult of victims.”
In “Disciplinary sanatorium” and in interviews Limonov has
unapologetically described the era of Stalin and Hitler as a
“great epoch.” See Mirchev, 15 interv’iu, 99.
92. On the influence of the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”
on Zamiatin and Orwell, see Krishan Kumar, Utopia and
Notes 185

Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd,


1987).
93. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1990),
257.
94. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 258–9.
95. Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, 122–3.
96. Limonov, 316, Punkt “B,” 274.
97. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 42. Compare with
Limonov’s statement: “In short, the well-fed, cosy and concil-
iatory atmosphere the Western civilization has been striving for
has killed the arts” (Eduard Limonov, “Edichka the Samurai,”
Moscow News November 8 1992, 16).
98. Eduard Limonov, 316, punkt “B,” (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998),
272, 273.
99. Eduard Limonov, “Chuzhoi pisatel’,” Eduard Limonov: Sobranie
sochinenii v trekh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), 12.
100. Limonov, “Chuzhoi pisatel’,” 12.
101. Limonov, V plenu u mertvetsov, 245.
102. Eduard Limonov, “V spiskakh ne znachitsia,” Moskovskaia
pravda, 3, 23 Oct. 1993. Other examples of this genre are col-
lected in Eduard Limonov, “Ischeznovenie varvarov,” Ischezno-
venie varvarov (Moscow: Zhurnal “Glagol,” 1992).
103. Eduard Limonov, “Nenavist’ k Internetu,” Grani.ru 2005.
104. Gordon, “Eduard Limonov: ‘Ia ne takoi, kak Edichka, da
i on, estestvenno, ne podonok, prosto vozmushchennyi
buntuiushchii . . .’”
105. Eduard Limonov, “Zavist’ i psikhopatiia,” Grani.ru 17 June
2008.
106. Eduard Limonov, Kniga vody (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2002),
58.
107. John J. Su, Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 5.
108. Eduard Limonov, Ubiistvo chasovogo (St. Petersburg: Amfora,
2002), 34–35.
109. Limonov, Sviashchennye monstry, 316.
110. In his 2008 interview with the New York Times Magazine,
Limonov states of his years in New York, “It was a great time, a
legendary time. I have now a certain nostalgia . . . It’s exciting, and
dangerous of course, what we’re doing now”—a reference to his
National-Bolshevik Party’s activities—“but to have lived in the 70s
in New York, it means a lot. Still.” See Meier, “Putin’s Pariah,” 37.
186 Notes

C hapter 5
1. Susan Sontag, “Joseph Brodsky,” Where the Stress Falls (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 332–33.
2. Amy K. Kaminsky, After Exile: Writing the Latin American
Diaspora (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999), 128.
3. Kaminsky, After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora, 128.
4. Aleksandr Shchuplov, “Borshch dolzhny varit’ slugi.” Rossiis-
kaia gazeta 3868 (8 Sept. 2005).
5. On Voltairians and Voltairiennes, see Vladimir Kirsanov’s
review at http://az.gay.ru/books/fiction/aksenov.html and
Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, “Nostalgic Imagining in Post-Soviet
Narratives,” Love-sickness, Melancholy and Nostalgia, (Univer-
sity of Toronto Press, forthcoming).
6. Serguei Oushakine discusses the purely formal character of
post-Soviet nostalgia for the imperial era in, “‘We’re nostalgic
but we’re not crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia,” The Rus-
sian Review: 66 (July 2007), 451–82.
7. Maria Sergeeva, a rising star in the Young Guard known for her
incendiary blog that identifies “enemies of the nation” (includ-
ing Limonov), holds ambitions of becoming “President, or at
least Prime Minister” (Will Stewart, “Putin’s Poster Girl: Pin-
Up Politician Who Hates the West, but Loves Thatcher,” Daily
Mail [15 March 2009]).
8. On the renaming, see Luke Harding, “Signs of Dispute on
Moscow’s Solzhenitsyn Street,” The Guardian (12 December
2008). On Dzerzhinskii’s statue, see Paul Goble, “Duma Dep-
uties Applaud Proposal to Restore Dzerzhinsky Statue to Luby-
anka Square,” Georgian Daily (22 September 2008). http://
georgiandaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&task
=view&id=7701&Itemid=67.
9. John J. Su, Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 4.
10. John J. Su, Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 4.
11. Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of
the Modern Poet, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature
41 (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1991), and Lynne
Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics and
the Question of Difference (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998).
12. Vitaly Chernetsky, Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia
and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s UP, 2007), 267.
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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 15, 59–60, Island of Crimea, The (Ostrov


