28.6.2002 18:12 MSK
Masochism, literature and Putin
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| Foto AP |
The «Iduschiye Vmeste» («Walking Together») party made their debut in May 2001 staging a 10 000-strong meeting to celebrate the anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s reign. Boys and girls of student age wore T-shirts with the President’s effigies, playing about at Vasilyevsky Spusk near Kremlin, hugging and responding in expletives to orations of the speakers who denounced the Western values. A year later, on June 27, some 200 young demonstrators strolled through Moscow ready to pounce upon something Russian this time around – to wit, a trendy post-modern penman Vladimir Sorokin.
Writer Sorokin is a meaningful phenomenon of Russian culture. He had sold tens of thousands books to confirm the status. His post-modernist works are distinguished for their extreme physiological nature – Sorokin’s pages feature the entire range of things a human organism would eject, from words and yells to material substances.
The story entitled «A Month in Dahau» is based upon the bone-grating description of masochist love of a prison camp’s tortured inmate towards a Gestapo woman. The pain is treated here as something more than mere suffering – it’s pain and sensuous bliss at the same time. In Sorokin-spawned worlds, this incendiary mixture of feelings drives all the abstract notions, say, morals, beyond recognizable. “The Feast” book nourishes on a sub-plot of cannibal parents who eat their teenager daughters. The girls are seated on a special shovel and baked alive in the oven. During the family meals, girls express their envy toward the eaten sisters. The unhurried descriptions and peacefully optimistic life stories prepare the reader for the imminent cooking of a girl called Nastya. Her anguish within the scorching oven is carefully rendered in detail, while Nastya’s parents behavior is surreal to the highest degree: their voices, borrowed from Dostoyevsky’s “Idiot” novel, show the authentic paternal concern for the girl’s expression…
It is only readers’ privilege to decide whether such literature is to be or not to be. The readers readily consume Sorokin’s offerings. Yet, “Iduschiye Vmeste” sharply dissociate themselves with such readers. On June 27, they crammed a makeshift w.c. pan at Teatralnaya Square with brochures citing Sorokin’s works and set for Chekhov monument to apologize before the prominent Russian author for the lack of worthy, in their mind, writers of today. While at Teatralnaya Square, the crowd expressly criticized the administration of the Bolshoi Theater for offering Vladimir Sorokin a contract for an opera libretto.
Here they are – people of the Russian capital who had assumed the right to judge what is good and what is bad on the moral side. Putin’s young followers would not stoop to involve the author into a literary or moral dispute, having restricted themselves to microphoned insults – quite in tune with the Komsomol traditions of the Soviet era. And they had the thoughts similar to those of their predecessors, too. The European youth, dissatisfied with the current trends in the art, would simply forge their own style instead of pumping up passions. “Iduschiye Vmeste” seem to be unable to create a thing; instead, they can inform of a bad pen to grown-ups. Well, to prosecutor’s office, to name a possible addressee, who might have paid attention to alleged pornography propaganda in Sorokin’s books.
The childish attitudes of “Iduschiye Vmeste” betray their perception of literature. In order to prove that Sorokin is awful the young politically-concerned citizens exposed an especially shocking, to the minds of theirs, extract from the writer’s heritage on a slogan, having underlined the unprintable words. It was no kind of bones crunching in description of the unreal voluptuary from Dahau. Alas, the progressive youth, which “Iduschiye Vmeste” fancy themselves to be, has proved to be too vulnerable to just a cynical men’s printed story of long fumbling with a girl refusing to spread her legs apart… Where has this non-childish nostalgia for censure originated from? Obviously, the same source with unnatural suddenness had spawned the 10 000-strong crowd of “Iduschiye Vmeste” a year before. And this has little to do with Sorokin’s ill fantasies. The nightmares, crafted by writers, fade in contrast to the “creative” activities of the authorities who direct plays outside the Bolshoi Theater stage. And “Iduschiye Vmeste” appear to have been recruited for much more than a crowd scene.
Alisa NIKOLINA