Russian Novel as a Serial Murder

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The Russian Novel as a Serial Murder

or The Poetics of Bureaucracy

Boris Groys

It is a well-known truism that Russian subjectivity hopes to see and

discover itself in the first place in the mirror of the nineteenth century

Russian classical novel. In his novel Roman, Vladimir Sorokin turns

to the tradition of the Russian classical novel in order to pose once

again the question of Russia and of how Russia defines itself within

this tradition. Roman was written in 1985-89 and was published in

Moscow in 1994.1 In this period occurred the downfall of the Soviet

Union, Soviet communism, Soviet ideology and Soviet literature,

whose stylistics Sorokin used in his earlier texts. When on the ruins

of the Soviet Union Russia appeared anew, the broad masses of the

Russian intelligentsia turned to the pre-revolutionary tradition of

Russian culture and especially the village-dacha culture looking

for authentic roots, values and orientation. The Russian landscape

and the tender, good and patient Russian national character, sung by

classical Russian literature, again took their place of honour in the

general mythology. Sorokins novel is, in the first place, a reaction

to this mythology.

The plot of the novel is quite simple. The action takes place

somewhere in old pre-revolutionary Russia. The young lawyer Ro-

man Vospevennikov gives up his lawyers practice and life in the

big city, which he finds banal and tedious. In search of freedom he

goes to live in a village, where he intends to occupy himself partly


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with farming and partly with painting, for which he discovered a

sudden and unexpected calling. Roman takes up his quarters with

his relatives, the couple Vospevennikov, who once took the place of

his dead parents. Against the background of the typical life of a ni-

neteenth-century nobleman in a village: hunting, fishing, mowing,

extinguishing fire, visiting the church, et cetera, the hero meets the

heroine, Tatyana, the foster-daughter of a forester. After the decla-

ration of love follows the wedding, which culminates in Romans

slaying with an axe first all his relatives and acquaintances and next

all the peasants in the village. Afterwards he performs a kind of

black mass in the local church, using the entrails of his victims, kills

Tatyana and at last dies himself. The first, longest part of the novel,

more than 300 pages, is devoted to the description of Romans life

in the village until the moment of the extermination of the villagers

and has been written as a typical nineteenth-century novel la Tol-

stoy and Dostoyevsky. The second, much shorter part (less than

100 pages) has been written in an ultra-modernist prose-style and

contains only the description of the ritual of destruction and self-

destruction staged by the hero.

The sudden change from the traditional, psychological way of

story-telling to literary modernism coincides with the sudden change

in the heros behaviour, which goes far beyond ordinary human be-

haviour. Without any doubt, this moment of change is crucial for the

understanding of the entire structure of the novel. Moreover, such a

sudden change is characteristic for the greater part of Sorokins

texts, especially his short stories, and is, therefore, expected by the


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impression that as a matter of fact nothing has happened, except a

simple change from one style into another, so that the horrible

event loses its status of a fact of reality described by the text and is

entirely de-dramatised, appearing as an intratextual stylistic device.

Thanks to this, Sorokins texts maintain their distance from po-

pular literature and offer the possibility of what has been described

by Roland Barthes as plaisir de texte. This possibility does not en-

tirely eliminate a normal, i.e. a referential reading of Sorokins

text, evoking in the reader a delicious horror which is, as is well-

known, an unequivocal sign of popular literature. In this manner,

Sorokin offers two competing ways of reading, a referential and a

non-referential one, or, which is the same, a popular and an elitist-

modernistic one, without predetermining the readers choice. As a

matter of fact, it is the indefiniteness and indissolubility of this

choice, that is to say the continuing tension between these two con-

flicting ways of reading, which forms the basic inner conflict of

Sorokins prose, a conflict that is not solved in the end by some

kind of synthesis or catharsis. On the contrary, this conflict mani-

fests itself on all the levels of Sorokins text, including that of ideo-

logy. In Roman he also defines the heros relationship to himself

and to Russia, so that both the subjectivity of the hero and Russia

acquire a double reading.

