The Postcolonial Perspective

exorcizing empire:

IURii andrukhovych's Moscoviad

The collapse of the Soviet Union was accompanied by the publication of Ukrainian works that were intended to shake off the legacy of cultural dependence.

Another example of anticolonial writing is Ievhen Hutsalo’s collec­tion of essays The Horde Mentality: Essays (Mentalnist Ordy. Statti, 1996). The writer deconstructs Dmitrii Likhachev’s claim (traditional among nationalists, as we have seen) that “Forces of attraction, acting especially [powerfully] upon weaker, less numerous nations allowed Russia to preserve approximately two hundred nations on its expanses.”¹ Hutsalo gives examples, ranging from Russian folklore (including the earliest bylinas and songs about Ermak) to recent literature and journalism, of a will to power that sanctioned violence against non-Russians and the taking of war bounty. He tries to dem­onstrate how both nineteenth-century and contemporary writers inter­nalized nationalist mythology and colonialist rhetoric with roots in the past. The rightfulness of Russian expansion and the “naturalness” of its rule, as argued in the works of nineteenth-century apologists of empire like the historian Sergei Solovev and journalists of the day, are counterposed to eyewitness reports of the behaviour of Russian, and later of Soviet, troops in Siberia and Central Asia.

Relaxed censorship allowed the publication of many proscribed works in Russian literature. In ιg8g, on the eve of the dissolution of the USSR, Vasilii Grossman’s Forever Flowing (Vse techet, 1g70), a book the author had completed a year before his death in 1g64, was made available to readers in the USSR.² Many Russians found it offensive because, like Hutsalo’s text, it surveys centuries of Russian history and reaches the conclusion that the legacy of oppression, fear, and colonial violence has ingrained hypocritical, xenophobic, and submissive atti­tudes in many Russians. It is worth noting in particular that the book makes explicit the connection between violent conquests of the impe­rial past and the horrors of Stalinism. The narrator’s father, for exam­ple, justifies the expulsion of the Circassians from the territory they now inhabit: “When they chop down the forest, the chips will fly! And, for that matter, the Circassians were not driven out of here. They left for Turkey of their own free will. They could have remained and profited from Russian culture. In Turkey they became paupers and many died.”³ Other characters assuage their bad consciences by using the same words to justify forced collectivization, famine, mass arrests and the stifling of dissent. One of the most important examples of “chips flying” in the twentieth century and one that also figures in his Life and Fate (Zhizn i sudba, 1g80) is the famine of 1g33. In a central section of Forever Flowing it is described as an attack on the Ukrainian “other”: the peasants’ un-Russian attachment to private property, it is said, became the scapegoat for the failure of Moscow’s policies, result­ing in a decree that they be “put to death by starvation.” In an implicit rejection of dehumanizing, stereotypical portrayals of the peasantry that were common in the twenties and thirties, Grossman shows them as helpless victims of yet another attempt at radical social engineering.

The fundamental problem of Russia’s historical development, argues the hero of Forever Flowing, has created a chasm between Rus­sian and European life. Its origins lie in the fact that “Western devel­opment was based on a growth in freedom, while Russia’s was based on the intensification of slavery.”⁴ Russian leaders sacrificed individual liberties in favour of state aggrandisement, hoping to drive their subjects into paradise through brute force. Peter and Catherine extended serfdom; Lenin laid the foundations for Stalin’s regime. Great Russian writers like Dostoevsky tacitly acquiesced to this fact by encouraging imperial expansion and developing a cult of the “Russian soul” that was frequently a smokescreen behind which hid reckless­ness, philistinism, and brutality. This attack on centuries of tsarist and post-tsarist history and this challenge to the concept of Russia’s unique spiritual qualities proved unpalatable to many readers and critics until the late eighties.

The “imperial syndrome” still dominated the thinking of many political and intellectual circles that worked openly for the return of Ukraine to a state structure dominated by Russia. During the nineties, discussions in the press rehearsed many arguments of the colonial dis­course.

Vitalii Korotych quipped that Russia was most terrified of the fact that the world could get on quite well without it, while the writer Iurii Nagibin declared that “the greatest fault of Russians lies in the fact that they consider themselves faultless.”⁸

The break-up of the Soviet Union was accompanied by the sudden appearance of a new, postmodern literature in which an unexpected detachment from politics, a playful parody and an irreverent humour predominated. These qualities deflated the earnest mythmaking of both imperial and Soviet times. Although “classics” of Russian post­modernism such as Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House (Pushkinskii dom, 1971), Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line (Moskva- Petushki, 1977), and Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools (Shkola dlia durakov, 1976) had earlier been published in the West, it was only in the late eighties and early nineties that they were made available to a wide public in their entirety.

