(from Russkaya
Mysl,
Contemporary social life is primarily a process of
the entropy of dogma, occurring in the most varied forms.
Literature is inevitably drawn into
this process, at times accelerating it to an extreme as a result of its feverish removal
of the taboos on previously forbidden
themes.
In the space of a few seasons from the agitated abyss of
our shocked world there has arisen a vast continent of the literature of condemnation
and accusation. The civil and social therapeutic significance of these alpine
peaks of the literature of perestroika is
truly immense.
But how is this reflected in the very substance of
literature? "The image of the world
manifested in the word"—as the poet said. Is not this the ideal of
a literature already at its basis, in the micro-world of its atomic structure,
seeking to exact retribution from the macro-world?
Contemporary literature (and not only ours), having
virtually lost its sense of the whole,
frequently reserves the aesthetic right to a literary assimilation of
the fragment.
This literature is reminiscent of the child which
We can, and probably we
should, talk ad infinitum of the heinous crimes of Stalinism, the defects of
the administrative command system, the
moral degradation of our contemporaries, and the accompanying
ecological disasters, but we should also remember that this sad detective novel
of contemporary history can by definition have
no ending. What is required is not so much a literature which transforms
a particular "case file" into a particular genre, as one which
gathers together the entire bitter experience of this world. We do not have
such a literature today—and neither do others. It seems to me that our era
could well announce a competition for the best metaphorical novel which
captures the full panorama of our contemporary history, the totality of
"our spiritual city", in the frequently repeated phrase of Gogol, who
was almost the ideal embodiment of this kind of literature. The era is ready
for a return to the great allegorical novel of the copper-smith John Bunyan, The
Pilgrim's Progress, to the barbarous and extremely profound philosophical lyricism of the cobbler Jakob
Boehme—to the baroque books which embraced the entire world between
their bindings.
There was a glimmer of something of the kind in our
literature during its "mythological" boom. Unfortunately, the works
which appeared at that time contained too
much game-playing—with the censor, with the reader, with literature
itself—and too much mixing of "Myths of the Peoples of the World"
with granny's Russian folk tales, of folklorified kitsch with the genuine
poetic tradition of myth, for this movement to take any serious step beyond
belles lettres or even for it to be constructed in convincing aesthetic forms.
But in general this was already the torment of literary substance in search of
a new state. It is a curious fact that Russian literature participates in this
search only to an extremely moderate
degree—specifically in its myth-creating aspect.
But this renders all the more characteristic and all
the more significant every shift of this
literature towards a metaphorical meta-depiction of the world, every
attempt it makes to create, in the terms of Khlebnikov's pledge to his genre, a
"meta-narrative". Particularly if the creation is already complete.
Leonid Latynin defines his The Face-Maker and the Muse as
a "novel". But it is precisely a "meta-narrative" filled
with a passionate striving to embrace the entire ontological spectrum of
existence, the entire journey of the human pilgrim, the entire curriculum of
his temptations and all his torments—from sex to torture, from overcoming of the self to the domination of the other. Everything "local" and
"individual" is decisively subtracted from the time and space
of this quasi-novel Its clock-face is marked not in
concrete historical time, but in universal time. Its plot line lies beyond all
geographical latitudes or, rather, it extends far beyond them.
...The heavy burden of totality oppresses a certain
City and its inhabitants, who seem somehow
eroded by the perpetual rain, more redolent of metaphysics than of meteorology,
and flattened beneath this
oppressive weight.
But this is no Orwellian or
Zamyatinesque police hyperdictator-ship. In The Face-Maker and the Muse the
police, in the person of the Official, is no more than
a servant of the ontology of the place, of the very mode of human existence
here. The human being here is not attached
to any definite soctal formation or regime. In The Face-Maker and the Muse, even modem technology acquires pree-modern features, approximately magic, or the
art which allows the Face-Maker hero to change human faces with his
scalpel so that they bear at least a distant resemblance to some mysterious,
perfect Image. And the Image likewise has nothing in common with the Benefactor or the Big Brother of the
popular anti-utopias. The story of The Face-Maker and the Muse does
not depict some political regime or social
order of the "anthill socialism" kind. The book's theme is the
regime and the order of existence itself.
Let us state quite openly that such
books are tragically rare in literature, particularly in current literature,
with its simple-minded thematic
differentiation of the world. The only Russian book
which to any degree reminds this
author of Latynin's work of fantasy is the novel of Ivan Pantyukhov, the
forgotten Kievan writer andunfortunate correspondent of Blok—Silence and the
Old Man
(1908), which the author called a "universal satire", recreating in the manner of a sacramental mystery the combat
between "soul" and
"matter".
The depiction of the City-world in Leonid Latynin's
"universal satire" draws together all his tragic experience of being
positioned less in one particular history or another than between Life and the
ritual of forcible "Departure", between the Eros which scorches the
human flesh and the Image which shines in the heights of transcendence between the Face-Maker's companion
the Muse, who embodies harmony which the hero only has to reach out his
hand to touch, and the general discord between the Official who passes the
universal substance through the filters of "totality" and the inspired transformation of this
substance under the Face-Maker's creative
scalpel-chisel.