In the first place, it is possible to show that the novel Roman

from the first to the last page can perfectly be read in a traditionally

psychological key: as a complete and consistent story about how the

hero, Roman, is looking for and ultimately succeeds in finding him-


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self. Roman leaves the city and goes to live in the country to acquire

inner freedom and to discover himself. This zone of inner freedom

Roman explicitly associates with the image of the Russian coun-

tryside. This becomes clearly apparent from the dialogue between

Roman and Zoya, his former love, when she also strived for free-

dom, impetuously throwing herself into horse-riding and other

country pleasures, but who in time, becoming disappointed with

Russia, decided to emigrate to the West, because she became bored

with her own country (as a result of which she turned out to be the

only one who escaped the blow on the head with the axe at the end

of the novel). Roman, on the other hand, emigrates to Russia, to the

interior of the country.

Zoya, however, is almost the only doleful exception against a

generally cheerful background. All the other characters in the novel

(except doctor Klyugin, about whom we will talk later on) contin-

uously assure themselves and others that in Russia a Russian human

being feels himself so free, easy and comfortable as he could never

feel himself to be in the West. Such assertions, and the descriptions

which confirm them, exclamations as Perfect! Wonderful, spee-

ches and toasts in praise of life in the countryside, Russian natural

beauty and the Russian people, delight in Russian food et cetera,

forms a significant part of the text of the novel. In its characters,

Roman himself included, this sense of freedom through direct

contact with nature (fishing, hunting, mowing, pick-nicking, taking

part in the life of the peasants, all of which is considered to belong

to natural life) is particularly strong. This contact with nature


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invariably brings the characters to a state of blissful ecstasy. Nature

functions here as an unconditional value and as the only source of

freedom and happiness. Sorokin accentuates the fundamental themes

of the nineteenth-century Russian novel: the salutary union of nature

and freedom, the turning away from civilisation, simplification, go-

ing back to the sources, et cetera. And it is obvious that we have to

deal here with a more fundamental aspect of Russian literature than

the usual division in Westerners and Slavophiles, not to mention the

other less important ideological subdivisions.

The opposition between natural freedom and servility as regards

the conditions of civilisation has a long tradition in European culture

and is symbolised in modern times in the first place by the name of

Rousseau. For Rousseau, Nature functions as the bearer of the

good, civilisation as the bearer of evil. By Nature he understands

natural man who lives in the heart of everyone: the contemplation

of external nature has in the first place the pedagogical function of

resuscitating natural freedom and natural good which have been

buried in the hearts of men by the conditions of civilisation. It is this

pedagogy which is practised by the Russian novel as Sorokin un-

derstands it. The traditional Rousseau theme is in this case, how-

ever, connected with the complementary and very important theme

of Russia. The opposition between nature and civilisation is under-

stood at the same time as the opposition between Russia and the

West, and Russian literature is, of course, on the side of Russia.

There is nothing new here, however. The German romantics already

used the opposition between the natural and the artificial to describe


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the opposition Germany/France, natural being on the side of Ger-

many, although the entire conception had been borrowed from the

Frenchman Rousseau. Russian literature transfers the same oppo-

sition to the opposition Russia/the West, Russifying Rousseau and

placing Germany under the artificial West, after having borrowed

from the German romantics their rhetorical device.

It is not by chance that Roman goes to live in the country, in Rus-

sian nature, renouncing the written, codified, artificial law which he

served as a lawyer.3 To ironise written law and legal proceedings is

a frequent device in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The

written, artificial law, a man-made creation, is opposed to inner free-

dom, granted by nature, life itself. Freedom cannot be determined

by written, legal rights. Natural life itself is a zone of freedom. For

that reason, Russia, as the incarnation of the natural, is synonymous

with real freedom, as it does not have formal, written, legal free-

dom. Russian literature, as Sorokin understands it, proclaims life

itself, freed from all external restraints, as the highest value. The in-

ner freedom of a Russian lies deeper than all the external freedom of

western people, because freedom is another name for life. And this

inner freedom is completely realised when man and nature, life, are

fused and not when man is separated from life, as it happens within

the system of legal rights, which isolates the individual and forms

the basis of city life, considered slavish by Roman.