Marko Pavlyshyn has described Andrukhovych’s grouping andjux- taposition of hallowed images as an iconostasis.¹⁰ It is an apt descrip­tion of the effect produced in the novels by the simultaneous appearance of symbolic literary and cultural figures who are emblem­atic both of empire (in Moscoviad) and nation (in Recreations).

Moskoviad is a personal farewell to the Soviet capital (the author studied for two years in Moscow), but beyond this, and indirectly, it is a coming to terms with an entire imperial era in Ukrainian history. The imperial “icons” who, at the novel’s conclusion, meet beneath Moscow in a secret underground conference hall to discuss “saving” the “one and indivisible” Russia are contemporaries who have selected the roles and personalities of historical personae. They appear in the masks and imitate the voices and views of historical figures: Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, General Suvorov, Lenin, and Dzerzhin­sky - an indication that imperial behaviour has been assimilated and is being mimicked by the present generation for whom it still serves as the mainspring of thought and action. The group gathers in a secret inner chamber deep beneath Moscow’s Lubianka Prison and the Chil­dren’s World shopping centre. They are the archetypal figures who have developed and continue to reinforce its ideology. The proximity of the Lubianka and Children’s World are appropriate. This ideology exploits both terror and infantilization, its exponents in the under­ground chamber describe how they have manipulated the psychology and conduct of imperial citizens over generations.

In the adjacent main conference hall a large number of Russian nationalists have also gathered. They include black-shirted fascists, tsarist sympathizers, and other contemporaries who profess a violent, authoritarian creed. All are inheritors of the same imperial ideology. They drink to “a united and indivisible Russia,” to a “new Russia, that will be like the old Russia.” The narrator senses in these reflex reac­tions “some kind of sacral force, the militant statist substance of Holy Rus, the spirit of Ivan Kalita, Peter I, and perhaps even Marshal Arkhromeev.”¹³ He himself has stumbled into this heart of jingoistic darkness by accident and has been mistakenly welcomed as the repre­sentative of a loyal Ukraine. The key to the current disorder in the state, a Russian fellow-poet informs him, is the loss of “Slavic unity” - a reminder that with Ukraine as a cooperative partner the superpower status of Russia remains secure. The communists are blamed for breaking up the empire, something that Batu, Napoleon, and Mazepa failed to do. Their dissatisfaction is not with communism but with its inability to maintain the territorial integrity of the empire bequeathed to it by centuries of tsarism. Andrukhovych’s novel, it is to be remem­bered, appeared at a time when Russian nationalism and messianism were once more openly displayed and were being actively encouraged in ruling circles - a reaction, one critic claimed, “to the trauma of losing an empire.”¹⁴

This denouement beneath the Lubianka comes at the end of a day in the life of the narrator-hero, a Ukrainian poet studying in Moscow. The reader follows him through a series of encounters in a cafe, the apartment of a former lover, and the city’s underground tunnels, before emerging in the conference hall. His experiences reveal the sordid and dismal life of a society in dissolution. They are interspersed with the poet’s reminiscences concerning his sexual relationships with women and contacts with fellow-writers and his musings on the difficulties of surviving in the city. His primary concern is the satisfaction of immedi­ate needs: sex, drink, bathing, catching a pickpocket, escaping arrest. It is in the course of these events that he finds his way into the under­ground tunnels beneath the city, where he makes the discovery that the regime is secretly breeding giant rats, which it plans to set upon the restive population if the army and police force prove unreliable.

The text undermines key desiderata in colonialism’s ideology. It demythologizes the capital as a brilliant centre of culture and ele­gance. Andrukhovych displays literary life, and Moscow in general, as an unappetising universe ruled by careerism and hypocrisy. The goods of the dominant culture are defective, or, like the toys in Children’s World, simply missing. In fact, the metropolitan culture is narrow and reactionary, full of half-baked street philosophers and alcoholics who recite disconnected fragments of chauvinistic poetry or quote phrases from the Bible. The international stature of the dominant culture and its civilizing role, which is related to the regime’s claims to impose the Pax Sovieticus in the region, are called into question. The hero’s jealous Russian lover ends his relationship with Astrid, an international aid worker from abroad. The Russian woman keeps snakes in her apart­ment and, it is implied, uses them to poison Astrid. Everywhere the hero witnesses explosions of the state violence that has been internal­ized by the common people. His relationship with his Russian lover ends in a violent scene when he makes it clear to her that he is leaving for good. He fights with a local pickpocket (who also happens to be an expatriate Ukrainian), observes beatings on the street and in a restaurant, narrowly escapes a bomb explosion, reports on rapes and Mafia killings, and hears a constant stream of abusive language. This is the real metropolis. It is a world far removed from the glamour of high culture. Only once, while in the dark underground, does he hear distant music from a concert hall somewhere above.

