Mikhail Epstein

Department of Slavic Languages
Emory University

 

I suggest to your attention some excerpts from my paper on two Russian postmodernisms and their interrelationship with the Western one. The paper was presented at the MLA conference in December 1991, at the same panel with Marjorie Perloff’s and Barrett Watten’s papers now proposed for this discussion. Also, I will cite several passages from my recent pamphlet (of a very limited circulation) arguing for the purely “ideological,” “Eastern” version of postmodernism as opposed to Fredric Jameson’s influential theory which connects postmodernism with the economic basis of the “late capitalism” and therefore denies its possibility in non-Western countries (Mikhail Epstein, Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking: An Inquiry into Soviet Ideological Language. Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies. Occasional Papers, # 243. Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1991). What I am going to say does not reflect latest interesting developments in Russian criticism where the question of “post-modernism” became as focal as the concept of “socialist realism” was in the 1930s (this is not an arbitrary connexion: actually, the later stage of post-modernism comes to succeed the earlier one). In particular, I would like to address you to the articles of Vyacheslav Kuritsyn “Post-modernism: new ancient culture” and Sergei Nosov “Literature and Play,” accompanied by editorial comments in Novyi Mir (Moscow), 1992, No.2. pp.225-239.

 

First of all, I want to discuss “the origins and the meaning of Russian postmodernism,” taking the idiom from the famous work of Nikolai Berdiaev The Origins and the Meaning of Russian Communism (Istoki i smysl russkogo kommunizma, Paris, 1955). Communist teachings came to Russia from Western Europe and seemed at first completely alien to this backward semi-Asiatic country; however Russia turned out to be the first nation to attempt to enact these teachings on a world-wide scale. Berdiaev has shown convincingly that communism was intimately linked to the entire spirit of Russian history long before Russia learned anything about Marxism.

 

The same paradox, in my view, relates to the problem of Russian postmodernism. A phenomenon which seemed to be purely Western, in the final analysis exposes its lasting affinity with some principal aspects of Russian national tradition.

 

Among the different definitions of postmodernism, I would single out as the most important the production of reality as a series of plausible copies, or what the French philosopher Baudrillard calls “simulation.” Other features of postmodernism such as the waning of comprehensive theoretical metanarratives or the abolishment of the oppositions between high and low, elitist and mass culture, seem derivative of this phenomenon of hyperreality. Models of reality replace reality itself which therefore becomes irrecoverable.

 

Indeed, the previous dominant trends in Western twentieth century culture such as avant-gardism and modernism were elitist in that they pitted themselves against the reality of mass society either because of an alienation from it (modernism) or because of an effort to transform it in a revolutionary way (avant-gardism). As for metanarratives such as Marxism and Freudianism, their main point was to unmask the illusions of consciousness (ideological perversions) in order to disclose the genuine reality of material production or libidinal energy.

 

Yet once the concept of reality ceases to operate, these metanarratives, which appealed to reality, and elitist arts, which opposed it, begin to wane.

 

The appeal to a reality principle evokes the phenomena of great Western science, philosophy, and technology and thus may be considered the cornerstone of all Western civilization. According to this principle, reality must be distinguished from all products of human imagination and there are practical means which permit the establishment of truth as a form of correspondence between cultural concepts and reality. Science, technology, and even the arts strove to break through different subjective illusions and mythological prejudices to the substance of reality by way of objective cognition, practical utilization, and realistic imitation respectively. The last great metanarratives of Western civilization, those of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, are still penetrated by this obsession with capturing reality and they relentlessly attempt to demystify all illusory products of culture and ideology.

 

During the twentieth century, however, an unexpected twist transformed these highly realistic and even materialistic theories into their own opposites. While Marxism, Freudianism, and Nietzscheanism all appealed to reality as such, they also produced their own highly ideologized and aestheticized realities, and more sophisticated tools of political and psychological manipulation. Reality itself disappeared, yielding to the most refined and provocative theories of realities and, next, to the practical modes of the production of reality. Now in the late twentieth century, what is produced is objectivity itself, not merely separate objects.