At the same time, the search for natural freedom within the space

of the Russian novel runs against certain restrictions imposed on the

individual by collective life, God and good, which in the Russian


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possibility of freedom through its functioning in the teleologically

organised novelistic narration is continuously demonstrated by So-

rokin in the first part of his novel. We can find many examples of it.

From time to time the hero thinks that nature and God are indifferent

to his fate and to the fate of people in general; these thoughts,

however, inevitably lead to a still greater belief and the change of his

fate for the better. Characteristic in this respect is the episode in the

church, when Roman at first diverts his attention from the church

service, in order to give himself up to inner doubt: The deacon

read, and Roman became more and more absorbed in his sorrow,

his eyes indifferently travelling over the faces... How unsteady and

treacherous is everything in this world of human feelings, he

thought, there is nothing to rely on, there is nothing in which you

can believe without being deceived later on... et cetera. This drif-

ting away from the church service has, however, the advantage that

Roman for the first time sees his future wife, Tatyana, who appears

to be the image of real belief.

The rhetoric of moral internal monologue, which clearly refers to

Tolstoy, is rather often used by Sorokin without any direct moti-

vation of the plot, as, for instance, in the scene of the marriage of

Roman and Tatyana, in which Roman again is overcome by nihi-

listic thoughts: They sing, not understanding what and why they

are singing. But why is it so gentle, so innocent? Or, perhaps, they

know everything?... But their incomprehension and innocence do

not make it easier for me! Soon after, however, he accepts the

world: This was the light of hope... To hope, hope, that everything


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which is going on is right that is left to us! et cetera. Thus the

considerations about earthly vanity in the sense of Schopenhauer

leads the hero every time to the good in the sense of Tolstoy.

Sorokin does not forget Dostoyevsky: Tatyanas foster-father

makes Roman play Russian roulette with him. It seems as if the he-

roes are directly exposed to death, but, in the end, nobody is killed;

everyone is satisfied, affected even and Roman and Tatyana re-

ceive the blessing. Even the central episode in the first part of the

novel in which Roman, inspired by noble feelings, fights a wolf,

but discovers in himself a wolfish element, mixing his blood with

that of the wolf and registering natures indifference to his fate, ends

with the fact that Roman finds himself in Tatyanas house, which

leads to the marriage of the heroes. And Roman is treated by doctor

Klyugin who the only one of the novels heroes straightly pro-

claims nihilistic views.

Klyugin partly stands outside the general Russian idyll (already

suggested by his name, clearly derived from the German word

klug clever). But even the radically nihilistic speeches, well-

known to the reader of Russian nineteenth-century literature, do not

place Klyugin outside the domain of the novels good: Klyugin is

an excellent doctor, would not harm a fly, et cetera. In this way the

freedom of nature is continuously obstructed in the Russian novel

by the teleology of the good. For Roman to discover freedom in

himself, he should leave the space of the Russian novel, free himself

of the laws of realistic literary description and narration.

This liberation is realised by the hero, to all appearances, in the


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second part of the novel. From the moment that Roman raises the

axe in order to destroy the villagers undialectically, he begins to

withdraw himself more and more from the control of the traditional

Russian novel. The descriptions of nature and of the inner state of

the hero disappear from the text; there is no attempt any longer to

psychological motivation nor to reconstruction of relations of cause

and effect. The text of the novel changes more and more into a me-

rely external recording of what happens and as a result loses its con-

ventional literalness. Natures freedom is demonstrated by the possi-

bility to understand it and to reconstruct its internal laws, by its pure

processionality and operationality. In this respect, it is typical that

the de-teleologization of freedom in the second part of the novel

refers back to the same episodes as the teleologization in the first

part: in the second part everything turns out to be realised which re-

mained blocked-up in the first part.