The political myth of Ukraine as a junior partner, a willing sharer in the spoils of empire is also queried. The hero, who appears con­cerned only with sex, sustenance, and survival, unrepentantly does whatever is necessary to make his life easier, and is blackmailed at one point into cooperating with the kgb, does not lack a sense of identity or a conscience. He attempts to dispel cliches concerning Ukrainians that are held by his Russian friends and argues the cause of indepen­dence with them. Andrukhovych draws a distinction between Russia and Ukraine by contrasting two dominant architectural styles: the Stalinist “empire” style as contrasted with the baroque style of Ukraine. Finally, he ridicules the view of the Soviet Union as a consortium of contented cultures and nations who have all benefited from absorp­tion into the state. Cultural life is shown as inauthentic and superficial, a melange of cliches culled from various constituent cultures. Like the writers’ residence in which the narrator lives, it is an agglomeration, an artificial unity of separate existences “dreamed up by the system for its ownjustification and self-placation.”¹⁵

Andrukhovych also disconcerts Ukrainian nationalists by suggesting, albeit flippantly, that there were moments of communion between the cultures and that Ukrainians were partly responsible for their fate because of their spiritual and political prostitution. His metaphor for this political collaboration is sexual intercourse, in particular between powerful Russian figures and prominent Ukrainians. In his “Letters from Ukraine,” a series of poems written at the same time as his Moscoviad, he treats this political-sexual relationship with sardonic humour. Feofan Prokopovych, the first Ukrainian collaborator with the empire, he says, was a homosexual who slept with Peter the Great, setting a precedent in this, as in many other things, for a long list of compatriots who sought a route to power and influence. Oleksa Rozumovsky (Aleksei Razumovsky in Russian) the lover, and later the husband, of the Empress Elizabeth was a good singer. Andrukhovych remarks wryly, that he “did more for Ukraine than any other tenor.”¹⁶ Ukrainians themselves have helped to create Russian culture, even in its kitsch version. It was, he writes, the Ukrainian writer Grebenka (Hrebinka) who wrote the unfadingly popular “Ochi chernye” (Black Eyes), now sung in restaurants around the world and which, along with “Kalinka-malinka” and Dostoevsky’s novels, constitutes “the weight­iest contribution of Russia to world culture.”¹⁷ In Moscoviad the narra­tor’s relationship with his Russian lover is a mirroring of the political breakup. In the same way, his meeting with the aristocratically man­nered Ukrainian pickpocket is an encounter with his Russified alter ego. It is appropriate that the narrator’s fight with the pickpocket ends with his “countryman” (zemliak) disappearing into the open sewers in the basement of the building, to become part of the city’s waste. The hero has refused to heed his countryman’s frantic pleas for help as he hangs helplessly over the sewer in his final moments. This can be interpreted as a symbolic break with the degenerate, collaborationist maloros mentality.

The postcolonial moment, however, unlike the anticolonial, does not attempt to produce nationalist countermyths but, in Pavlyshyn ’s words, “turns the tables on the colonisers, rather than engaging them in combat.”¹⁸ The postcolonial makes playful use of the stories, beliefs, and rituals that constitute the colonial attitude, reprocessing them in order to generate its own identity. It delights in the use of pastiche and parody. Rejecting overarching metanarratives, it deemphasizes both history and teleology, preferring instead to concentrate on the contemporary individual’s relationship to the surrounding environ­ment. As an attempt to supersede and transcend the narratives of both colonialism and anticolonialism, it refuses Russian or Soviet teleolog­ical imperatives (by making fun, for instance, of the widely promoted view that Russians, as guardians of the Third Rome, have a special spiritual power and mission) and rejects widely held nationalist views of Ukraine as an innocent victim of history.