157n14, 177n93 Krym), 27, 54
agency, 18, 20, 22, 23, 44, 50, 51, “Japanese Jottings” (“Iaponskie
53, 70–71, 72, 77, 78, 87, 90, zametki”), 35, 36, 37, 38,
141, 142, 147–48, 149, 153, 41, 160n23, 161n24
168n4, 168n6 Journey, The (Puteshestvie), film, 32
Aksyonov, Vassily “Little Whale, Varnisher of
Around the Clock Non-Stop Reality” (“Malen’kii
(Kruglye sutki non-stop), kit, lakirovshchik
35, 36, 41, 42, 43, 44, 54, deistvitel’nosti”), 33,
160n18, 161n36 160n13
Burn, The (Ozhog), 34, 41–44, “Lunches of 1943” (“Zavtraki
52, 161nn37–38, 165n87 sorok tret’ego goda”), 33
Caesarean Illumination (Kesarevo “Lungs and Gills,” 38, 46–47,
svechenie), 21, 58, 61–63, 171n25, 171n26
65, 158n2, 163n60, Moscow Saga, A (Moskovskaia
165n82, 166n92 saga), 21, 31, 52, 53–54, 55,
Colleagues, The (Kollegi), 38, 39, 44 56, 58, 67, 158n2, 164n65,
“Fundamental Displacement” 164nn67–68; television
(“Kapital’noe adaptation, 4, 21, 31, 52,
peremeshchenie”), 46–47 54, 55–56, 164nn67–68 (see
Generations of Winter, 21, 52, also Teleserial)
158n2, 164n66 (see also A Moskva-kva-kva, 22, 27–28,
Moscow Saga; The Winter’s 66–67, 68, 159n2, 166n96,
Hero) 167n99
“Halfway to the Moon” (“Na Negative of a Positive Hero
polputi k lune”), 32–33, 36, (Negativ polozhitel’nogo
159n9, 161n32 geroia), 56–57, 165n73
In Search of Melancholy Baby (V New Sweet Style, The (Novyi
poiskakh grustnogo bebi), sladostnyi stil’), 21, 46,
20, 29, 35, 36, 38, 41, 48, 58–59, 60–61, 62, 65,
44–46, 49, 50, 54, 161n40, 158n2, 162n49, 165nn80–
162n41, 162n42, 162n43 81, 166n92
202 Index

Aksyonov, Vassily (continued) Bernstein, Richard, 172n51


“Not Quite a Sentimental biography, 9, 14, 24, 32, 71, 72,
Journey,” 51, 163nn58–59 111, 112, 127, 134–35, 140,
Rare Earths (Redkie zemli), 48, 141, 145, 152, 153, 168n6,
159n2 179n10, 183n57. See also
To Israel and Back (V Izrail’ i Limonov, Eduard; Les monstres
obratno) (anthology), 56, sacres
57–58 Boltianskaia, Natella, 165n83,
“A Starry Ticket” (“Zvezdnyi 166n94
billet”), 32 Booker, Keith, 184n88
“Under the Sky of Sultry Bourdieu, Pierre, 125, 182n51
Argentina” (“Pod nebom Boym, Svetlana, 122, 153,
znoinoi Argenitiny”), 35, 36, 191nn39–41, 186n11
38, 39, 41 Brennan, Timothy, 16, 158n23,
Voltairians and Voltairiennes 166n90
(Vol’ter’ianki i Vol’ter’iantsy), Brodsky, Joseph, 6, 109, 112, 127,
149, 159n2, 159n5 128, 132, 133, 134, 135, 142,
Winter’s Hero, The, 21, 52, 158n2 147, 178n2, 179n2
Aleshkovskii, Iuz, 6 “Brodsky” (as figured in
Ankersmit, F. R., 170n26, Limonov’s In Captivity
172nn46–48, 172n53 among the Dead), 132, 133,
Appadurai, Arjun, 51, 96, 163n57, 134, 141, 152
176n78 Brown, Edward J., 174n61,
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 48, 174n63
162n51
“autobiographical turn,” 153 Capote, Truman, 144
autobiographism, 20 Carden, Patricia, 182n54
in Aksyonov, 31, 161n37 Chekalov, P. K., 172n50
in Limonov, 10, 11, 23, 110, Chernetsky, Vitaly, 153, 186n12
113, 117, 118, 119, 126, Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 110, 145
127, 129, 135, 136, 137, Chow, Rey, 3, 4, 53, 155nn2–3,
142 164n63
in Solzhenitsyn, 70, 82, 90, Chuprinin, Sergei, 176n86
94, 100, 168n9, 172n46, Cortázar, Julio, 46, 47, 51,
174n61 162nn46–47
Avedon, Richard, 144 cosmopolitanism, 10, 16, 21, 22,
Avvakum, Archpriest, 110 27, 29, 30, 31, 34, 38, 48,
52, 63, 64, 65–66, 144, 149,
Bakunin, Mikhail, 110, 145 163n54
Balina, Marina, 35, 36, 160nn14– Curtis, James M., 168n6, 1700n30
15, 160n17, 160nn20–21
Bamlag (Baikal-Amur railway camp), Dali, Salvador, 126, 144
172n49 Decker, James M., 177n100
Basinskii, Pavel, 165n84 deterritorialization, post-Soviet, 56,
Belyi, Nikolai, 172n49 97
Index 203