For the killing of the inhabitants of the novels space, Roman

uses an axe, given to him as a present for his marriage by Klyugin,

and on which is written: Swing and strike! Klyugin, by the

way, does not only preach nihilism, (with which the axe of the

peoples war and Raskolnikovs axe are associated), but argues

about libido and thanatos, presenting in this way the key to the un-

derstanding of the ritual of the killing as erotic. Tatyana accompanies

the hero, ringing the little bell, which had also been given as a

wedding present, by the village idiot who, as could be expected,

represents the wild, irrational and destructive side of Orthodoxy.

Many other scenes of the first part allude to the end of the novel: the


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description of the murder of Tatyanas parents, the hunting scene,4

the scene of the fight with the wolf, et cetera. Moreover, the first

part of the novel suggests the interpretation of the religious-erotic

ritual performed by Roman in the second part as the equivalent of

the wedding-night: after the long ritual of the wedding, in which the

ecstasy of the good reaches an unbearable degree of collective

hysterics, there was nothing else the heroes could do than kill

everybody and die themselves, in order to reach communion in love.

The operations performed by Roman on the body of Tatyana are

also clearly erotic. Besides, Roman has an orgasm only after he has

removed all the others, Tatyana included, and finally desecrates

the church to escape the eyes of God.

Nevertheless, highly important for a possible psychological inter-

pretation of the transition to the second part of the novel can be

considered a short scene in which Roman requires from Tatyana an

absolute faith in freedom and Tatyana answers positively. Sorokin

demonstrates here what could have happened if Onegin, without any

regard for the conventions of society, had married Tatyana. They

would have been a pair of natural-born killers, who would have

gone further on the path of the abolition of conventions until the

complete extermination of all the representatives of these conven-

tions. The traditional Rousseau-like aspiration of the Russian novel

to freedom and nature is realised in the extreme, in the form of

absolute terror. Roman becomes a serial killer who definitively frees

his inner, natural freedom from the gaze, description and under-

standing of others. The hero, who realises this freedom in himself,


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completely emancipates himself from the author, from the narration,

from the laws of the literary text as such. Not for nothing is the hero

called Roman: the inner intention of the novel is realised exclusively

in the hero himself, leaving no place for the external, for descrip-

tion. Roman stops being text and becomes life. If Bakhtin describes

the poetics of Dostoyevskys novels as being orientated to the equa-

lity of author and hero, Sorokin stages, to all appearances, the defi-

nitive victory of the author over the hero: the hero destroys every-

thing that can be described and finally himself as the object of

description. The novel ends with the death of the hero, as the hero

before his death succeeds in destroying everything in the space of

the novel that still could be described and narrated. Sorokins Ro-

man can, therefore, be read as the definitive victory of nature and

freedom in Russia over the text, the law and the West, something

which the nineteenth-century Russian novel could not achieve.

Besides, the literary radicalisation of natural freedom outside the

boundaries of the usual social conventions had already been realised

rather conclusively by Marquis de Sade in the context of French

Enlightenment. In their elaborate philosophical deliberations the li-

bertines of De Sade draws conclusions from Rousseaus demand to

follow unconditionally the voice of nature with which Rousseau

himself probably would not agree. Moreover, however, De Sade is

in his turn extremely didactic and subjects the description of erotic

orgies to a strict ritual. The reductional registering of pure proces-

sion, or pure ritualism, by means of which in the second part of

Sorokins novel nature apparently demonstrates its absolute free-


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dom, stylistically directly refers to De Sade. Moreover, as Roland