The nature of these
megalithic themes implying that somewhere in the space between them, as the
inevitable consequence of the divided human condition and the crucifixion of
the human being between the everyday and the spiritual there exists the
millenial sense of human martyrdom, is
expressed here in the book's beginning and ending, in the hero's trial
by fire and water.
In
In The Face-Maker
and the Muse torture becomes as it were the apotheosis of social being, the
supreme manifestation of inter-human contacts. A dubios
point? Let academic sociology, which is by the very nature of its
activity convinced of the opposite, attempt to refute the author's view. For
the time being we can simply remind the
reader that that most intelligent of reactionaries, Joseph de Meistre, one of the most profound and
fanatical "officials" of civilization, asserted that its central
character was the executioner. This thesis of de Meistre's provoked a
storm of liberal humanist antitheses, but
not one of them, not even the most acute, has reduced the number of
executioners in the least, or the corresponding incidence of torture in our
spiritual city—and our material one.
But nevertheless, in the name of what do people torment
each other so in The Face-Maker and the Muse? The scale of this
"universal satire" is made particularly clear in its recreation of
the interminable human urge to compete, the rat-race, vanity fair, the universal stock-exchange, in which these
vanities are incapable of settling into calm even for a moment What has
this to do with totalitarianism, which, in theory, should extinguish all
superfluous elements of individualism and
the excessive ambitions of what Dostoevsky called "personal
desiring"... This is rather the totality of such "desiring", of
the urge to outstrip one's neighbour, an ugly mass
Napoleonism.
In this, Latynin's book, the events of which are like the
demon in the Iranian epics—"here and not here"—comes unexpectedly
close to the extremely local "Muscovite" prose of Yuri Trifonov, the heroes of which transform the world city into
something between a wrestling
stadium and a lottery. But this book decisively removes the final
elements of local atmosphere, metaphorically, and even metaphysically
re-evaluating such situations and in the process
transforming the fair of East European vanity into a universal fair. The author's ingenuity of plot and
theme constructs a monstrous
structure in which the anonymous and faceless constantly spills over into enterprising imposture.
Here a person realizes himself only
by outstripping-'-another. The author's integral energy allows him to
draw into his metaphor of total competition a large number of its "sub-genres"—from political intrigue to public
sex— in an ironical, even humorous manner, and then even to transcribe
them in a tragic mode.
This aspect of the book in particular bears the
traces of contempo- , rary history. In theory human competition has been anathema
to nationalist totalitarianism of all colours—but
in practice it has encouraged this competition to an extreme degree,
although in hidden, transmuted forms. Today, like a child with a new rattle, our liberal intelligentsia is comforted by the
happy prospect of a free market and other economic declensions of this
same rivalry in a completely open and
legalized form. Naturally, it has been forgotten (if, indeed, it had
ever been realized) that the whole of Western literature
from the industrial revolution to the first rumblings of the new
technological revolution was one long howl of protest by the aesthetic elements against this rivalry, against
the discord disrupting the "spiritual city". Perhaps there
really are no other realistic means for
managing economic activity, but the spiritual economy of humanity
presupposes the occurrence of something of the order of an inevitable apocalypse of this dicord.
Larynin's book recreates, not
history, but the age-old morphology of the notorious urge to
compete, which has provided the opportunity for entire social formations
to thrive—some by praising it, others by
reviling it, while meantime the domination of man by man, which began slightly before Jacob's struggle with
the angel, seems likely to end together with human history itself.
The entire novel seems to belong to
an alien, as yet unassimilated literature, in a totally unfamiliar
manner, with no direct antecedents or contemporary parallels. A
certain tragic supplement to the book's "chronicles of torment"
is provided by an artistic torture—the convulsive attempt to situate the word
in entirely new aesthetic conditions which
impart to it vastly more extensive meanings than in traditional descriptive writing, meanings which are directed towards the universal whole, towards the goal of
depicting the world.
A contemporary of Baudelaire who was a gourmand in literature
and in other fields was astounded by Les Fleurs du Mal and wrote of their author: "The poor child, how
much he has suffered."
Contemporary history, which
has most effectively weaned us of gourmandising of any sort, is a harsh tutor of the
true—and tragic—worth of genuine literature. The point is not simply that Larynin's book came into existence in the
conditions of the underground of the seventies-(it was written in
1977-78), the fate of which during its own
lifetime is only too well known. In detaching itself from the literary
establishment the book also detached itself from
its well-trodden aesthetics, and was immediately launched on a road
without the usual literary customs posts, without the standard sign-posts to
simplify the journey, or any hand holding a torch to light the way. The book's
stylistic cocoon winds dense and thick around its theme, which is intended to
recreate the universal process in its entire amplitude—a tragic determination
to impart a completely different level of connection to the artistic image. Here we have one of its first sobs and
screams.
Translated by Andrew Bromfield