The City in Russian Literature: Images Past and Present Author(s): Robert Porter Source: The Modern Language

Review, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Apr., 1999), pp. 476-485 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3737123 . Accessed: 23/04/2011 10:47
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THE CITY IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE: IMAGES PAST AND PRESENT

Before considering the contemporary depiction of life in the Russian city in fiction, it will be useful to rehearsesome general points. First,the very manifestationof urban life in Russia has been viewed with extreme ambiguity. Pushkincan be viewed as the instigator of the urban theme. Evgenii Onegin, the hero of Russia's first novel (a novel in verse), excited, corrupted, and then bored by life in St Petersburg,goes off to the provinces, only to taint Tatiana's life, and in the most famous of his narrative Pushkincould write of the 'stern, elegant aspect' of Peter Horseman, poems, TheBronze the Great's city. Dostoevskii and Gogol' could depict Peter's creation as squalid, false, corrupting, and even, as in Pushkin, capable of destroying people's minds. At the same time, all these writers were irresistiblyattracted to it. It can, of course, be argued that Petersburgwas a special case, being founded by a Westernizing tyrant and built by foreign craftsman;Peter's 'window on the West' might allow him to look out at the achievements of Europe, but it could also let foreign light in, and such alien influences would not be welcome to many Russians. But similar aversion to urban life seemed to be expressed with regard to other Russian cities, as in Levin's discomfiturewhen in Moscow in Tolstoi's AnnaKarenina, the provincial towns in or Chekhov, which always seem to spell entrapment and boredom, rather than social and economic advancement. Often, too, in Chekhov, it must be said that the provincial towns are depicted in realistic opposition to a fanciful, idealized picture of the city: note the three sisters'yearning for a Moscow to which they will never repair, and which would never solve their problems anyway. This resentment of urban life can be explained in part by the late advent of the industrial revolution in Russia. In economic terms towns were often more consumptive than productive, their inhabitants fed by the toilers in the fields, but with few of the benefits of urban life spreading out to the countryside. There was (and still is) an enormous economic and cultural gulf between the town and the country in Russia, a gulf that in Soviet times the authorities sought, with only limited success, to eliminate. The Bolsheviks were ideologically committed to industrializationand urbanization, to evening out the social differences,and to that end they tried, through propaganda as much as anything else, to strengthen the between the peasantry and the proletariat. smychka Yet in much of the serious literature just before the Revolution, as well as in serious literature during the Soviet period, the darker aspects of life in the city stubbornly seem to take centre stage. Clearly, the disorientating and confused worlds in Belyi's Petersburg and Wolves (1916) or Pil'niak's Machines (I924) are part and parcel of the Modernist experiments that were sweeping Europe and America. The latter work, by its very title, exhibited the dilemmas within Pil'niak himself. Right at the beginning of the century Briusov in his collection Urbiet orbi(I902) could even question the beauty of Paris or Venice:
A TbI BO CTOIA MrAe MoryqHM, cyAb6a, KaK
Ho He cKyAeAneaH MOHX 6e3yMHbIX6paTHi,
H FopoAa c AIOAbMH He naaaAa 6opb6a 6ecqHCAeHHbIe paTH [ ...] KOAOCCOM, AaBmIaLHM [. . .]

('Paris')

ROBERTPORTER
B (popMax BbInyKAo-npeKpacHbIX
HolieMy iora B apKIX KpacKax H ItBeTax, n04 COAHUIeM npe4cTaBaA npea B30POM npax?

477

('Venice')1 Even in works of full-blooded Socialist Realism in the 1930s the emphasis seems to be on the painful if exhilarating process of urban development, coupled with some vague generalizations about the bright future, rather than on specific
achievement (for instance, Kataev's Time, Forward!(I 932) ).