Barthes rightly remarks, De Sades erotic rituals are themselves or-

ganised as language: by means of various operations of fragmen-

tation, these rituals realize the articulation of bodies, transforming

these bodies into elements of language.5 The religious-erotic ritual,

described by Sorokin, also consists of the fragmentation of bodies

and of the introduction of a new system of combinations which pla-

ces the fragments of these bodies in new relations to each other,

now not subjected to natural, organic logic, but to the syntax of a

new language, by means of which Roman formulates his messages

to God and the world: Roman places the intestines of his victims in

the church, puts stones on the intestines, heads on the stones, etc. In

this manner, natural freedom again turns out to be completely sub-

jected to the syntax of language. Even Romans last death spasms

are described by reduced subject-predicate constructions which,

among other things, refer to texts by Sergey Tretyakov. In the mo-

ment just before his death when freedom reaches its greatest

intensity, Roman subjects himself totally to the fundamental laws of

the functioning of language. The emigration from the idyllic

Rousseauistic Russian village to the domain of pure desire or the

pure religious-erotic subconscious turns out to be just as illusory as

the earlier move from the city to the village. Again, the hero does not

find inner freedom, but only moves from text into text, from

language into language.

From this point of view, the scenes of mass destruction in the

second part of the novel begin to look different. We do not see here


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the self-liberation of the hero but, rather, the destruction of the

signifieds of the novel, with the aim to leave only the signifiers.

When all the referents of the novel have died, only its text remains.

The orgy of destruction and self-destruction staged by Sorokin does

not signify in this case the victory of natural freedom over the laws

of the text but, on the contrary, the definitive victory of the text over

its natural referents and its own organic meaning.

In one of his articles on Rousseau, devoted to the deconstruction

of the Rousseauistic myth about Nature, Paul de Man writes that the

description of the fragmentation and mutilation of the human body,

which we often encounter in literature, serves as a metaphor for the

fragmentation and mutilation of the text itself.6 This fragmentation of

the text occurs as a result of censoring, quotation and other manipu-

lations of the text, which disclose the disorganisation, the machine-

like character of every text. In this way, the ritual of dismember-

ment described by Sorokin, can be understood as the metaphor of

textuality. Characteristically, Sorokins novel begins with the

description of Romans grave in the village graveyard which, in its

turn, reminds one of De Mans famous discussions of the trans-

formation of the body into the text of the epitaph in which the

graveyard also plays a role.7

So then, Sorokins hero dies, looking for inner freedom but not

finding it. The only thing he is capable of turns out to be emigration

from one text to another or, in other words, from under the power

of one syntax, writing, law into the power of another one. The death

of the hero, however, in this case also means the death of the


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author. Not for nothing is the hero called Roman. With his death

dies the genre of the novel, and also the author-novelist. The author

and the hero of the novel, as has been rightly noted by Bakhtin in

his time, are connected in one chain. The author has power over

language only in so far as he uses language to describe the freedom

of the hero outside language. If it turns out that the hero does not

have such a freedom, as he cannot free himself from the power of

language, together with him the author also loses his freedom: he

changes into a passive medium of language structures and the self-

development of the text. But this also means that the death of the

hero coincides with the death of the author, so that both receive a

joint epitaph from contemporary post-structuralist literary theory.

At first sight it would seem as if Sorokin, by his text, confirms

this diagnosis. But when we take a closer look, it turns out that

although the author of the novel dies, this dead author is not Sorokin

himself, but his double, a fake figure, a literary mask, alter-ego,

specially predestined to be shot down. The point is that the entire

novel is, as it were, written on the account of another or, to be more

correct, on the account of others. The worn-out and at the same time

recognisable stylistics of the novel unmistakably show that the

author is not Sorokin, but some other, who completely seriously

writes a Russian novel. It is this other who turns out to be the dead

author and who, for that matter, has appeared as such from the

very beginning, not being able to write a live, sincere, not banal but

original, authentic and not worn-out authors language. The citatio-

nal, pseudonymic, personage-like character of Sorokins prose is,


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however, not indicative of reduction and death, but of the survival

of the author, who hides himself behind his masks-doubles that he

sacrifices to his hero.

Sorokin belongs to the literary-artistic movement which arose in

the beginning of the 70s within the context of Moscow unofficial

art, i.e., the art practised outside the official Soviet cultural institu-

tions, and which is generally called Moscow conceptualism.8 This

term refers back to the Western, in the first place Anglo-American

variant of artistic conceptualism, represented, for instance, by the

works of the groups Art and Language or Joseph Kosuth. Within

the context of the art of the sixties and seventies, the American con-

ceptualists very consistently enforced the principle of ascesis in art,

radically excluding all references to the world of visual temptations.