 

There are different modes for the production of reality. One is a Soviet-style ideocracy that flourished precisely on the basis of Marxism, which claimed to denounce all ideologies as mystification. Another is an American- style psychosynthesis which includes the comprehensive system of mass media and advertising that flourished precisely on the basis of pragmatism and psychoanalysis, both of which claimed to denounce all illusions of consciousness.

 

In other words, what we now see as reality is nothing more than a system of secondary stimuli intended to produce a sense of reality, or what Baudrillard calls “simulation.” In spite of any seeming resemblances, simulation is the opposite of what was understood as imitation during the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Imitation was an attempt to represent reality as such without any subjective distortions. Simulation is an attempt to substitute for reality those images which appear even more real than reality itself.

 

The production of reality seems rather new for Western civilization, but it was routinely accomplished in Russia throughout its history. Ideas always tended to substitute for reality, beginning perhaps from Prince Vladimir who in 988 adopted the idea of Christianity and implanted it in a vast country in which there was hardly a single Christian.

 

Peter the Great ordered Russia to educate itself and vigorously introduced newspapers, universities, academies. Therefore they appeared in artificial forms, incapable of concealing their deliberateness, the forced order of their origination. Even the first factory in Russia was built not out of some industrial need, but because Czar Anna decided to build a factory to match Western development. In essence, we are dealing with the simulative, or nominative, character of a civilization composed of plausible labels: this is a “newspaper,” this–an “academy,” this–a “constitution”; but all of this did not grow naturally from the national soil, but was implanted from above in the form of smoothly whittled twigs–perhaps they will take root and germinate. Too much came from the idea, the scheme, the conception, to which reality was subjugated.

 

In his book Russia in 1839, Marquis de Coustine expressed this simulative character of Russian civilization in a most insightful manner. “Russians have only names for everything, but nothing in reality. Russia is a country of facades. Read the labels – they have ‘society,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘literature,’ ‘art,’ ‘sciences’–but as a matter of fact, they don’t even have doctors. If you randomly call a Russian doctor from your neighborhood, you can consider yourself a corpse in advance.”¹ One can ascribe this negative reaction to a foreigner’s malevolence, but Aleksandr Herzen, for one, believed that Marquis de Coustine had written the most fascinating and intelligent book about Russia. This Frenchman had expressed most precisely the simulative character of an entire civilization, in which the plan, the preceding concept, is more real than the production brought forth by that plan.

 

This nominative civilization, composed completely of names,² discloses its nature in Russian postmodernist art, which shows us a label pulled off of emptiness. Conceptualism, the prevailing trend in contemporary Russian art, is a set of labels, a collections of facades lacking the three other sides.³

 

The most grandiose simulacrum that expressed the simulative nature of Russian civilization was, of course, Petersburg itself, erected on a “Finnish swamp.” “Petersburg is the most intentional (or imaginary–umyshlennyi ) and abstract city on earth,” wrote Dostoevsky in “The Notes from the Underground”: the reality of the city was composed entirely of fabrications, designs, ravings, and visions lifted up like a shadow above a rotten soil unfit for construction.

 

A shakiness was laid into the very foundation of the imperial capital, which subsequently became the cradle of three revolutions. The realization of its intentionality and “ideality,” simply not having found firm soil beneath itself, gave rise to one of the first, and most ingenious, literary simulacra–in Dostoevsky: “A hundred times, amidst this fog, I’ve been struck with a strange but importunate reverie: ‘And what, if this fog were to scatter and leave for above, wouldn’t this entire rotten, slimy city take off with it, wouldn’t it rise up with the fog and disappear like smoke, and the prior Finnish swamp would remain, and, in the middle of it, for beauty, I think, the bronze horseman on his hotly breathing, exhausted horse?'”(A Raw Youth, emboldening mine–M. E.).⁴

 

This vision could have just come off of the canvas of a conceptual artist, a postmodernist master such as Eric Bulatov, for example. Contemporary Russian conceptualism emerged not from the imitation of Western postmodernism, but rather from precisely that Petersburg rotten fog and Dostoevsky’s “importunate reverie.” Potemkin villages⁵ appears in Russia not simply as a political trick, but as the metaphysical exposure of the fraudulence of any culture or positive activity. It is an outward appearance of a type which almost does not conceal its deceptiveness, but also does not destroy its illusion in a purposeful way, like Hinduist Maya should be destroyed. Rather it is anxious to secure its preservation as an appearance, but in no way prepares to ground or fill it in. The intermediary stratum between “is” and “is not” is that edge along which the “enchanted pilgrimage” of the Russian spirit slides.