diaspora, 15, 16, 17, 153 exilic writing, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10,


as critical modality, 15, 16, 17, 12, 14, 15, 24, 25, 28, 70, 71,
18, 153 113, 139, 157n15
diasporic writing, 12, 15, 17, 30, and modernism, 4
157n19 and the novel, 151
displacement, 6, 12, 15, 16, 29, 31, physical, 19
37, 40, 41, 46, 48, 51, 56, 73, and preexilic writing, 10, 11, 77
89, 110, 147 rhetorical constructions of, 2, 3,
condensation and, 84, 172n46 14, 19, 24, 28, 36, 63, 71
discursive, 7, 12, 20, 31, 36, 38, and rhetorical movement toward
39, 42, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, return, 2, 7, 9, 10, 19, 24, 28,
56, 60, 67, 89, 102, 177n93 33, 48, 67, 71, 91, 107, 157
“rhetoric of” (see Israel, Nico),
157n14, 167n15 Finn, Peter, 164n70
temporal, 116 Fish, Stanley, 81, 168n6
Dol’berg, Aleksandr, 174n60 Foucault, Michel, 71
Donoso, José, 148, 149 Frumkina, Revekka, 177n102,
Dos Passos, John, 80, 170n30 178n104
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 53, 55, 99,
105, 110, 138 Glad, John, 155nn4–5, 156nn8–9,
Dovlatov, Sergei, 6 164n64, 178n1, 179n4, 183n77
Dvadtsat’ dva, 157n10 Gladilin, Anatoly, 6, 35, 159n7,
Dzerzhinskii, Felix, 152, 186n8 160n16
Gorbanevskaia, Natal’ia, 6
Echo of Moscow (Ekho Moskvy), Gordon, Dmitrii, 182n50, 183n59,
166n92 185n104
Efimov, Igor’, 6 Grani, 7, 157n10
Ekho, 157n10
emplacement, 8, 23, 24–25, 28, 61, Hannerz, Ulf, 175n75
74, 89, 108, 111, 112, 132, home, 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16,
141, 142, 167n15 17, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 31, 54,
Epstein, William H., 112, 127, 56, 58, 59–60, 61, 63, 65, 67,
129, 134, 159n6, 168n6, 68, 70, 73, 88, 91, 103, 107,
179n10, 183n57, 183n67, 111, 147, 148, 149, 157n19.
184nn84–85 See also homecoming
Ericson, Edward E., 168n5, homecoming, 8, 21, 51, 58, 59,
169n21, 171n34 61, 65, 67, 148. See also home;
Erofeyev, Victor, 32, 159n8 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr
Evola, Julius, 130 Huffer, Lynne, 153, 186n11
exile Hutcheon, Linda, 170n29
and alienation, 162n54
and diaspora, 15, 16 Iser, Wolfgang, 75, 169n13
end of, 28 Israel, Nico, 15, 16, 59–60, 157nn14–
exilic historiography, 11, 22, 69, 73, 15, 165nn78–79, 177n93
77, 107 Ivanova, Natalia, 164n67, 174n64
204 Index