By placing the text instead of the picture in the space of the work of

art, Western conceptualism demonstrated its radical opposition

against the commercial mass culture of its time.

However, the basic features of conceptualism at the same time

turned out to be closely related to some central aspects of official So-

viet mass aesthetics, which also understood art as an illustration to

particular political-theoretical propositions. The asceticism of Wes-

tern conceptualism and its utopian-pedagogical pathos could also be

easily recognised by the Soviet spectator and reader, especially if he

was familiar with the theory and aesthetics of the Russian avant-

garde. In the first place, however, Western conceptualism won the

Soviet spectator over by the spirit of contemporary bureaucracy

which permeated its artistic practice. The works of the conceptualists


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remind us of the documentation of big companies and public insti-

tutions. Moreover, the conceptualist takes up an emphatically exter-

nal, programmatically disinterested position as regards his own

work. In its complete opposition to the traditional modernist orien-

tation towards self-expression, this programmatical distance from its

own art calls to mind the contemporary bureaucrat who controls the

property of other people and for that purpose enforces laws not

formulated and passed by him.

The utterly bureaucratic Soviet society of the Brezhnev period,

which excluded from its very beginning any form of self-expres-

sion, be it artistic or political, can therefore be considered an excel-

lent example of conceptual art. The Moscow conceptualists looked at

the matter exactly in this way. Hence their specific strategy, which is

difficult to describe in terms used for the Western artistic move-

ments. The Moscow conceptualists did not see in their work a utopic

alternative to the mass culture that surrounded them, as was the case

in American conceptualism, but a reflection in response to the

functioning of Soviet mass culture, i.e. a culture that functions with-

in the space of an already realised utopia. For that reason, the mini-

malist-conceptualist devices were not used in Moscow in the seven-

ties for the construction of an autonomous work of art, as was the

case with the founding fathers of conceptualism, but for the recon-

struction of devices which had already been applied for the building

of an autonomous socialist society in one country. In this way,

Moscow conceptualism aesthetically reacted at the pedagogical and

bureaucratic doctrines of Soviet culture and at its being dominated


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by the ideological text.

Accordingly, Moscow conceptualism also changed the character

of the texts used in the space of the work of art. Whereas the Ameri-

can conceptualists in the first place lean on the great academic Ang-

lo-American philosophical tradition of logical positivism, the Mos-

cow conceptualists use texts of daily life, ideological, bureaucratic

texts and literary texts that have become a part of Soviet mass con-

sciousness as, for instance, texts by Pushkin, Tolstoy or Dosto-

yevsky. And Moscow literary conceptualism treats the texts they use

in the same way as contemporary art works do with visual ready

mades. It does not identify itself with these texts, but quotes them

as symptoms of the culture within which it exists, and which it ne-

vertheless is able to analyse from an external position. The analogy

between the bureaucratic and conceptualist work with texts led to the

integration of an enormous mass of textual material in the practice of

Moscow conceptualism: this resulted in an essential change in the

understanding of the text itself, which played a decisive role in the

development of the literary branch of Moscow conceptualism.

The fact is, that within the space of quotation the text, if presented

as a great mass, as it were, entirely loses its meaning it simply

becomes an ornament, an arabesque, a dcor. This radical de-

semantisation of the text goes much further than that which could

have been reached by the traditional avant-gardistic devices of the

destruction of the semantic unity of the text in the literary space of

the book. And besides: the conceptualist de-semantisation of the text

does not wholly require its deformation, estrangement, the intro-

duction of semantic changes in its own structure, et cetera. The most


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trivial, ordinary text immediately loses its meaning if it is without

any changes being made in its entirety taken up in the space of

quotation. In this space it simply changes into criture, according to

Derridas terminology. At the same time, we cannot consider this

change as a case of deconstruction, as it is not a matter here of the

dissolving of the original text in an endless game of diffrences: the

text remains complete and can also be read as such, i.e. with its

ordinary meaning maintained. As a result the readers consciousness

begins to waver permanently between two incompatible ways of

reading the text: on the one hand the text is considered a ready-

made, a purely visual phenomenon, an ornament deprived of any

semantics, on the other hand, however, this text can be read as a ful-

ly comprehensible utterance with a definite meaning which can ea-

sily be reconstructed.