 

After the Bolshevik revolution, this simulative nature of reality became even more pronounced. All social and private life was subjugated to ideology, which became the only real force of historical development. Those signs of a new reality of which the Soviets were so proud in the thirties and fifties, beginning with Stalin’s massive hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River and ending with Khrushchev planting of corn and Brezhnev’s numerous autobiographies, were actually pure ideological simulations of reality. This artificial reality was intended to demonstrate the superiority of ideas over simple facts. Communist subbotniks⁶ in the Soviet Union were examples of hyperevents which simulated “the feast of labor” precisely in order to stimulate real labor.

 

In Baudrillard’s definition of this phenomenon of hyperreal: “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory–PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA–it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable [written by Borges] today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.”⁷

 

Anyone who looks at a map of the former Soviet Union today will agree that such a huge country had to arise initially on the map before it could expand in reality. Today we can address this phrase “the desert of the real itself” directly to what has remained from the Soviet Union. This country is originally poor not with commodities, comfort, hard currency, but with reality itself. All shortcomings and deficiencies are only symbols of this fading reality; and symbols themselves comprise the sole reality that survives in this country.

 

To sum up: reality as such gradually disappears throughout Russian history. All reality of pagan Rus’ disappeared when Prince Vladimir ordered the introduction of Christianity and briskly baptized the whole nation. Similarly, all reality of Moscow Rus’ vanished when Peter the Great ordered his citizens “to become civilized” and shave their beards. All reality of “tsarist” Russia dissolved when Lenin and Bolsheviks transformed it into a launching pad for a communist experiment. Finally, all Soviet reality collapsed in several years of Gorbachev’s rule yielding to a new, still unknown system of ideas. Probably, the ideas of capitalist market and free enterprise have now the best chance in Russia, though they remain there once again pure conceptions against the background of hungry and devastated society. Personally I believe that in a long run Eltsin or somebody else will manage to create a sumulacrum of a market for Russia. Realities were produced in Russia out of the ruling elite’s minds, but once produced they were imposed with such force and determination that these ideological constructions became hyperrealities. * * *

 

Almost all investigators of postmodernism cite America as a wonderland in which fantasies become more real than reality itself. In this sense, however, America is not alone. Russia, as distinct from Europe, also developed as a realized dream. It is true that the postmodernist self- awareness of Soviet reality emerged later than parallel philosophical developments in the West. Nevertheless, already in the mid-seventies, so-called conceptual art and literature became more and more popular in the Soviet Union, suggesting a comprehensive reconsideration of the entire phenomenon of Soviet civilization. As distinct from realistic literature of the Solzhenitsyn type, conceptualism does not attempt to denounce the lie of Soviet ideology (from false ideas to a genuine reality). As distinct from metaphysical poetry of the Brodsky type, it does not turn away from Soviet reality in search of higher and purer worlds (from false reality to genuine ideas). Conceptual painting and writing, as presented by Ilya Kabakov, Erick Bulatov, Dmitry Prigov, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Lev Rubinstein, Vladimir Sorokin, convey ideas as the only true substance of the Soviet lifestyle. Paradoxically, false ideas comprise the essence of genuine reality.

 

The erasure of metanarrative is another important feature of postmodernism that is worthy of explanation. In the Soviet case, it is an indisputably Marxist metanarrative. There is a common, though fallacious, belief that only under and after perestroika, have Marxist teachings begun to dissolve into a variety of ideological positions. In truth, this dissolution began at the very moment when Marxism was brought to Russia and further progressed when it turned into Marxism-Leninism and Soviet Marxism.

