The Post-Soviet Apocalypse and Its Spatial Allotropes (2000)

Intertexts, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2000 The Post-Soviet Apocalypse and Its Spatial Allotropes Harry Walsh U n i v e r s i t y o f H o u s t o n One of the features defining the post-modern world, in the view of Fredric Jameson, is the covert feeling that “we now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic,” with the result that “our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism” (16). Notice in this regard how easily Italo Calvino gives time spatial attributes as he muses over die possibility that the novel form is out ofsynchronywiththesetimes:“Thedimensionoftimehasbeenshattered, we cannot live or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears” (8). The present studylooksatoneprobablemanifestationofsuchaconceptualshiftfrom temporal to spatial consciousness. Here will be examined three themes in Russianwritinginthelate-andpost-Soviettimes.Theyare:apocalypse, levitation(“magicalflight”),andboundaries.Theintersectionofthese threethemes,orimages,isshowninworksofsixlivingwriters:Leoni Borodin,Anatolii Kim, lurii Kozlov, Leonid Latynin, Valentin Rasputin, and Viacheslav Rybakov. It will be argued that the three features in ques¬ tionformpartofacomplexculturalmetaphorthathasarisen,orelsereap¬ pearedinanewform,inmodernRussianthought.Theyaretreatedhereas figuresofthoughtinametaphoricalseries,andnotmerelyasfiguresof speech. Asaspace-savingmeasurethefiguralcomplexinquestionwill sometimes be referred to as atropeme, and the three individual figures as allotropes without, however, any attempt being made to press exaggerated claimsforconceptualoriginalityoruniversalapplicability. Theclusterpatternsofthistropeme’sconstituentslendcredenceto thepropositionofLakoffandJohnsonthatmetaphorspermitusto“use one highly structured and clearly delineated concept to structure another (61).Theirbeliefthatacomplexofpropertiesoccurringtogetherismore basictoourexperiencethantheirseparateoccurrence,whilenotanorigi¬ nalinsight,neverthelessholdsoutthepromiseofassistingoureffortsto deciphertheencodedmetaphoricalseriesgeneratedbytheexperiencesof Soviet life and its afterlife. 2 5 1 2 6 I N T E R T E X T S Apocalypse in Russian Cultural Space' The question of why Russians, seemingly of all classes and locales, are oready to see any given present as prologue to some time-ending revela¬ tionmustliebeyondthescopeofthisstudy.Whatcanbedoneinthisspacej IS to examine the current eschatological temper of Russian writers with the ! aimofarrivingatahypothesiscapableofexplainingthecomplexoffeaturesI embeddedinthephenomenon.Thesixwriterstreatedinthisstudyrepre-; sent two opposing sides in an ongoing schism within the contemporary j Russianintelligentsia.Theyhaveallcomposedtheworksunderreviewini Ae same apocalyptic register, and all use this register in its time-honored | hinction as the mediator between the words of the text and the program- j mauc demands of the social context, with the entire discourse configured asifinformationknownonlytodeitiesisbeingrevealedbythenarratorto urnans. Borodin, Rasputin, and Kozlov arc closely associated with what *^ightbetermedtheRussianreligiousright,whichhasitsownjournals, publishinghouses,andpoliticalparties.Theyarcdistrustfult>fclosecon¬ tacts with the “West” and see Russia’s deliverance in close adherence to its distinctculturaldestinyandtotheteachingsoftheOrthodoxCdiristian ^th. This essentialist tendency will be referred to here as particularism. i^m,Latynin,andRybakovwithequalinsistencerejecttheparticularists’ neo-slavophilismandnationalexclusivityandviewRussia’sfullparticipa- ^on in the world’s commerce and with international governing bodies as yconsistent with Russia’s needs and with her enduring salutary' tradions .Incontrasttotheparticularists,theselatterwriterswillbereferredto ere as mondialists, aterm sometimes hurled at them by their enemies, ese differing orientations, as we shall see, affect the way in which the components of the tropeme under review are employed in their respective texts. The different, and often opposed, meanings imputed to these images among the writers surveyed here confirm Norman Fairclough’s surmise tat the “intertextual heterogeneity of texts is [... 1aparticular feature of periods and areas of intense social and cultural change” (189). We can, owever, observe fairly distinct patterns in the heterogeneity of the textual antecedents nesting in the worl« of our six authors. InhisfictionandessaysValentinRasputinhaslongbeenavolubleand persistent Cassandra, warning Russians of impending doom. In the seven¬ ties and eighties he inveighed against grandiose Soviet dreams for reshap¬ ing nature and against the Soviet reality of poisoned land, water, and air. Of late his writings warn of adifferent kind of contamination from Western cultures grounded on the blasphemy of rationalism. He writes of the “three dangers threatening the survival of mankind in the world today: nuclear, ecological, and the danger connected with the destruction of culture” [tri opasnosti unichtozheniia chelovechestva segodnia vmire: iadernaia, ekologicheskaiaiopasnost’,sviazannaiasrazrusheniemkurtuiy)(“Pravaia, levaia,gdcstorona?”140).2Arecent,symptomaticRasputinarticleis“The Walsh—The Post-Soviet Apocalypse and Its Spatial Allotropes 2 7 Twilight of Man” (Snmerki liudei). Elena Hellberg-Hirn neatly sums up Rasputin’s forebodings in this description of one of his best known novels: In an apocalyptic scenario that anticipates much of later glasnost cultural production, Proshchanie sMateroi (Farewell to Matera, 1976), [he] predicts the extinction of Russia’s sacrosanct...