In social and economic terms the cardinal difference between the process of urbanization before and after the Revolution was that in Soviet times urbanization was planned centrally, albeit with varying degrees of success, rather than left to develop ad hoc.The raw facts and statistics are interesting.James Bater writes: 'For more than four decades the notion of an optimal city size was widely accepted as an essential element in Soviet policy, though what was to be the optimum size was far
from consistent [...].

population to 50,000 to 60,ooo' (The SovietCity:IdealandReality(London: Arnold, to 300,000.2 The idea was that such cities would be big enough to be economically dynamic yet small enough to promote a communal (and, of course) socialist, spirit. In fact the situation on the ground often frustratedthese designs. Both in the nineteenth century, when capitalism was belatedly developing, and in the Soviet era of state planning, the chief feature of the Russian city was the high density of population. The tiny elite had space, while the vast majority of the urban population lived in cramped conditions. In 1926 per capita living space in Moscow was 5.7 square metres; in 1956 it had dropped to 4.8. Such reductions were generally duplicated throughout the country and could be more dramatic: for example, the corresponding figures for Minsk were 5.9 and 4.I (Bater, p. Ioo). Current legislation in Britain stipulates that for local authority housing a one-storey dwelling for four people should have sixty-seven square metres of living space. Moreover, it has been a special characteristic of the Russian city that the high density is distributed uniformly. Not only are there few leafy suburbs; the newer suburbs are sometimes more densely populated than the rare inner city residential areas. Throughout Stalin's rule only about 18% of the total investment in the national economy went on housing, and about half of this came only in the last five years of the period: that is, in the post-war years, when an enormous amount of reconstruction was required (Bater, p. 79). The Stalin period was marked by the notorious 'communal apartment', in which several families shared cooking and washing facilities. The Khrushchev era saw the appearance of the new high-rise blocks, which though jerry-built and pointedly functional, meant that families could at last live self-contained. 'Khrushchoby' (a pun on the leader's name and the word for slum) they may have been dubbed, but most agreed they were an improvement on the
1980), p. 76). Later, this optimum size was to be shifted upwards to around 200,000

Early schemes for the Soviet socialist city limited the

V. Briusov,Sobranie literatura,1973), I, 302, 35I. Dates in sochinenii, vols (Moscow:Khudozhestvennaia 7 bracketsin the text of this articlereferto the firstsignificantpublication(eitherin Russiaor abroad).Editions cited are as far as practicablebooksratherthanjournals. 2 TheSocialist and ed. Structure Urban Policy, by R. Frenchand F. Ian Hamilton(New York:Wiley, City:Spatial
1979), P. 77.

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past. The use of prefabrication and general principles of utilitarianism meant, in addition, that there was an extraordinary degree of uniformity throughout the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. The comic film of I975 The Ironyof Fate (directed by Riazanov), in which a drunk accidentally finds himself in an apartment in Leningrad and thinks he is at home in Moscow, has become a staple of Russian New Year entertainment. However, it should be noted that the apartment, the could on occasion become a spiritual haven for intellectual discourse in a kvartira, world of philistinism and ideology. A final feature that sets the Russian city apart from the urban experience in the West is that 'differences in income or nationality are not expressed in geographically separated living patterns' (Bater, p. 79). This could be construed as the enactment of a sound socialist ideal, or as yet again somewhat crude central planning that could merely mask all manner of serious social problems. were classifiedas towns: a gorod poselokgorodskogo an urbation of at least I0,000 or tipa, to I2,000 inhabitants, depending on the republic (Bater, p. 2). So the Soviet Union was, on paper, no longer an overwhelmingly rural country. Yet it must be borne in mind that the level of services and amenities in the towns was far lower than in Western towns and cities, while the attitudes and psychology of those who lived in Russian towns might still be conditioned by their recent experience in rural communities. The stress and, indeed, trauma engendered by rapid urbanization was a recurrent feature of much mainstream Russian literaturefrom the late 1950S. Here I am referring particularly to 'village prose', where traditional morality and peasant stoicism were celebrated. Such qualities in the Russian countryside were paraded in fiction as a counterweight to the corrupting influences of the city, whither youngsters so often migrated in search of education and better jobs, but also in pursuit of Western mores, fashions, and pop music. In sum then, Russian cities, especially those created in the post-war period, appear to lack any obvious organic growth, while the burgeoning of the urban population has created all manner of social problems. In 1967 Isaac Deutscher could write: The periodsof intensive urbanization werebetween1930 and I940 and betweenI950 and townsand over 2000 smallurbansettlements were 1965.About800 big and medium-sized In built.In 1926therewereonly 26 milliontowndwellers. 966 theirnumber about125 was million.In thelastfifteenyearsalonethe urbanpopulation increased 53 or 54 million has by evenif it had takenplacein morefavourable people[.. .]. Sucha changein socialstructure, would have created huge and bafflingproblemsin housing, settlement, circumstances, and were to and health,andeducation; Sovietcircumstances as if designed intensify magnify the Revolution Buffalo, NY, beyondmeasure turmoiland the shocks.( TheUnfinished (Toronto,
and London: Toronto University Press, 1967), p. 43) In I979 more than 162 million Soviet citizens out of 262 million lived in what