 

Perhaps more than other metanarratives, Marxism relies on reality and materiality as the determinant of all ideological phenomena. When this teaching came to a culture in which reality had always been a function of powerful State imagination, a strange combination emerged: materialism as a form and tool of ideology. Paradoxically, Marxism was a catalyst for this transformation of Russia into one great Disneyland, though one less amusing than terrifying. Before the Bolshevik revolution, not all aspects of material life were simulated and some place remained for genuine economic enterprises. But now that Russian ideology has assimilated materialism, all material life has become a product of ideology.

 

Marxist teachings themselves also suffered a paradoxical transformation. On the one hand, Marxism became the only theoretical viewpoint that was officially allowed by the Soviet regime. For this very reason, it ironically grew to include all other possible viewpoints. Internationalists and patriots, liberals and conservatives, existentialists and structuralists, technocrats and ecologists all pretended to be genuine Marxists, pragmatically adapting the “proven teaching” to changing circumstances. In the West, Marxism preserved its identity as a metanarrative, giving its own specific interpretation of all historical phenomena because it was freely challenged by other metanarratives (such as Christianity and Freudianism). In the Soviet Union, however, Marxism became what postmodernists call pastiche, an eclectic mixture of all possible interpretations and outlooks. As an all- encompassing doctrine penetrating into physics and theater, military affairs and children’s play, Soviet Marxism was the ultimate achievement of postmodernism.

 

In Western society, postmodernism is often regarded as a continuation of the logic of “late capitalism,” a condition in which all ideas and styles acquire the form of commodities and become “manageable” and “changeable.” In the Soviet Union, postmodern relativity of ideas arises from its own ideological, not economic, base. All those concepts previously alien to the essence of communist ideology, such as “private property” and the “free market,” are now freely entering this ideological space, stretching it beyond its limits–allowing the ideology to embrace its own opposite. This is a process of de-ideologization, but not in the sense of Daniel Bell’s understanding of the phenomenon in his famous book, The End of Ideology. In the Soviet Union, de-ideologization means the end of the “particular” ideology which originally had a definite class character, social ideals, and aimed to inspire the proletariat to launch a socialist revolution and construct communism. The current de-ideologization of Marxism in the USSR is a process of the universalization of ideological thinking as such, its final move from the realm of militant modernism to a more playful, relaxed, postmodern mentality.

 

This de-ideologization, or super-ideologization, of Soviet Marxism raises a vital question: are there two distinct postmodernisms, one Western and one Eastern, or is there a single, shared postmodernism? The best answer, in the author’s view, is that “one-and-a-half” postmodernisms exist. The postmodern condition is essentially the same in the East and West, although it proceeds from opposite foundations: ideology and economics, respectively. Late capitalism and late communism are polar opposites in terms of economic structure and efficiency, but economics alone does not determine culture as a whole. The fundamental underlying patterns of cultural postmodernism in the East are not economic, they are ideological. Communism has proved to be a more radical challenge to capitalism than was originally thought, not only did it change the mode of production, it changed the relationship of base and superstructure in society.⁸

 

A comparison of capitalist economics and communist ideology is imperative for elucidating the postmodernist traits common to both societies. Such a “cross” examination would be more interesting than a parallel comparison; if one compares communist and bourgeois ideologies, or socialist and capitalist economics, little can be found beyond commonplace oppositions. It is far more relevant–even from a Marxist-Leninist perspective–to examine the common ground between communist ideology and capitalist economics, as the two perform identical functional roles in their respective social structures. The circulation of goods in capitalist society is essentially identical to the circulation of ideas in communist society. Ideology, like capital, allows for the growth of surplus value, or, in this case, surplus evaluation. In a communist society, every concrete fact of the “material” world is treated ideologically, as evidence of some general historic tendency–its significance increases from one instance of ideological interpretation to the next.