Andrukhovych’s works delight in juxtaposing styles and incongruous levels of language. His uplifting national sentiments are delivered by alcoholics in sordid bars, while his curses are elaborated with the wit and grace of baroque dramas. He loves long enumerations that juxta­pose and intermingle the incompatible and combine opposites. The present moment is constructed out of the past, of which the imperial experience is a large part, but the new writing, while acknowledging this fact, reworks all available elements into a new consciousness and identity. Thus the opening sections of the novel portray the bricolage of the poet-narrator’s life: there are pictures of Cossacks and zunr politicians on the wall, the Ostankino broadcasting tower is visible in the background, oriental music penetrates from another room, and the voices of neighbouring Jewish, Russian, and other writers can be heard in the background. The old can be recycled into the new, the low-brow can be remodelled into the high-brow, the local can coexist with the universal, and the imaginary with the real. They come together in a shock of discovery to create the new sensibility.

The postcolonial and postmodernist writings of Andrukhovych, Viktor Neborak, and Oleksandr Irvanets, and of the Propala hramota, Luhosad, and other groups have moved the discourse of empire away from binary oppositions. Although the legacy of hegemonic cultural attitudes is still a theme in their works, it is clear that the new writing makes a determined attempt to shift the war of discourses onto a new plane. A fluid and ambiguous cultural situation does not disturb these writers but instead provides the conjunctions and contrasts for their best effects. The succession of backdrops, by allowing the incorpora­tion of various worlds and experiences, underlines the simultaneous presence within reality of many pasts and possibilities. These authors have been prepared to play with the painful marks of their own forced hybridity, the very symbols of their own divided identity. Bohdan Zholdak, for example, uses surzhyk, the macaronic mixture of Ukrai­nian and Russian and a humiliating legacy of colonialism, to hilarious effect.¹⁹ These writers have also introduced forms of proscribed or “aberrant” discourse such as the narratives of the alcoholic, the deranged, and the sexually promiscuous into literature’s mainstream.

Andrukhovych’s work also provides an example of the trajectory of current postcolonial writing. His first two novels exploded anticolonial and colonial mythologies. His third novel, Perverziia. Roman (Perver­sion: A Novel) shows the difficulty of defining cultural autonomy in the contemporary environment.²⁰ The hero, Stas Perfetsky, is a writer who has emerged into a global environment and must confront the prospect of a “recolonization” by new, unfamiliar processes: global cap­italism, the mass media, and Western myopias and obsessions. Perfetsky travels to a conference in Venice entitled “The Postcarnival Absurdity of the World: What is on the Horizon?” The speakers are to discuss inauthenticity, “the total unoriginality of everything,” in the present, which is dominated by “quotation, collage and deconstruction.”²¹ Par­ticipants listen to a talk on carnival as a defence against the decay of “the human” in people.²² Another talk is given by a globe-trotting, fabulously rich feminist who decries patriarchy. A third, by the star of the conference, is translated into many languages but remains incom­prehensible in any. It is a confusing, self-reflexive environment where fantasy and reality are frequently indistinguishable. The hero himself thinks, “In truth no reality exists. There is only an endless number of our versions of it, each of which is false, and all of which, taken together, are mutually contradictory.”²³ Perfetsky attempts to give a talk on Ukraine and its place in the world, but it becomes clear that he too has fallen victim to contemporary relativism. His descriptions of the history and geography of Ukraine mix myth and reality: Ukrainians themselves are the product of a “carnival of tribes” who have at various times passed through the land and who have all left their trace in the genes and mentality of the people. The speaker enumerates a long list of cultural myths that have been constructed to describe his homeland, each of which might contain a grain of truth, but each of which is also a distortion. The very possibility of any authentic existence or auton­omous culture appears impossible.

At the end of the novel, Perfetsky appears to stage his own suicide, which occurs on the night of 10 March, the anniversary of Shevchenko’s death. This symbolic death in Venice allows him to cut all ties with his previous existence, to achieve his ambition of “begin­ning everything anew.”²⁴

The novel deals with Ukraine’s interaction with the contemporary West. Intellectuals have displayed two responses toward Western moder­nity. One has been an optimistic attempt to embrace self-development and self-awareness, to celebrate the possibilities of choice. A second, far more anxiety-ridden response has been to recognize real power rela­tions and the limited potential of irony and carnival to deconstruct cultural narratives generated in distant metropolises. In the light of these attitudes Andrukhovych’s book suggests a mixed response to the postcolonial moment. For all the stress on fun and carnival, there are troubled undertones. Whereas the first two novels could be seen as responses to nationalism and colonialism, the last novel deals with the problem of integration with a West that remains unresponsive and obsessed with itself. Having “joined Europe,” the author appears to say, Ukrainian writers now find themselves increasingly part of a “Euro­pean” malaise and have acquired a new set of dilemmas. The project of cultural demythologizing and identity creation must now be con­ducted in a wide and confusing cultural arena.