High divorce rate, unwanted pregnancies, over-crowding, domestic conflict, often violence, frequently provide the backdrop to narrativesset in the city, be it in Russia or elsewhere, but in the case of Russian fiction in recent years all the traditional problems associated with rapid urbanization have gone hand in hand with more blatant social and economic differences. The news media and popular fiction often address these issues for their own sake. The weekly Literaturnaia gazeta recently carried a major article on the housing problem and the way in which the innocent have been cheated in their bids to gain accommodation and/or residence

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permission.3 Serious fiction has used social and economic problems over housing as a springboard into existentialist and psychological areas. Before addressing the more recent view of the city, I consider three extracts from different books and authors, which all pre-date in some way the glasnost era: Our town was divided into two parts - the old part, where we lived, and the new part, where we didn't live. The new part was mostly called 'Behind the Palace', because on the wasteland between the old and new parts they'd built some Palace, the biggest in the country, or so they said round our way. At first it was going to be the biggest Palace of Metallurgists in the country in the style of Corbusier. The Palace was almost built when they found out that the designer of the project was subject to the influence of Western architecture. They gave him a hard time for old Corbusier and it took him a long time to get over it. Then new times came and they allowed him to return to his interruptedwork.4 Everyone knows in the centre of Simferopol in the midst of her crazy architectural expressions the skyscraper, impudent in its simplicity and resembling a sharpened pencil, which is headquarters of the newspaper The Russian Courier.At the start of our narrative, towards the end of a somewhat sombre editorial night, in spring, at the end of the current decade or the beginning of the next one (it depends when this book comes out) we see the publisher-editor of this newspaper, the 46-year-old Andrei Arsen'evich Luchnikov in his personal apartments, 'on the top deck' ('na verkhoture It was with this Soviet coinage that the bachelor Luchnikov delighted in '). designating his playboy penthouse (pleiboiskiipentkhauz):5 The biggest block of flats on the Arbat was between Nikol'skii and Denezhnyi Lanes, these eight-storey buildings, days they are called Plotnikov Lane and Vesnin Street -three standing closely one behind the other, the facade of the first one decorated with white glazed tiles. Signs hanging on the walls read 'Fine Embroidery', 'Stammering Cured', 'Venereal and Urinogenital Diseases'. Low, arched, passageways tricked out at the corners with wrought ironwork,joined two deep, dark courtyards. Sasha Pankratov came out of the block and turned left toward Smolensk Square. Girls were already strolling up and down in pairs [.. .]. Carelessly turned-up coat collars, rouged lips, curled eyelashes, eyes on the look-out, coloured neck-scarves. The autumn chic of the Arbat. [.. .] The first Soviet Gaz and Amo cars rolled along the asphalted carriageway of the road and tried to avoid the potholes. The strip between the tramlineswas still cobbled. Trams were coming out of the park with one, or even two extra cars in tow - a vain attempt to satisfy the transport needs of the great city. The first line of the Metro was being laid underground, and a steel derrickstuck up into the air above the shaft being sunk in Smolensk Square.6 The first two passages relate to provincial towns, the third to Moscow. Yet in all three, with varying degrees of humour, seriousness, or straight narrative, one detects a sense of disapproval. Alienation seems at its most pronounced in the first passage. It is a typical example of 'youth prose' of the I96os. The town has been built by 'them' without reference to 'us', and the erection of the showpiece building has been hampered by ideological considerations, with scarcely a thought for the practicalities involved. There is even an implication that there is scant regard for what ordinary people really need: as long as the Palace is the biggest in the country, it is assumed
3 I. Nekhames, ili na dlia na 'Lazeiko zhulikov: Literaturnaia gazeta, pravo registratsiiupravo zhilploshchad", February1998,p. 4. 4 V. Voinovich,'Dva tovarishcha', as elsewherein thisarticle,is The translation Novyi here, mir(i967: i), 87. V. Aksenov,Ostrov (AnnArbor,MI: Ardis, 1981), p. 9. Krym 6 A. (Moscow:Sovetskiipisatel', 1987),p. 4. Rybakov,DetiArbata