Johnson, D. B., 160n18, 160n22 Diary of a Loser (Dnevnik


neudachnika), 117, 124,
Kaminsky, Amy K., 11, 12, 15, 148, 126, 180n21, 182n52
157nn17–19, 186nn2–3 “Disciplinary Sanatorium”
Kaplan, Caren, 16, 29, 40, 41, 57, (“Distsiplinarnyi sanatorii”),
161nn33–34, 165nn74–75, 137, 139, 182n48, 182n52,
175n68, 175n75, 175n77 182n43, 184n91
Karadzic, Radovan, 122 Foreigner in the Time of
Kasack, Wolfgang, 156n7 Troubles, A (Inostranets v
Kashkarov, Iurii, 6 smutnoe vremia), 123, 129,
Kedrov, Konstantin, 174n58 182nn44–45, 183n64,
Kenzheev, Bakhit, 6 183n66, 183n68
Kolerov, Modest, 158n27 His Butler’s Story (Istoriia ego uslugi),
Kondratov, Stanislav, 173n57 117, 126, 183nn71–73
Kontinent, 6, 7 In Captivity among the Dead (V
Korolev, Sergei, 173n58 plenu u mertvetsov), 128,
Korzhavin, Naum, 6 132, 133, 183n75, 184n80,
Kovcheg, 119, 157n10 184n82, 185n101
Krokodil, 50, 52, 163n55 It’s Me, Eddie (Eto ia—Edichka),
Krushchev, Nikita, 34, 45 10, 20, 23, 111, 116–17,
Krushcheva, Nina, 167n1 118, 119, 120
Kumar, Krishnan, 184n92, 185n95 Les monstres sacres (Sviashchennye
Kuritsyn, Viacheslav, 98, 176n83 monstry), 134, 144–45,
Kustanovich, Konstantin, 33, 159– 179n5, 182n50, 185n109
60nn10–12, 160n18, 161n35, Limonov in Photographs, with
161n37, 166n87 Commentary Written
by Limonov Himself!
Lanin, Borin, 156n7 (Limonov v fotografiiakh
Lawton, Anna, 178n108 s kommentariiami,
Leiderman, Naum, 178n107 napisannymi im samim!), 23,
Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 122 118, 121, 122–23, 180n19
Limonka, 123, 132, 151 (see also photography)
Limonov, Eduard Limonov versus Putin (Limonov
316, Point “B” (316, Punkt “B”), 23, protiv Putina), 23
126, 135–36, 137, 138–40, Limonov versus Zhirinovskii
184n86, 185n96, 185n98 (Limonov protiv
Anatomy of a Hero (Anatomiia Zhirinovskogo), 142
geroia), 122, 124, 130, Memoirs of a Russian Punk
179n9, 180n19, 180n25, (Podrostok Savenko), 135
182n43, 182nn48–49, My Political Biography (Moia
182n52, 183n69, 183n70 politicheskaia biografiia), 23,
Book of the Dead, The (Kniga 141, 144
mertvykh), 133, 134, “Russian Literature and Russian
183n78, 184n79, 185n106 History” (“Russkaia literatura
Book of Water, The (Kniga vody), i rossiiskaia istoriia”), 141,
185n106 178n113, 179n6
Index 205