This oscillation of the receiving consciousness between, in con-

ventional terms, the positions of the spectator and the reader, which

originated within the space of the conceptual painting, made such a

deep impression on some authors in the seventies that they felt

obliged to look for a comparable effect on the basis of purely literary

devices. The influence of the conceptualist artistic practice on litera-

ture is, therefore, in the first place the result of a specific use of the

text as part of this practice. It is not a coincidence that the best-

known representatives of Moscow literary conceptualism, Dmitry

Prigov, Lev Rubinstein and Vladimir Sorokin, began their careers as

artists or were closely connected with artistic circles.

Not only did Sorokin begin as an artist (in which he resembles


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his hero Roman), but during a number of years he earned his living

as a designer of books, just as the founder-fathers of Moscow con-

ceptualism, Ilya Kabakov and Eric Bulatov, whose artistic practice

played a decisive role in the forming of Sorokins literary method.

In a certain sense, literary conceptualism can be defined as the de-

sign of the text. Being employed in book-design makes one look at

the text in the first place as a sign, which the designer fashions and

models, without paying much attention to its meaning, just as com-

puter software processes large parts of texts independently from

their semantics. This external, ready-made work with texts makes it

possible to use much larger parts of texts by others than in usual

literary quotation. Moreover, the conceptualist text-designer is, just

as Bakhtins author, not interested in the revival of the quotation,

in the logo-centric return to its authentic voice, in the creation of

polyphone, inter-textual play or a grotesque body, which ought to

bring to life the dead text. The text-designer is much more interested

in demonstrating the text as a dead text, as an absolutely passive,

non-organic sign-mass, which could be subjected to all kinds of

manipulation, cuttings, changes, transferrings from one space into

another, et cetera, without taking into account its so-called mea-

ning, just as it happens with computer text design and book design.

It is, by the way, not a matter here of a senseless text corpse: this

expression presupposes that once, in its beginning, the text lived

and only died at a later stage, after having consented to subject itself

to various pathologist experiments. On the contrary, the concep-

tualist work with a text demonstrates its originally dead, purely


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disposal this hand-made product is placed, freely and sovereignly

handles it, driving the text from one place to another, fragmentising

it, quoting it or just forbidding it, et cetera. Explicitly rejecting his

authorship and stylistically attributing his own text to another, the

author acquires in this manner the possibility to place himself, at

least symbolically, on the level of the bureaucrat and handles his

own text as it were from the outside, i.e. sovereignly.

Within the context of the Soviet culture of that epoch, the

corresponding strategies were made much easier by the fact that

there was a sharp opposition between the official mass culture and

the samizdat, handmade books of unofficial culture. The device of

the ready-made which is employed in contemporary art, consists in

the artists individual appropriation of the products of artistic mass-

and series-production. The practice of the device of the ready-made

in literature is usually complicated by the fact that literature in mo-

dern times only exists in printed form, i.e. the mass production of

books. In the Russian samizdat of the sixties and seventies, on the

contrary, the book functioned as a unique manuscript, or as an indi-

vidual object, after the manner of a medieval hand-written text. It

was precisely this form of samizdat-manuscript that for the Moscow

conceptualist authors played the role of quotation space, supplying

the place of the conceptual painting.

At first sight, the direct transposition of this device from the

samizdat into printed literature seems to be impossible. But at the

same time also in its printed existence literature maintains its unique

space of quotation: the library. There are no libraries identical to


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each other, although in each one books are collected which have

been printed in editions. One can say that Sorokins texts represent

such unique personal libraries, in which in one book texts are col-

lected which belong, as might be expected, to different libraries in

the censured Soviet situation particularly, such texts were not able to

co-exist in the same space, in one library.