ii

myown. 5

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that it must be the best for all concerned. Voinovich's story was published in Russia non in 1967 before the author became persona grata. The other two extracts fall into the dissident camp immediately. Aksenov's novel was published in the West, when in fact the author himself had abandoned any furtherattempts to work under the communist r6gime and had settled in the United States. Rybakov's novel was written in the 195os and 96os and would have stood a chance of publication in the Khrushchev era. As it turned out, it lay in the desk is drawer until Gorbachev came to power. Children theArbat interesting more as a of and historical work, dealing as it does with the gilded youth of the sociological 1930s. Some of the scenes are reminiscent of America in the same period, with semidevushki professional snooker players, smart-operating lawyers, and restorannye ('restaurant', or 'good-time', girls) on the look out for material gain and/or an advantageous marriage to any male on the way up. The pressures of materialism and careerism are compounded by totalitarianism and state repression. When the unjustly convicted Sasha is packed off to Siberian exile the reader senses on the hero's behalf almost a degree of relief from the pressure of city life. Sasha is allowed to carry a gun to go hunting and has to do no more than report to the police once a week. In the case of Voinovich's story the alienation is compounded by the work that the two boys do at the local factory: routine packing. They have no idea what the purpose of their task is, it is just 'something to do with the space programme'. The comedy of the youngsters for ever outwitting their parents or teachers in their pursuit of fun and the opposite sex takes on a darker hue at the end when a gang of louts forces one of them to beat up the other. Elsewhere in Voinovich, there is a (1976). Set grimmer view of the city in his factual and autobiographical TheIvankiad in Moscow in the early 1970s, it tells the true story of the author's move into a new apartment he has been allotted. This proves no easy task since one Ivan'ko, a highranking bureaucrat, wants the apartment himself, especially to instal the bathroom suite he has imported from the West. The conflict escalates farcically;Voinovich is on the receiving end of threats and anonymous phone calls, but eventually takes possession of his new accommodation, lying awake there on the first night, 'like Chonkin', the hero of his comic anti-war masterpiece, expecting attack. Aksenov's novel is a political fantasy in which the Crimea enjoys, vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, the same sort of status as Hong Kong did vis-a-vis mainland China until I997, but is eventually invaded by Soviet tanks. Aksenov parades his enthusiasm for the West in his use of brand names and other foreign coinages. Such cosmopolitanism amounts to the author's thumbing his nose at the uniformity and drabness of Soviet life, particularlyurban life, a clear act of defiance in the face of the traditionalproduction novel and village prose. One detects generally in Aksenov a liking for the big city, but at the same time an awareness of its vulgarity. Certainly his prose owes something to the Modernism of an earlier era, and his narrativescan at times be disorientating and blurred, not least in his magnum opus The Burn (i980), which critics have discussed in terms of Bakhtinian carnival. Take this excursion into verse in the text: for hippies! Saturday- a festival all drop-out On the Portobello Roadlinestwomileslong A bazaar whores Of organ-grinders, side-winders, cheating shrimps,