 

The famous formula of a capitalist economy which Marx suggested in Das Kapital is “commodities–money–commodities,” or “money–commodities–money.” The same formula can be applied in modified form to the ideology of Soviet Marxism: “reality – idea – reality,” or “idea – reality – idea.” Facts are exchanged for ideas in communist society in the same way as goods are exchanged for money in capitalist societies. Ideas, as a sort of currency, acquire an abstract form of “ideological capital.” They do not constitute material wealth, but the “correctness” of communist ideology. This “correctness,” or absolute truth, compensates people for their labor (“heroic deeds and sacrifices”), as well as recoups the cost of so-called “particular” mistakes resulting from Party policy.

 

What happens in the late stage of communist development? Why does it move toward a “postmodernist condition” along the same path followed by “late capitalist” societies? Totalitarianism was a superlative machine for accumulating and exploiting all sorts of ideas: leftist and rightist, revolutionary and conservative, internationalist and patriotic, etc.. However, this machine spawned a phenomenon bigger than itself. Just as capital eventually outgrows the capitalist “machine” and becomes a self- sufficient entity, Soviet ideological capital has outgrown the “machine” of a particular personality or system of ideas and has become an omnipresent mentality, appropriating any fact to serve any idea. Such is the current state of Soviet society under glasnost’. Marxist ideology, the most powerful of all modern ideologies, is losing its identity and becoming only one possible interpretation of reality (in the Soviet Union, it would be the least probable one!). The expansion of Marxist ideology overcame Marxism as a form of modernity and created the postmodern condition in the USSR.

 

The overarching expansion of Soviet ideology occurred in the Brezhnev era, when the difference between facts and ideas was practically erased. Ideology was gradually transformed from a system of ideas into an all-encompassing ideological environment which retained all possible alternative philosophical systems as latent components within itself. Existentialism and structuralism, Russophilism and Westernism, technocratic and ecological movements, Christian and neo-pagan outlooks–everything was compressed into the form of Marxism, creating a sort of post-modernist pastiche.

 

One can easily anticipate a counter-argument: how can we refer to Soviet postmodernism without a clear identification of Soviet modernism? Western postmodernism came after modernism, so where is the corresponding progression in Soviet culture?

 

It is obvious, however, that Russian culture of the pre-revolutionary period was predominantly modernist as such trends as symbolism and futurism indicate. As expressions of a highly utopian vision, the Bolshevik movement and October revolution also can be seen as modernist phenomena. The same rigidly consistent style of modernist aesthetics was dominant in the twenties as Mayakovsky’s and Pilnyak’s works demonstrate.

 

In this sense, socialist realism may be regarded as an essentially postmodernist trend destined to balance all opposites and to create a new space for the interaction of all possible stylistic devices including Romantic, Realist, and Classicist models. Andrei Siniavsky’s dissident interpretation (in a 1960 famous essay “On Socialist Realism”) of Soviet official literature as of a reborn classicism was one-sided, as were more conformist attempts to describe socialist realism in terms of amplified critical realism, or heroic romanticism, or combination of both. Socialist realism was not a specific artistic direction in a traditional or modernist sense, it can be adequately approached only as a postmodernist phenomenon, as an eclectic mixture of all previous classical styles, as an encyclopedia of literary cliches. We should trust more to social realism’s own self-definition: the unity of a method attained through the diversity of styles (or their mixture, or pastiche). “Socialist realism is regarded as a new type of artistic consciousness which is not limited by the framework of one or even of several modes of representation….”⁹ Socialist realism simulated successfully all literary styles beginning from ancient epic songs and ending with Tolstoy’s refined psychologism and futuristic poetics of a placard and a slogan.

 

The epoch of the thirties through fifties in the Soviet Union was clearly post*modernist, even though the prevailing term at the time was “anti*modernism.” The furious struggle against “rotten bourgeois modernism” became the hall-mark of Stalinist aesthetics. What was antimodernism in relation to the West was postmodernism in relation to the native, pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary modernist culture.