Russkoe, 113, 178n2, 179nn11– Nussbaum, Martha, 75, 76, 88,


14; film by Aleksandr 169nn14–15
Veledinskii, 135
Torturer, The (Palach), 120, 126, Ong, Aihwa, 29, 53, 62, 164n61,
136, 139, 181nn31–32 165n86
“We Are the National Hero” online publishing, 4, 142
(“My—natsional’nyi geroi”),
115–16, 117, 118, 124, 126; Panfilov, Gleb, 104, 106,
Limonov and “Coat of the 178nn108–9
National Hero,” 116, 117, Pearce, Joseph, 171n39, 173n57,
121, 145 176n88
Young Scoundrel, The (Molodoi perestroika, 6, 27, 50, 52, 54, 89,
negodiai), 135 91, 120, 163n57, 176n85
Lipkin, Semen, 173n57 photography, 10, 116–18, 119,
Lisnianskaia, Inna, 173n57 130, 121–23, 124, 131, 134,
Liubimov, Iurii, 155n4 180n19, 181n30, 182n43.
See also under Limonov in
MacFadyen, David, 55, 105, Photographs
164n69 Pieters, Jürgen, 173n55
Maiakovskii, Vladimir, 121–22, Pihlainen, Kalle, 86, 172n53
123–24, 125, 126, 134, 181n34 Pipes, Richard, 174n60
Maksimov, Vladimir, 6 Porter, Robert, 184n87
Mamleev, Iurii, 6 postexile, 8, 11, 12, 148, 157n19
Medvedev, Dmitrii, 151 Prokhorova, Elena, 177n103
Mozhaev, Boris, 173n57 Putin, Vladimir, 20, 150, 158n27.
See also under Limonov versus
Nabokov, Vladimir, 47 Putin
Naficy, Hamid, 157n11
National Bolshevik Party, 23, 109, Radishchev, Aleksandr, 110
123, 124, 126, 132, 134, 135, Ramones, The, 144
141, 145, 150, 185n110 Remnick, David, 173n58
Nekrasov, Viktor, 6 return
Nemzer, Andrei, 166n92, 174n65, end of, 152
175n66 from exile, 7, 8, 19, 24, 25, 157
Nicholson, Michael, 167n1, and the novel, 67, 129
169n18, 170n25, 176n91 and postmodernism, 2
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 139, 185n97 rhetorical constructions of, 2, 7,
Nivat, Georges, 156n8, 167n2, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21,
168n10, 174n59 24, 25, 30, 33, 41, 58, 59,
nostalgia, 2, 4, 7, 8, 11, 16, 17, 18, 24, 61, 68, 71, 91, 103
25, 28, 52, 55, 56, 65, 66, 67, writing of, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
68, 103, 113, 127, 141, 143–44, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 24,
149–50, 151, 152, 153, 158n29, 25, 30, 31, 33, 68, 71, 99,
166n97, 185n110, 186n6 153, 157n19
Novikov, Nikolai, 110 Rickels, Laurence A., 134, 184n83
Novyi zhurnal, 153n10 Robbins, Bruce, 30, 159n5, 166n95
206 Index

Rogachevskii, Andrei, 131, 178– “Ego,” 92–93


79n2, 180nn16–17, 181n34, First Circle, The (V kruge
183n74, 183n76, 184n87 pervom), 4, 77, 88,
Ross, Andrew, 184n88 104, 177n91; television
Rushdie, Salman, 15, 157n14, 177n93 adaptation, 21, 22, 76,
89, 99, 103–4, 105, 107,
Samakhova, Irina, 174n58 178n105 (see also Teleserial)
samizdat, 40, 44, 45, 104, 113 Gulag Archipelago, The
Saraskina, Liudmila, 98, 173n57 (Arkhipelag Gulag), 69, 75,
Scammell, Michael, 79, 170n23, 76, 88
170n25, 174n59, 178n112 Homecoming, The, 175n73
Seidel, Michael, 10, 157n16, Invisible Allies, 90
158n26, 165n72 “It Makes No Difference” (“Vse
self-censorship, 113, 172n46 ravno”), 94, 95, 102
self-orientalization, 24, 53, 97 Little Grain Fell between Two
Shatalov, Aleksandr, 119, 120, 136, Millstones, The (Ugodilo
137, 179n7, 180n27, 181n29, zernyshko promezh dvukh
181n32, 184n89 zhernovov), 20, 89–91,
Shaw, David Gary, 167n3, 168n4 92, 99, 101, 107, 168n9,
Shchuplov, Aleksandr, 186n4 170n24, 174n61
Shemiakin, Mikhail, 116 March 1917, 86
Shevelev, Igor’, 158n1, 163n60, “Meetings with Solzhenitsyn”
165n71, 165n84, 167n99 (television show), 173n57
Shohat, Ella, 15, 158n22 “The Miniatures” (“Krokhotki”):
Shokhina, Viktoriia, 182n47 from 1958–1960, 22, 74,
Simpson, David, 75, 169n14 98, 100, 176n90, 176n91;
Siniavskii, Andrei, 6, 24 from 1996–1999, 22, 74,
Sintaksis, 6 89, 97, 98, 99–100, 101–3,
Slavkin, Viktor, 160n19 105, 168n10
Sokolov, Sasha, 6 “Nasten’ka,” 93
Sokurov, Aleksandr, 167n1, 169n12 Oak and the Calf, The (Bodalsia
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr telenok s dubom), 90–91,
“Apricot Jam” (“Abrikosovoe 158n25, 174n59, 174n61
varen’e”), 93–94 October 1916, 76, 84, 85
“At the Fractures” (“Na One Day in the Life of Ivan
izlomakh”), 94 Denisovich (Odin den’ Ivana
August 1914, 78–79, 82, 88, Denisovicha), 69, 76
168n9, 170n32, 171n34, “On the Extremes” (“Na
171nn36–37, 172n46 kraiakh”), 92, 93
“The Binary Tales” Red Wheel, The (Krasnoe koleso),
(“Dvuchastnye rasskazy”), 22, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75,
10, 22, 74, 89, 92–94, 76–77, 78–79, 80–88, 93,
97–98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 94, 95, 97, 167n1, 168n9,
103, 169n10, 176n81. See 170n30, 172n50, 172n53,
also individual stories 177n91
Index 207