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of rotten fringe and lame pilots, avocado slices, solicitors, cabbages and alabaster swords of the Samurai and wings heaven-high, of nut-chewing and evil-doing, mini-skirts,alcoholic idling of Scottish pipers and Guianese snipers, Spanish overalls and Russian hats, of Tibetan hide Arab tripe and three-cornered hats - the dress of Mr Couldn't-Careless. (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980), p. 92) (Ozhog Here a fusion of the cities of East and West can be detected. To digress briefly: in American literature New York might, roughly speaking, be seen as the equivalent of Petersburg, in that it is a 'special case' city, simultaneously attracting and repulsing. In the novels of Philip Roth, the stories of Tama Janowitz, or Tom Wolfe's The Bonfireof the Vanities,the individual is no less oppressed than is Gogol"s lowly clerk, Akakii Akakievich. Jennifer Belle's first novel GoingDown (I 997) is a blackish comedy concerning a New York girl resorting to prostitution just to maintain a degree of independence from family and friends. Elsewhere in American fiction, however, other cities do not seem to threaten in anything like the same way. For example, in John Updike's Couples(i968), set in 1963, the ubiquitous amorality and adultery appear solely the responsibility of the well-heeled characters concerned, while the town of Tarbox, despite its unfortunate name, hardly oppresses; on the contrary, it seems to provide ample accommodation and opportunities for work, for recreation, and for a very comfortable standard of living. The image of New York established by the American writers is taken up with a vengeance by the sometime Russian emigre Eduard Limonov in some of his In outrageous novels, especially It's Me, Eddie and The Torturer. these, the immigrant from Eastern Europe is an outsider, poor, shunned, resentful. He is simultaneously repulsed and attracted by the affluence around him, and resorts in the first novel to homosexuality and in the second to sadism. He resembles a kind of enhanced version of Dostoevskii's spite-filled Underground Man. The life Eddie leads on the streets of New York seems to chime with the street life that the author details in his novels The Youth Savenko (1983) and The roung Rascal (1986), set in his native Khar'kov: gang rivalry, theft, promiscuity and gang rape, fifteen-year-olds well beyond the control of their parents or the police. And this is the late 1950s, when the Soviet Union was seen to be a superpower and a totalitarian state, albeit with some post-Stalinist liberalism. How are Russian cities depicted in more recent fiction? The theme of Petersburg has never disappeared. It is very much there in Andrei Bitov's PushkinHouse (1978) and in some of the stories of Tat'iana Tolstaia (On the Golden Porch (1987): a fascinating love-hate relationship, a promise of mystery and magic, the small man with aspirations of a kind pitted against impersonal and unfathomable forces. Some of the eeriness and magic of Petersburg has rubbed off on Moscow. Of course, the first major example of this would be Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (completed in I940, published in 1966-67, full text I973). Venedikt Erofeev's Moscow-Petushki(written in 1969, published I977) opens: Everybody says: the Kremlin, the Kremlin. I hear about it from everybody, but I've never once seen it myself. How many times (a thousand times), either drunk or with a hangover,

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I've walked across Moscow from north to south, from west to east, from one end to the other, straight across or whatever which way- and I've never once seen the Kremlin. And I didn't see it again yesterday,- and after all, all evening I was whizzing around those places, and it wasn't as if I was very drunk.7 Venichka does not see the Kremlin until the very end of the book when, in his delirium, he is trying to find Kurskii Station. Usually, when he is trying to find the Kremlin, the one place he invariably stumbles across is Kurskii Station. One of a gang of thugs bangs the hero's head against its walls, and all the hero can focus on is the monument on Red Square to Minin and Pozharskii, the two national heroes who led the struggle against the Polish invasion in the early seventeenth century (one might reflect here on the perceived 'Russianness' of Moscow as against the 'foreignness' of Petersburg); in the final section Venichka is stabbed through the throat with an awl in an unknown building entrance, and never regains consciousness. At the beginning of this dazzling short novel the hero-narrator is accompanied on his physical and mental peregrinations by the voices of angels. The voices return at the end to mock him, and distinct parallels are drawn between the hero's fate and Christ's passion: Eli, Eli, lama sabakhthani.Venichka spends all the novel trying to get to Petushki, where 'the jasmine never fades and the birds never cease singing', but he achieves immortality in Moscow, having taken his readers on a hilarious and erudite odyssey through Russian history, culture, and politics. In this novel then, Moscow cheats and destroys no less than does Petersburg, but it is also home to the everlasting. Evgenii Popov once told Venedikt Erofeev that he had heard that Moscow-Petushki had been attributed to him (Popov) in some quarters; understandably, Erofeev was not pleased.8 Yet there are several similarities between the two authors, not least the interest in alcohol consumption. Moreover, in Popov's The Soul of a Patriot (1989) Moscow does take on a metaphysical edge as the author wanders through her streets, just as he wanders through his family history and his own biography. The Soul of a Patriothas at its centre the death of Brezhnev in November 1982, and the novel, written more or less contemporaneously with this event, goes a long way to capturing the atmosphere of impending change, of uncertainty and the mixture of hypocrisy and genuine solemnity, of relief and yet foreboding. We went under one more archway, and found ourselves on Gorkii Street near the 'Natasha' shop, where the cordon was, and promptly encountered that winding ribbon of people. The ribbon stretched from Maiakovskii Square along one of the better streets in Moscow, where in the evening it is as bright as day and the people's faces shine .... Shuffling their feet, the people moved along slowly, hardly conversing with one another. Some had their heads hung down, others were carrying briefcases. Had they come from work? Had they been buying groceries? But it was Sunday .... However, perhaps they did have some sort of groceries?
...

procession was clearly turning into Pushkin (formerly Bolshaia Dmitrovka) Street, and heading for the Hall of Columns in the House of Unions. (Moscow: Tekst, 1994), pp. I64-65) (Dushapatriota In this view of the city everything has changed. The centre of Moscow is hushed. The police and security forces are astoundingly polite and helpful. Popov and his
7 Moskva-Petushki, Ostav'te in moiudushuv pokoe:Pochtivse (Moscow: Kh. G. S., 1995), p. 36. This is the largest collection of Erofeev's works to date. 8 This detail is revealed in Popov's novel Podlinnaiaistoriiazelenykh muzykantov (Moscow: Vagrius, I998).

The absence of music and of traffic, the scraping of thousands of shoe soles ....

The

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friend the poet Dmitrii Prigov get closer to the 'epicentre of world history' to see Brezhnev's lying in state, and they are struckby the banality of it, and their feelings are mixed. Popov persistently mentions the former names of streets and the functions and histories of buildings. Battered and bruised though Russian culture may have been by the experiences of the twentieth century, it none the less still exists, and the individual's memory plays a part in reasserting it. In their amblings the two writers restore to Moscow a certain intimacy and character. At one point Popov seems dismayed at a piece of modernist architecture that has displaced some shops and houses. Elsewhere he ties specific buildings to the lives and histories of their former inhabitants. Other recent writers have painted darker pictures of the city. Viktor Erofeev's novel Russian ( Beauty 1990) is the frenetic account by a young upmarketprostitute of her affair with a high-ranking literary bureaucrat in the last years of Brezhnev's rule. There are perhaps more descriptions of body parts and bodily functions than there are of the city per se, and there is a strong element of magic in the text (her genitals smell of bergamot, she copulates with her lover after his death and conceives), but the work can be construed in part as a fairly realistic snapshot of a corrupt and out-of-touch elite, unmindful of the position of Russia in history or of the current state of the nation. In one episode the heroine and some of her dissident friends go off into the countryside and at a local market there is a delightful skit on the age-old gulf between town and country. The heroine later runs naked over an ancient battlefield in order 'to save Russia', but ends up with nothing more than a nasty cold. Liudmila Petrushevskaia specializes in domestic scenes of city life where the overcrowding and poverty generate a Dostoevskian atmosphere of despair and selfregard. Often characters are egoists, unable to see beyond their own misconstrued value-systems. Characters are often physically ill, deformed, or deranged. History and politics are very much on the fringes of their perception and narrativessuch as Time, TheNight(1990), and OurCrowd (I992) paint a chilling portrait of the era of stagnation. Many of her stories, but not all, are relentlesslyrealistic, piling on details of poverty, drunkenness, and domestic conflict, both physical and mental, but they eschew any sensationalism. In the early 199os when the economic problems of a shift to a market economy really began to bite, when there were serious food shortages and on top of all this the attempted coups of i991 and 1993, images of the city as a place of chaos and danger came to the fore once again (had they ever been far away?). Vladimir Makanin's novel TheManhole 199 I) presents a fantasy city in which one society lives ( above ground and another beneath the surface. A not dissimilar notion comes through in Viktor Pelevin's OmonRa (I992), where a man is trained by the authorities, in the strictest secrecy, to be landed on the moon and to operate the moon-buggy there, sacrificinghis life in a bid to keep the Soviet Union in the space race. In this book it turns out that the Soviet Union has no space programme at all to speak of, and the hero discovers that he is being trained and despatched in a closed section of the Moscow underground. The comedy of this work hardly assuages the grim notion of the city as a vast and impersonal construct where the individual is reduced to an automaton. Dmitrii Lipskerov's novel Forty rears in Chanchzhoe (I996) unashamedly owes and rearsof Solitude, admits as much in something to Garcia Marquez's OneHundred

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the comments on its cover. However, in terms of Russian literature and the depiction of the city, it represents something of a new departure and is therefore worth considering at some length. Chanchzhoe is situated in a remote Eastern part of the Russian Federation, its exact location, like the temporal setting of the work, being deliberately vague. Extremely unlikely incidents are matched only by some exceedingly outlandish characters to produce a work of authentic magic realism. If magic realism came about in South America in the wake of the post-war processes of modernization and relative liberalization, then the appearance of such writing in the post-Soviet era is perfectly understandable. Chanchzhoe experiences a bloody invasion of chickens, and the town council is initially at a loss as to how to deal with it, before accepting that some benefit may be derived. The meat and feathers are put to good use. Retired Colonel Shaller is the strongest man in town and a great philanderer. So too was one of the inhabitants of the Korean quarter of the town, who much to the chagrin of the local women, volunteers for public castration when a group of skoptsy (members of a religious sect which practised self-castration)arrivesin town. The local boarding-school is named after him, because he did much to stop the bloodshed in the past when the Russian mounted an ill-fated (as it turned out) pogrom against the Koreans. Mr Teplyi is the teacher at the boarding-school. An accomplished Slavist, a graduate of Vienna University, he originally had great career plans, possibly as interpreter to the Duke of Edinburgh. However, it was discovered that he was a member of a satanic sect and he was forced to retreat to his native Russia and settle in this remote spot. He agrees, for a fee, to try to decode the reams of gibberish that Shaller's wife is pounding out on her typewriter, having fallen into a trance-like state. One of the inmates of the boarding-school, Jerome, goes out murdering chickens at night to avenge the death of his father during the chicken invasion. Teplyi kills and butchers two of his charges, before being murdered himself. The horror at the serial killings is mixed with a general feeling among some inhabitants that this new 'Jackthe Ripper' might put their town on the map. A local merchant Iagudin tries to construct a gigantic Tower of Happiness on which people can ascend to Heaven, but he is killed in his attempt to fly from it. The local physicist, Gogol', manufactures a hot air Balloon of Happiness, but he is the only one brave enough to fly in it. Meanwhile several of the inhabitants are sprouting chicken feathers and the only apparent antidote is the blue apples that Father Gavron, a local monk, has developed. There are some steamy sexual encounters, frequently involving the delectable FrancoiseCoti, and the local press is always ready with news and opinions, not least the tabloid BustandLegs. could be interpreted as a satire in many ways. The Forty rears in Chanchzhoe bumbling attempts by the town council to respond to crises is redolent of an embryonic democracy. The manner in which some charactersabandon their Asiatic names in favour of Russian ones might be construed as a skit on the ethnic problems that have thrust their way violently to the fore since the collapse of communism. The hare-brained schemes and the xenophobia on display in the text have a long tradition in Russia. However, the overall impression the reader is left with is of a free-wheeling, anarchic comedy that basks in its own carefreeness. Inhabitants and chickens pitch for battle at the end of the work, but the chickens fly out in formation while the humans make a mass exodus, the Russians in chaos, the Koreans afterwards,in an

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orderly and dignified fashion. The whole narrative is rounded off with an earthquake. Yet despite murders, bizarre mental and physical afflictions, and the odd earthquake or pogrom, the only character who seems genuinely resentful of the place where he lives is the murderous schoolteacher, who cannot wait to get back to Europe and civilization. All the others seem keen on solving their problems locally. Moreover, Chanchzhoe provides no small degree of bourgeois comfort to many. Shaller and Fran,oise take their pleasure at the side of a private swimmingpool. Shaller's earlier encounter with a female admirer, Liza, takes place in a genteel salon setting more reminiscent of the nineteenth century than the modern age. There is no overcrowding and few, if any, serious economic failings. Since the demise of the Soviet system Russia has once again seen a wholesale renaming of its towns and cities and their streets. The old joke concerning the dissident who was born in Petersburg,reached manhood in Petrograd, now lived in Leningrad and wanted to die in Petersburghas become a reality. Yet such repeated relabelling can only reinforce the sense that urbanization is inimical to any feeling of community and tradition. Small wonder then that Lipskerov sets his story on the fringes of Russia proper, unearths the meaning of the city's name (it means 'Chicken City'), incorporates a possible 'translation' of Mrs Shaller's gibberish (it is no less than a chronicle of the town), and emphasizes the generational links among the population. A true sense of family and communal history is packed into those forty years. At one point in the chronicle the inhabitants even triumph over a Mongol siege. Such corporate notions should be set against the polemic offered in Geoffrey Hosking's recent Russia:Peopleand Empire(I997) that the Russians succeeded for several centuries in building and maintaining an empire, but have failed singularly in building a nation. Can Russian cities now look forward to a sustained period of organic, settled, and steady growth, that might engender stronger feelings of tradition and community? Or will they have to settle for such development only within the unpredictable realms of magic realism, and at the price of pogroms, serial murders, earthquakes,and Mongol invasions?
UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL

ROBERT PORTER