The Last Rogue of History: Picaresque Elements in Sasha Sokolov’sPalisandriia

Abstract

Sokolov wrote Palisandriia (1985) with the intention of producing novel that would end the novel as a genie.1 If the assault mounted by Shkola dlia durakov (1976) and Mezhdu sobakoi i volkom (1980) aimed too high, this, his third sortie lowers the guns. Pseudo-literature, 'sub-literary genres'2 the detective, science-fiction and pornographic novels, the thriller and adventure tale, sensationalist political satire and memoirs aie mustered as parodie ammunition. Modernism, autonomous self-referential art, confronts its true enemy, history/*3 and the lines of battle are drawn, contrary to Utopian practice, not on history's claims to extra-textual reality or objective truth-value, but rather on the historian's encroachment into literary territory itself. The reader is being wooed away by nothing more than outmoded narrativity. Solzhenitsyn's more recent incursions notwithstanding, history and the novel have long fought for aesthetic authority, especially on Russian soil. The natural affinities between the two, exploited and 'problematized' in Western postmodern efforts such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, are those revealed through their narrative common denominators [of] teleology, causality [and] continguity.4 A product of the Russian 1980s, of what then called itself the Russian avant-garde and felt itself marginalized by the ideological obsessions of an exhausted, indeed false aesthetic,5 Palisandriia attacks the historical or extra-referential narrative headon, and it does so by zeroing in on these affinities, these fundamentals of narrative syntagmatics, anathemas all to the earlier, pre-Palisandriia Sokolov. Narrative common denominators become common grounds of indictment, and the postmodern presence of the past6 takes a unique twist when history and the