“Reflections on the February 41–42, 44–45, 50, 56–58, 63,


Revolution,” 86 72, 74, 88–89, 92, 95, 96, 97,
Russia in Collapse (Rossiia v 99, 101, 103, 107, 110, 118,
obvale), 97–98, 176n81 125, 129, 148, 149, 159n10,
Two Hundred Years Together 160n14
(Dvesti let vmeste), 97 Tret’ia volna, 153n10
“The Young Generation” Trifonov, Iurii, 42, 43
(“Molodniak”), 93 Tsvetkov, Aleksei, 6
“Zheliabug Settlements” Tsvetkova, Vera, 165n85
(“Zheliabugskie Vyselki”), Tvardovsky, Aleksandr, 90
94, 95–96, 101, 175nn70–72
Solzhenitsyna, Natal’ia, 86, 104, 105, Ulitskaia, Liudmila, 107, 108,
172n52, 176n88, 177n101 174n60
Sontag, Susan, 147, 186n1 Urmanov, A. V., 171n38
Stomakhin, I., 182n46
Strauss, Claude Lévi, 65–66 Vail’, Peter and Aleksandr Genis,
Strelets, 7 156n7, 159n4
Su, John J., 143, 152, 158n29, Voinovich, Vladimir, 6, 97, 166n97,
185n107, 186nn9–10 176n79
Vremia i my, 157n10
Tarsis, Valery, 155n4
Teleserial. See television adapations Wachtel, Andrew Baruch, 11–12,
of literary works 13–14, 16, 158nn20–21,
television adaptations of literary 158n28, 168n7, 170n30,
works (teleserial), 4, 10, 11, 21, 171n34
22, 31, 53, 54, 55, 68, 76, 89, Walker, Cheryl, 159n6
99, 103–5, 164n70. See also Wanner, Adrian, 176nn89–90,
Aksyonov, Vassily; Solzhenitsyn, 177nn91–92
Aleksandr Warhol, Andy, 144
Thomas, D. M., 167n1, 170n25, White, Hayden, 84, 173n54
170n29, 172n46, 173n57
Tien, Davrell, 181n27 Yeltsin, Boris, 59, 96, 163n57
Toker, Leona, 77–78, 169nn19–20 Yurchak, Alexei, 17, 155n1,
Tolstoy, Leo, 53, 54, 80, 164n67, 158n24, 174n62
170n30, 174n58
translation, 3, 4, 21, 40, 50, 59, 62, Zamiatin, Evgenii, 110, 138
116, 166n92, 170n30; cultural, Zhirinovskii, Vladimir, 122
55 Zholkovskii, Aleksandr, 179n3
transnationality, 2, 3, 8, 10, 13, 29, Zinik, Zinovy, 6, 157n12
54, 63, 65, 107, 144 Zorin, Andrei, 98, 173n57,
travel, 6, 10, 16, 27, 29–30, 31, 176n84
32, 33, 34–36, 37–38, 39, Zverev, Aleksei, 164n68

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