4
Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of Platonov is that the quality of his work makes it hard to sustain an engaged discourse about his contemporaries and those who came after him. This may even be cited by the powers-that-be as a reason for suppressing both Chevengiir and The Foundation Pit. On the other hand, it's precisely the suppression of these two books, resulting in a lack of awareness of their existence, that has allowed a great number of writers—both his and our contemporaries—to go on with their production. There are crimes the forgiving of which is a crime also, and this is one of them. Suppression of Platonov's two novels not only set back the entire literature some fifty years; it also hampered the development of the national psyche as such by the same number of years. Burning books, after all, is just a gesture; not publishing them is a falsification of time. But then again, that is precisely the goal of the system: to issue its own version of the future.
Now this future has arrived, and although it's not exactly what the system bet on, in terms of Russian prose it's far less than it should have been. It's a good prose all right, but both stylistically and philosophically, it's far less enterprising than the prose of the twenties and thirties. It's conservative enough to enable one to talk about "traditions of Russian prose," of course, but it knows in what century it lives. For the latest in that knowledge it has to go, unfortunately, to foreign authors, most of whom still have less to offer than that same Platonov. In the sixties the best of modern Russian writers were taking their cues from Hemingway, Heinrich Boll, Salinger, and, to a lesser extent, from Camus and Sartre. The seventies were the decade of Nabokov, who is to Platonov what a tightrope walker is to a Chomolungma climber. The sixties also saw the first selection in Russian of writings by Kafka, and that mattered a lot. Then Borges came out, and on the horizon looms the Russian translation of Robert Musil's great masterpiece.
There are a great many other foreign authors of lesser stature who, one way or another, today teach Russian writers a lesson in modernism, from Cortazar to Iris Murdoch; but as has already been said, it's only the best of them who are willing to learn this lesson. The ones who really learn this lesson properly are the readers, and today an average Russian reader is much smarter than a promising Russian writer. Also, the trouble with the best is that they are writers of mainly satirical bent, and they face from the outset obstacles of such magnitude that they have to go easy even on that acquired knowledge. Apart from this, in the last decade there has been emerging in the country a largely unpalatable, strong tendency toward nationalistic self-appreciation, and many a writer, consciously or unwittingly, caters to that tendency, which often has the attraction of asserting the national identity in the face of the depersonalizing mass of the state. Natural and commendable as such an aspiration may be, for literature it beats a stylistic and aesthetic retreat and means recoiling without firing a destructive salvo, sequestering oneself in narcissistic self-pity because of having curbed one's own metaphysical ability. I am talking here obviously of the "peasant prose," which, initsAn taeus-like desire totouch the ground, went a bit too far and took root.
Neither in invention nor in overall world view does the Russian prose of today offer anything qualitatively new. Its most profound perception to date is that the world is radically evil, and the state is but that evil's blind, if not necessarily blunt, instrument. Its most avant-garde device is stream of consciousness; its most burning ambition is to admit eroticism and foul language into print: not, alas, for the sake of the print, but to further the cause of realism. Thoroughly fundamentalist in its values, it employs stylistic devices whose chief attraction lies in their familiar solidity. The name of the game is, in short, classical standards. But here is the rub.
What underlies this concept—classical standards—is the idea of man being the measure of all things. To tie them to a particular historical past, say, to the Victorian era, amounts to the dismissal of the species' psychological development. To say the least, it's like believing that a seventeenth-century man felt hunger more than his modern counterpart. Thus by harping on the traditional values of Russian fiction, on its "severe spirit of Orthodoxy," and whatnot, the critical profession invites us to judge this fiction by standards which are not so much classical as those of yesterday. A work of art is always a product of its time, and it should be judged by this time's standards, by the standards of its century to say the least (especially if that century is about to be over). It is precisely because Russia produced such great prose in the nineteenth century that there is no need for special provisions in evaluation of its contemporary fiction.
As in everything else, in the way of prose this century has seen a lot. What it has come to value, it seems, apart from popular-at-all-times straight storytelling, is a stylistic invention as such, a structural device—montage, hopscotch, whatever. In other words, it has come to like a display of self-awareness, manifested by the narrator's distancing himself from the narrative. That, after all, is time's own posture toward existence. In still other words, in art, this century (alias time) has come to like itself, the reflection of its own features: fragmentation, incoherence, an absence of content, a dimmed or a bird's-eye view of the human predicament, of suffering, of ethics, of art itself. For lack of a better name, the compendium of these features is commonly called today "modernism," and it is of "modernism" that contemporary Russian fiction, both published and underground, falls markedly short.
By and large, it still clings to an extensive, conventional narrative with an emphasis on a central character and his development, along the lines of a Bildungsroman technique, hoping—and not without good reason—that, by reproducing reality in its minute detail, it may produce a sufficiently surrealistic or absurdist effect. The grounds for such hope, of course, are solid: the quality of the reality of the country; oddly, though, that turns out to be not enough. What thwarts these hopes is precisely the stylistic conventionality of the means of depiction, which hark back to the psychological atmosphere of these means' noble origins, i.e., to the nineteenth century, i.e., to irreality.
There was one particular moment, for instance, in Sol- zhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, when Russian prose, as well as the writer himself, came within a two- or three-paragraph distance of a decisive breakthrough. Solzhenitsyn describes in one chapter the daily grind of a woman doctor. The description's flatness and monotony definitely matches the list of her tasks, epic in their length and idiocy, yet this list lasts longer than anyone's ability to sustain a dispassionate tone recording it: a reader expects an explosion: it is too unbearable. And this is exactly where the author stops. Had he gone on for two or three paragraphs more with this disproportion—of tone and content—we might have gotten a new literature; we might have gotten a real absurdity, engendered not by the stylistic endeavor of a writer but by the very reality of things.