In this way, Moscow conceptualism refrained from the oppo-

sition against the bureaucratically neutral, purely external and repres-

sive, official text operations by means of the creation of its own,

unique, authentic and individual language, apparently not subjected

to such a bureaucratic operation, as was required by the modernist

utopias of high and pure literature. Instead of that, the conceptua-

list author voluntarily sacrifices his individuality and by means of

this sacrifice succeeds in raising himself symbolically to the bureau-

cratic level of power, which permits him to oppose the strategies of

the bureaucratic text manipulation with his own manipulating strate-

gies.

When we consider the text of Roman from the point of view of

these strategies, one can say that Sorokin combines the typical syn-

thetic text of a Russian novel, which has passed the Soviet stylis-

tically-ideological censure, with a fragment of just as conventional

modernist prose, which by the same censorship is eliminated from

the repertoire of possible variants of literary writing. Two of these

text fragments are sewn together, one can say, with white threads,

which it would be nave to consider as the manifestation of the psy-

chology of the hero. It turns out to be that in this second interpre-


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25

tation the absolute natural freedom of the hero appears there, where

we find purely external, a-semantic and non-organic, bureaucratic

manipulations with texts understood as dead sign masses.

It now becomes clear how Sorokin remains alive after the death

of his double, i.e. the honest, authentic author, who tries to describe

the freedom of the hero. Sorokin remains alive as the author-bureau-

crat, the censor or the text designer, who manipulates his text from

the outside, from the other side of its contents, from the other side

of its referentiality. Such a freedom of the author-bureaucrat as re-

gards his text does not require the freedom of the hero. It does not

presuppose natural freedom, nor the protection of natural human

rights. With his novel Roman Sorokin gives all that is natural to na-

ture, i.e. to death. The other author dies, he who believed in natural

freedom. And, basically, this is not the Russian but the Western au-

thor: Rousseau, De Sade. It is the Frenchman who, brought up with

Roman and Romanesque culture, believes in the Romantic tradition

of individual freedom and for that reason writes novels. On the other

hand, it is the Russian intelligent, the subject of the dynasty of the

Romanovs, who goes deep into the interior of Russia to look for

natural freedom and the Third Rome. Such a Roman, of course, as a

result gives up the ghost, but this does not completely discourage

the Russian writer.

The Russian author, having grown up with the power of bureau-

cracy and censorship, i.e. with the spectacle of an unrestrictedly free

and at the same time meaningless-mechanical manipulation of texts,

believes in another, secret, i.e. bureaucratic freedom and finds there


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26

his true freedom. Sorokins novel Roman is, just as many other

texts of Russian conceptualism, an attempt to create a new poetics of

bureaucracy instead of a poetics of nature and to discover in

bureaucratic arbitrariness the opportunity for a new freedom of the

author after his death in language. The secret of this new freedom is

the rejection of sincerity (i.e. the rejection of self-denunciation, of

self-revelation in language, which threatens death) and the decision

to write from the dead doubles who are not threatened by anything.

Russian subjectivity discovers here the Russian bureaucracy as a

new utopia and a new idyll, inaccessible for the nave consciousness

of the Roman, Romanesque West. In retrospect, one can say that the

poet Fyodor Tyutchev again turns out to be right when he observes

that Russia is a region which is unknowable, i.e. a region of real

freedom. But now he turns out to be right as a Russian bureaucrat

which, in the first place, he was, and not as a lover of Russian

nature.

Notes

1

Vladimir Sorokin, Roman. Moskva 1994.

2

For a discussion of Sorokins early texts see Boris Groys, The Total

Art of Stalinism. Russian Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and

Beyond. Princeton 1991.

3

The prototype for Sorokin was, probably, Kandinsky, who also gave

up a career in the legal profession to look for real Russian art; this led

him, as a matter of fact, to Mnchen.


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Documents

Russian Novel as a Serial Murder