http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspxstory_id=2109760&window_type=print
The flickering aesthetics of Victor Erofeyev
Oliver Ready
19 January 2005
KHOROSHI STALIN
Victor Erofeyev
383pp. | Moscow: ZebraE. | 5 94663 132 2
LIFE WITH AN IDIOT
Translated by Andrew Reynolds
Victor Erofeyev
242pp. | Penguin. Paperback, £7.99. | 0 14 023621 X
Fame has stalked Victor Erofeyev since his schooldays. On a café veranda on
the Côte d’Azur in the mid-1950s, a short man in a striped vest asked him
who he wanted to be. “No one”, Erofeyev replied. Pablo Picasso, his
interrogator, was impressed, and complimented the child on his musical
fingers and his eyes “as sad as those of Jean Cocteau”.
The incident is reported in the documentary novel, Khoroshii Stalin (The
Good Stalin), recently published in Russian and in German, and by some
margin Erofeyev’s most engaging work to date. Assuming that the conversation
actually took place, one can agree with the conclusion that the child’s
reply proved strangely prophetic. Now entering his late fifties, Erofeyev
has become, in Russia, both a celebrity and a nobody; the lack of mystique
evoked by his name matches the calculated charmlessness of his fiction. In
Moscow, where he has been based for several decades, he regularly appears in
all the media, yet far more is produced by him than about him, while the
verdict of the literati remains stubbornly dismissive, especially following
the commercial and critical success in the West of his debut novel Russian
Beauty (1992). The fact that Khoroshii Stalin first came out in Berlin has
further entrenched his reputation as a writer for export only.
In Khoroshii Stalin, Erofeyev confronts directly a primary reason for the
intelligentsia’s antipathy: its refusal to forgive him his “disgusting
origins”. Erofeyev’s father, to whom the book is dedicated, is the good
Stalin of the title. Among his postings, this loyal Soviet emissary worked
in France to promote cultural exchange, and in Senegal and Gambia as
ambassador; back in Moscow, he worked under Molotov and even as an assistant
to Stalin himself, translating René Clair’s film Sous les Toits de Paris
(1930) directly into the Leader’s ear. On the verge of still greater
honours, Vladimir Ivanovich Erofeyev’s career ended abruptly after his son
instigated and co-edited Metropol (1979), an unofficial literary almanac
which provoked a political scandal and led to the emigration of several of
its better-known contributors. Indeed, Khoroshii Stalin begins with the
confession: “In the end, I killed my dad”. Yet, not even metaphorical
parricide ensured Erofeyev’s good name among writers whose respect he
craved; nor, it seems, has he earned reprieve through his influential
articles trumpeting the death of Soviet literature in all its guises and
championing the “alternative” literature whose roots lie in the Soviet,
non-dissident underground, and which he anthologized in Russia’s Fleurs du
Mal (1995). In Khoroshii Stalin, Erofeyev resigns himself to his
unpopularity. With characteristic capriciousness, he delights in the
memories of his sheltered, “Stalinist” childhood and in the charms of the
nomenklatura’s retreats, among mushrooms “untouched by the people”.
Erofeyev’s career has also been plagued by a different curse: before it even
started, another, unrelated, V. V. Erofeyev (Venedikt), had penned
Moskva-Petushki (1969), the most widely acknowledged classic of Soviet
underground prose. This absurd, finally wearying, coincidence warrants only
passing mention in Khoroshii Stalin, but it is treated at length, and with
admirable good humour, in an earlier essay “Erofeyev vs Erofeyev”: “I met
Erofeyev for the first time in the lift. He looked straight ahead. I looked
straight down. We ascended in silence. Both of us knew he was better than me
in every way. Taller, more handsome, straighter, nobler, more experienced,
more daring, more stylish, stronger in spirit. And infinitely more talented”.
Advisedly, the impostor barely takes issue with the legend of homeless,
meek, vodka-sodden “Venichka”, generated at the intersection of
Moskva-Petushki and the life of its author. It has endured as Russian
culture’s standing reproach to the establishment represented by the family
of the other Erofeyev.
In the same essay, Erofeyev consoles himself that the “vampiric” influence
of his namesake, who died in 1990, has at least freed him from writer’s
vanity. It must also have encouraged him in his efforts, quite against the
Russian grain, to turn the cult of the author into one of his most
persistent targets, whether in Khoroshii Stalin (“profound complacency
accounts for 30 per cent of any given writer; fear of death, 20 per cent;
belief in his own uniqueness, 50 per cent”) or in his early stories from the
1980s, which may now be read in this vigorous translation by Andrew
Reynolds. In Life With an Idiot, literary types appear in many guises, all
of them idiotic. In “Boldino Autumn”, Sisin is shaken out of his writer’s
block soon after recalling Ivan Karamazov’s formula, “If there is no God,
then everything is permitted”; but his creative burst is modest, amounting
to a dozen variations on the phrase, “Everything is shit”.
The slow death of the Russian author amid the devalued words of his
ancestors is a theme of both Erofeyevs (one wonders why, given that both
witnessed, through samizdat, the explosive recovery and discovery of
numerous literary geniuses and innovators). Moskva-Petushki ends with the
narrator describing his own death. Victor Erofeyev, by contrast, has sought
to make a radical break with what he calls the “subjectivism” of his
forebears. His characters are not allowed to be meaningfully self-absorbed,
nor to tempt identification with the author; speech is freed from their
illusory control. Instead, they are subjected to a narrative that jumps
between place and time, voices and dreams, a “flickering aesthetics”.
Paradoxically, however, a number of the stories collected here prove inert
and indigestible. It soon becomes clear that what Erofeyev’s Modernist
experiments actually depend on is a fixation with corpses and various
“flowers of evil”: torture, aggressive insanity and all-consuming Eros. The
stories only get going when several of these ingredients are in play;
indeed, it is only then that narrative is possible at all, and that the
endless collision of speech registers and citation comes alive. “The
Parakeet” takes the form of a deranged letter from an unidentified official
to a father, describing his abuse and murder of the father’s son as
punishment for the child’s attempts to get a dead bird to fly; in “Cotton
Wool”, a mother goads her child into suffocating himself with a plastic bag.
Such is the tenor of Erofeyev’s “anti-humanism”, whose premisses he has
since articulated, with fearless generalization, in his critical
manifestoes. In his introduction to Russia’s Fleurs du Mal, he attacks not
just the Soviet cult of optimism and immorality, but also the
nineteenth-century novelists for making such idiocies possible: nearly all
of them (including Dostoevsky and Tolstoy) are charged with colluding in a
false philosophy of hope in mankind, a conspiracy Erofeyev traces back to
the Enlightenment and forward to the Soviet atrocities committed in the name
of utopia. Even Turgenev’s nihilist Bazarov, he notes, promoted the belief
that man is good – it is his circumstances that are to blame.
Life With an Idiot also pursues the concerns of Erofeyev’s earliest essays
on existentialism and on the Marquis de Sade. Just as Russia had yet to
recognize itself in Sade’s exploration of violence and eroticism, Erofeyev
had written in 1971, so too had Russian authors failed to learn from a
writer who “never wanted to teach or to heal”. The essay, however, rests on
the same contradiction that would characterize Erofyev’s fiction: just as
Sade, in Erofeyev’s account, teaches not to teach, the stories in Life With
an Idiot are oppressively didactic in their overwhelming nihilism, their
one-sided emphasis on man’s destructive impulses. In the absence of any
counterweight, the stories seem overdetermined; it is hard to believe
Erofeyev really means it, even though he has the history of the Russian
twentieth century on his side. More-over, in a few cases, his experiments
seem imitative of the “alternative” literary tradition that he would later
chronicle. Two of the better stories – “Cotton Wool” and “The Maiden and
Death” – are strongly reminiscent, down to signature linguistic features, of
the grotesque fictional world of hysterical craziness, domestic cruelty and
necrophiliac yearnings created in the 1950s and 60s by Yury Mamleyev.
Erofeyev’s most successful marriage of underground themes and “flickering
aesthetics” occurs in the title story, which has translated well into an
opera by Alfred Schnittke (1991) and a less well-known, but skilful andn
unsettling film directed by Alexander Rogozhkin (1993). Andrew Reynolds has
also succeeded in transferring it into another cultural idiom, showing great
inventiveness in his wordplay, and replacing Erofeyev’s intentionally
hackneyed quotations, from Gogol and Akhmatova, with lines from Shakespeare
and Yeats.
With its provocative title, Erofeyev’s text immediately throws down the
challenge to its precursors. Against the frequent idealization of the mad
and the “wholly foolish” in Russian literature, Erofeyev asks what it would
be like to take them home. Life with an idiot is the narrator’s unexplained
punishment – and ours as readers. We follow the narrator into the asylum,
where he chooses an inmate whom he fancies to have a professorial,
Leninesque appearance and whom he nicknames Vova. The narrator, then, is an
idealist (or an idiot), looking for a sage (or a dictator). Bringing Vova
home to his Proust-loving wife, he unleashes the homo-erotic anarchy of his
befuddled writerly dreams. The interest of the story lies in the fact that
it is more than parody and more than deconstruction. There is genuine
tension in the treatment of the madness and ecstasy spread by Vova, as
Erofeyev revisits the dilemmas of writers of the Silver Age such as Andrei
Bely (in Petersburg), or Alexander Blok, who, in “The Collapse of Humanism”
(1919), breathlessly described how the world was ridding itself of a surfeit
of civilization. The story also continues Erofeyev’s ambivalent engagement
with Dostoevsky. In The Idiot, Erofeyev observed in an early essay,
Dostoevsky had shown the failure of “restrained, rational love”: “Only the
madness of love can save. Only with that kind of love can you carry people
with you”.
It is probably wise not to seek too many comparisons with “Life With an
Idiot” when reading the more restrained Khoroshii Stalin, which was written
almost a quarter of a century later, but which is also based on the
relations between three people – mother, father and son. In Erofeyev’s
account of his childhood years in France, which supplies the book’s most
memorable pages, his mother emerges as a reluctant politico’s wife whose
dream was to be a literary translator and who was quick to assimilate
Parisian ways; his father, by contrast, emerges as a reluctant cultural
attaché who barely ever read a book but who remained a devoted, even
ascetic adept of the “good” Stalinist dream:
"I know: my father is a good Stalin. Every family is a Communist cell. The
father is master: he loves, he hates. Stalin took all Russians for
children – that’s what they are. I never once saw my father drunk."
As this passage shows, Erofeyev has not abandoned his flickering style or
his preference for unattributable speech, but here he generally employs
these devices in a more measured manner and to greater effect, teasing
historical allegory out of a rich store of personal and paternal testimony.
The psychological focus of the novel is the son’s vacillation between mother
and father, between refuge in culture and seduction by power. Erofeyev
confesses openly to his absurd pride in Stalin’s affectionate treatment
towards his father, and even to the enjoyment with which he savours the
barbaric retribution carried out by the Red Army at the end of the Second
World War.
In contrast to this radical self-exposure and self-damnation, he sculpts a
vivid biography of a strong and morally consistent father, a “Soviet
Candide”. He describes at length his father’s peregrinations in Europe as a
wartime diplomat, and his refusal of an amputation that seemed to be his
only hope. He also relates his father’s many narrow political escapes as he,
or his superiors, fell in and out of favour; and his ultimate act of
magnanimity towards his son, whom he dissuaded from writing a public
statement of apology during the Metropol crisis. More broadly, the father
serves as a battering-ram by which to arrive at an explanation of the
enduring status of Stalin as a hero of the people: "I’ve grown up and
understood a thing or two: for the West and the greater part of the Russian
intelligentsia, Stalin is one thing; for many millions of Russians, he’s
another. They don’t believe in a bad Stalin. They can’t believe that Stalin
could ever have tortured or killed. The people have squirrelled away their
image of a good Stalin, saviour of Russia, father of a great nation. My dad
walked with the people. Don’t insult Stalin!"
Apparently honest to a fault, Khoroshii Stalin is also a deliberate tease,
as much a mockery of the reader as the earlier stories: are we faced with a
fiction that reads like an autobiography, or an autobiography disguised as a
novel? The author’s ageing parents clearly took the former view and, not for
the first time, the Erofeyev family drama has been played out in the
national press. In an extraordinary article in Moskovskie Novosti last July,
Erofeyev describes his parents’ appalled reaction to the book, especially to
the portrait of the father as
a cultural philistine and to an episode that related their joint beating of
their son. Erofeyev admits that several of the episodes have been entirely
made up but refuses to say which ones. Acknowledging and enumerating his
parents’ criticisms, and reiterating his love for his mother, he
nevertheless stands by his novelistic approach.
Khoroshii Stalin also prompts reservations of a different nature. The
bookish sections are unsatisfying, with a lengthy chronicle of the Metropol
affair substituting for real insight into the literary and artistic circles
to which Erofeyev remains heavily indebted, especially in his treatment of
the relationship between artist and authority. His statement, for example,
that “My Stalin is the great artist of life”, echoes rather loudly a
celebrated comment by the philosopher Boris Groys, that “Stalin was the only
artist of the Stalin era”. Elsewhere, the musings on chance and accidental
guilt recall the concerns of Andrei Sinyavsky, whose Good-night! (1984) is
another example of autobiographical, Stalin-centred fiction.
Other writers of recent decades may have confronted the past with more
profound originality (the philosopher Dmitry Galkovsky would be one example
from a younger generation), but few have commanded Erofeyev’s global
readership. With Khoroshii Stalin, he persists as a media don for the
alternative academy of the late Soviet era, exposing to greater light the
preoccupations of a remote and often hermetic intellectual context. The
threshold, he states, is his homeland. After a life lived between languages
and cultures, between the shadows of the powerful (his father) and the
mythically powerless (his namesake), this is one postmodernist claim to
which Victor Erofeyev remains uniquely entitled.
|