Cross(-Dress)ing One's Way to Crisis: Yevgeny Popov and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya and the Crisis of Category in Contemporary Russian Culture

Abstract

the Gorbachev and post-Gorbachev eras is a culture in profound crisis. In fact the word crisis now seems the most accurate description of the state of almost all spheres of life in the former Soviet Union economic, political, social, and spiritual, as well as cultural. Russian culture is hardly a newcomer to this state of affairs, however. The modern Russian identity has been forged by such historically recurring crises of identity and category, with the resolution of each crisis entailing the adoption of a new cultural, political, economic, religious, or other such system. The Russian literary and cultural critics Boris Uspensky and Yuri Lotman provide fruitful means for examining this process of change in a metahistorical context. In their article Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture they argue for a systemicity of cultural disruption and change, asserting that Russian cultural dynamics have always been oriented toward a decisive break with the [culture] that preceded it (31). Significant changes in Russian culture occur only in moments of crisis, as evidenced by the revolutionary and cataclysmic character of major events in Russian history such as the Christianization of Kievan Rus by Vladimir, the westernizing efforts of Peter the Great, and, last but not least, the Russian Revolution. Such dynamism requires a moment of crisis during which a new ideology vanquishes its predecessor. Lotman and Uspensky posit two models for the construction and development of that new culture: