Absurdopediia russkoi zhizni Vladimira Sorokina. Zaum', grotesk i absurd by M. P Marusenkov (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 885 ideas about life as performance have ‘become folklore’ and no longer require attribution, like some guitar poems. And Platonov’s conceptual mentors firmly but not demonstratively exclude the Francophone theorists of postmodernism whose notions have loomed large in Anglo-American humanities scholarship in recent years. Instead, more than anything else we find the steadfastly inwardlooking mental ambit of the metropolitan Russian creative intelligentsia, the social group that furnished the creators and consumers of guitar poetry, and which for obvious reasons shies away from foregrounded theorizing and is negatively dominated by instinctive a-Marxism. In addition, gendered criteria of description and evaluation are avoided; in this respect the book conforms to current academic fashion. In the event, much play is made with various meanings of concepts such as lichnost´, svoi (liudi), and so on. All this is somewhat heavy-handed; the fall-back argument resorted to here about problematizing facile binaries has worn pretty thin by now, depending as it usually does on simplistic assumptions about older scholarship and values. The book really comes to life whenever Platonov turns to the discussion of particularities: the personalities of the guitar poets, the stylistic analysis of song texts and, most valuable of all, an examination of the topics through which guitar poetry historically challenged and expanded the range of existing literary discourse in Russia: drink, the Gulag, criminality, a de-romanticized Moscow, unhappy love, the unheroic mishaps of everyday life. Quotations are given in punctilious transliteration, though using a clumsy and unfamiliar system, and also in translation, which tends to be somewhat stiff and formal, though still preferable to the inept colloquialism that appears all too often in attempts to convey the characteristic registers of guitar poetry in the original. New College, Oxford G. S. Smith Marusenkov, M. P. Absurdopediia russkoi zhizni Vladimira Sorokina. Zaum´, grotesk i absurd. Aleteiia, St Petersburg, 2012. 304 pp. Notes. Bibliography. R660.00. The work of Vladimir Sorokin has been eagerly and often heatedly discussed in critical circles for over two decades now, and the writer continues to have both his supporters and detractors. Maksim Marusenkov has succeeded in downplaying the emotion, the prejudice and the subjectivity in the arguments, and produced a cogent, well-researched and impressively constructed fulllength study of this important writer. The book begins with a chronological (to 2010) survey of Sorokin’s writings, beginning with the novel Norma, started in 1979, and ending with the 2010 Metel´ (The Snowstorm), a ‘classical Russian povest´’ (p. 67). Thereafter the book is structured in three detailed and well-referenced chapters that reflect SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 886 the themes of its subtitle. In ‘Zaum´’ (‘Extra Sense’) the author takes pains to establish the notion of ‘extra sense’ language through reference to the critical work of Viktor Shklovskii and the poetry of Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, before offering detailed analyses of the short stories ‘Zaplyv’ (‘Swimming In’) and ‘Letuchka’ (‘The Unscheduled Meeting’), the collection Pervyi subbotnik (The First Saturday Workday), the novels Goluboe salo (Blue Lard) and the Led (Ice) trilogy as case studies for an examination of Sorokin’s own use (and abuse) of language. The ‘poem in prose’, Mesiats v Dakhau (A Month in Dachau) is also discussed here with reference to its ‘stylized’ speech. It may come as a shock to Sorokin aficionados that the chapter ‘Grotesk’ is actually the shortest in the book, though in terms of actual content it is the most condensed. It begins with a theoretical discussion of different types of ‘grotesque’ — romantic, realistic or modernist and postmodernist — before showing how Sorokin’s highly individual ‘grotesque’ can be applied to all three of these sub-divisions (particular attention is focused on Padezh [The Cattle Plague], with its nods to Platonov). It is also in this chapter that the author discusses the novel Goluboe salo not only as commercially Sorokin’s most successful (six editions and more than 100,000 copies sold in 1999–2002), but also as one in which Russian history is placed at the centre of the author’s mirror, a mirror which remains defiantly ‘crooked’ (p. 194). In ‘Absurd’ the author remarks that the excesses, perversions and sheer savagery of the chaotically violent...