Cynics, Loyalists and Rebels in Recent Russian Fiction: Literary Scenarios of Legitimation and the Pursuit of ‘Sovereign Democracy’

Abstract

The idea that modern nations can be described as ‘imagined communities’ created through communication and interaction (Anderson, 1991) has prompted a shift of perspective in political theory. The focus of research has widened beyond the study of administrative practices to include the field of literature, the media and, broadly speaking, the practices of seeing enacted as people devise specific communal structures. Hence, the creation and preservation of sociopolitical institutions and the negotiations over models of collective and individual identity are no longer the exclusive concern of political science; rather, they are now approachable by cultural and literary studies. This shift underlies our analytical strategy as we seek to grasp the role that literature can play in the legitimation of political power: (i) Beyond its well-known function of social criticism, literature offers relevant insight into the genesis and consolidation of different forms of governance. In addition to representing political issues, literary works of art can stage and test the narratives that justify political practices or accompany them rhetorically. Fictional environments and the seeming gratuitousness of the literary devices allow for a far-reaching exploration of these narratives. (ii) Literary heroes and their narrative environments incite various forms of reader response, as the Constance school of literary reception has shown. Hans Robert Jauss associates the term ‘catharsis’ with aesthetic experience at large. He defines this experience as a projection of the reading self (or the contemplating theater public) onto a foreign self and describes the literary techniques or patterns of interaction that allow us to identify with the hero. Drawing on the ‘communicative efficacy of aesthetic experience’, Jauss demonstrates how literary works and the cathartic experiences they provide allow readers to mediate between fictional scenarios and political reality (Jauss, 1982, part A/7 and part B/1–2). (iii) In the years after 1989, the former Soviet countries underwent dramatic changes that were felt as keenly in the literary domain as elsewhere. The fact that writers were no longer perceived as the mouthpieces of state propaganda or as ‘engineers of the human soul’ (Stalin), however, did not fundamentally compromise their social status. Once divested of these functions, literature could develop into an area of a dogmatically unfettered search for ideals of social order; community models are put to test through the characters of a fictional tale or, in other words, through literary figures living out possible worlds. (iv) Literature as a technique of world making has a negative counterpart in which its critical, enlightening functions are sacrificed for the benefit of political mythology. In The Myth of the State, Ernst Cassirer identified three basic elements of political myth: ‘a change in the function of language’, the ‘introduction of new rites’ and ‘a new art of divination’ (1946, p. 282–9). While new functions of language can be experimentally performed in — and finally instituted by — works of literature, the notions of ‘ritual’ and ‘divination’ point to another function of literature compatible with Cassirer’s theory: Literary works can offer an affirmative or critical reenactment of the past, but also sociopolitical prophecy — a fact that is particularly relevant with regard to modern forms of Russian authoritarianism.