 

In the sixties and seventies, another wave of modernism came into Soviet literature: futurist, surrealist, abstractionist and expressionist trends were revived in literature, painting, and music. The twenties became the nostalgic model for this neo-modernism of the sixties as presented in Andrei Voznesensky and Vasily Aksyonov.

 

This explains why later, in the seventies and eighties, another wave of postmodernism arose in opposition to this sixties “neo-modernist” generation. For such postmodernists as Ilya Kabakov, Boris Grois, or Dmitri Prigov there are no figures more adversarial, than Malevich, Khlebnikov, and other modernists of the early 20th century, not speaking about the latter’s successors in the sixties such as Andrei Voznesensky or Vassily Aksyonov. Consequently, this postmodern generation feels a sort of nostalgia precisely for the typical Soviet lifestyle and the art of social realism which provides them with congenial ideological material for their conceptual works. Social realism is close to conceptualism in its antimodernist stance: they share highly conventional semiotic devices, the sets of cliches and idioms that are devoid of any personal emphasis and intentional self-expression.

 

These components of the postmodernist paradigm, which in the West were introduced simultaneously, took much longer to mature in Soviet culture. The erasing of the semantic difference between idea and reality, between the signifying and the signified, had been achieved by the first Soviet postmodernism (socialist realism); while the syntactic interplay of these signs was aesthetically adopted only by the second postmodernism (conceptualism). Although it would seem that these two processes must coincide, it took several decades for Soviet culture to pass from one stage to another.

 

The point is that Western culture has great respect for reality that is beyond signs. As soon as signs proved to be self-sufficient, they immediately acquired a playful dimension. The Russian cultural tradition is much more inclined to view signs as an independent reality deserving of the greatest esteem. Therefore it was extremely difficult to accept that these signs which substitute for reality may become objects of irony and aesthetic play.

 

Western postmodernism includes two aspects: what can be called the substance of postmodernism, and the interpretation of this substance in postmodernist conceptual framework. In the Soviet Union, these two aspects developed separately. The period from the thirties to the fifties witnessed the emergence of postmodernism as a specific substance, including the ideological and semiotic dissolution of reality, the merging of elitist and mass culture into mediocrity, and the elimination of modernist stylistic purity and refinement. Only in the late fifties, in the works of such poets as Kholin, Kropivnitsky, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Vilen Barsky, and then in the seventies, in the works of Ilya Kabakov, Eric Bulatov, Dmitri Prigov, and Lev Rubinstein, was the “substantial” postmodernism of Soviet culture interpreted precisely in postmodernist terms. Signs of heroic labor, collectivism, the striving for a communist future, and so on which previously were perceived seriously as the signified reality itself, now were perceived only at the level of signs themselves, which are susceptible to all sorts of linguistic games. In the 1980s Soviet postmodernism finally overtook its second aspect and bloomed into a full cultural phenomenon comparable with its Western parallel.

 

Certainly, such postmodernist phenomena as Borges’s stories, Nabokov’s and Umberto Eco’s novels or Derrida’s models of deconstruction have had a considerable influence on some contemporary schools of Soviet writing, including conceptualism and metarealism. What is much more striking, however, is that the earlier Soviet post- or antimodernism still influences, though unconsciously, the contemporary American literary scene. For example, Tom Wolfe’s recent manifesto “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”¹⁰ gained much attention with his attacks against modernism and his calls for a social novel which would combine fiction and reporting. Wolfe involuntarily duplicates the very patterns that Stalin’s ideologists used in their relentless political tirades against Russian pre-revolutionary and Western bourgeois modernism. Wolfe probably has never heard of Zhdanov’s infamous 1946 report debasing Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, let alone read it. Nevertheless, Wolfe’s main points and even his choice of metaphors are the same as Zhdanov’s: they both compare writing to engineering, for example. Wolfe also proposes that writers form brigades to pool their talents for an investigation of the amazing social reality in the United States, as it was in the Soviet Union of 1930’s.¹¹

 

I do not go so far as to suggest that the aesthetic code of Stalinism directly influenced such an “antimodernist” writer as Tom Wolfe. Yet the terms of postmodernist debate apply equally well in such embarrassingly different conditions as the U.S.S.R. in the late forties and the U.S. in the late eighties. The striving for a postmodernist world view inevitably brings about an opposition to the abstractness and individualism of modernist writing; it also causes a turn towards common and stereotyped forms of language as imposed by the dominant social order.

 

In a broader perspective, postmodernism can be seen as a type of culture which was developed in both the West and the Soviet Union, although by different methods. The Western version of postmodernism came chronologically later, though it was much more theoretically self-conscious. To try to isolate and identify a Western-style postmodernism in twentieth century Russian culture proved to be a difficult problem because the formation of specifically Russian postmodernism had been divided into two periods.

 

The development of Russian modernism was artificially stopped in the thirties, while in the West it developed smoothly up to the sixties. This accounts for the existence of a single postmodernism in the West, while two separate postmodernisms arose in Soviet culture, in the thirties and in the seventies. This obliges us to compare not only Russian postmodernism with its Western counterpart, but also to examine the two Russian postmodernisms: socialist realism and conceptualism. Perhaps, it is the chronological gap between them that made both versions so ideologically charged, though in two opposite directions. The first postmodernism is explicitly heroic, the second one is implicitly ironic. Nevertheless, if we identify them as two aspects and two periods of one historical phenomenon, these opposite tenets easily neutralize each other, comprising entirely “blank pastiche,” to use Fredric Jameson’s definition of postmodernism.

 

The tendency to perceive socialist realism and conceptualism as mutually s/t/imulating aspects of the same cultural paradigm presumably will get further support in the course of future reinterpretations of Soviet history in terms of its integrity and the interdependence of its “initial” and “conclusive” phases. Two Russian postmodernisms complement each other and present a more complicated and self-contradictory phenomenon than Western postmodernism which is concentrated in a single period of history.

* This draft essay was circulated during Postmodern Culture’s Symposium on Russian Postmodernism. See SYMPOS-1.193 to find where it was included in the discussion. Included here are Epstein’s comments introducing the essay. –Ed.

Notes

 

1. Marquis de Coustine, Nikolaevskaia Rossiia. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo obshchestva politkatorzhan, 1930, p. 79.

 

2. Is it not this “nominativity,” this pure concern with names, that gives rise to the sinister power of the nomenklatura, that is those people selected by no one and by no means meriting their stature, but who are named “secretary,” “director,” or “instructor” and have received power by virtue of these names.

 

3. On contemporary Russian Conceptualism see Mikhail Epstein “After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Literature,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 1991, v.90, no.2, pp.409-444, and Mikhail Epstein, “Metamorphosis: On New Currents in the Soviet Poetry.” Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. Ed. Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby. University of Michigan Press, 1991, pp. 382-407.

 

4. Dostoevsky has several variations on the theme of this vision, which affected him deeply, in A Weak Heart(1848), in Petersburg Dreams in Verse and in Prose(1861), and in the sketches for The Diary of a Writer(1873).

 

5. Dummy villages erected, according to foreigners, by the order of Prince Potemkin along the route he was to take with Catherine II after the annexation of the Crimea, 1783. This expression is used allusively of something done for show, an ostentatious display designed to disguise an unsatisfactory state of affairs, a pretence that all is well, etc. See Russian-English Dictionary of Winged Words, Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1988, p.162.

 

6. Voluntary unpaid work on days off, originally on Saturdays.

 

7. J. Baudrillard. The Precession of Simulacra. Semiotexte: New York, 1983, 2.

 

8. For a critical discussion of this issue, see the chapter entitled “Basis and Superstructure: Reality and Ideology,” in Marcuse, Soviet Marxism, 106-107.

 

9. Literaturnyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’. Moscow: Sovetskaiia entsiklopediia, 1987, p.416.

 

10. Tom Wolfe. “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast. A literary manifesto for the new social novel.” Harper’s November 1989.

 

11. These issues are discussed at length in my article “Tom Wolfe and Social(ist) Realism.” Common Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 1992, v. 1, No. 2, pp. 147-160.