The Poetics of Confrontation: Carnival in V. Voinovich’s Moscow 2042

Abstract

Vladimir Voinovich is recognized author of broadly anti-authoritarian literature, and critical commentary on his fiction tends to underscore the highly political and radically satiric nature of his texts, nature that invests his writing with subversive force. He exposes the ideologies and stereotypes of the dominant cultural forces in the totalitarian world, in the process deconstructing its cultural myths. Robert Porter correctly sees this strategy as formidable in Voinovich's celebrated futuristic novel Moscow 2042 (1987) suggesting that the work carries on an effective subversive dialogue with the Russian emigre aesthetic and, on another level, perceives it as skilful political satire directed against the Soviet system.1 Other critics have recognized similar intertextual dynamic at work in Moscow 2042, noting the way in which Voinovich's central emphasis on challenging existing ideologies and discourses and his intense involvement with the real-world context of Soviet reality render the novel truly transgressive in genuine political sense. Karen Ryan-Hayes suggests that this highly allusive text achieves its subversive effect through its parodic use of the utopian tradition, so that the patterns found in literary utopias become an organizing narrative vehicle in Moscow 2042. Referring to Robert Elliot's observation regarding the close link between utopia and satire, the critic demonstrates how Voinovich's satire utilizes the conventions of the literary utopia to focus critical lens on the present.2 But emergent in this work, paradoxically, is the author's sophisticated aesthetic play with the dystopian tradition as well, and so while satirizing his targets more forcefully and more effectively, he creates a kind of satiric palimpsest.3 Following this line of argument, one could maintain that his text gains its tremendous verbal energy largely because of the powerful way in which it parodies and thus transforms the conventions of official literary modes pertaining to totalitarian culture. Indeed, as Fredric Jameson has shown, literary genres are always invested with ideology as in fact they originate and develop in immediate response to political forces in specific sociohistorical situations.4 One may assert, therefore, that by playing with variety of possible genre configurations, Voinovich's book makes an effective political statement precisely because it ironically reverses the ideological constructs inherent in genre making. Appreciating Voinovich's dialogue with various literary traditions undoubtedly contributes greatly to understanding the mechanisms through which his volume achieves its striking demythologizing impact and it is in terms of his subversive writing strategies that I would like to analyze the rich and multivoiced texture of Moscow 2042. It appears that the book resonates with M. Bakhtin's concept of carnival, which ...has been, in the literature of the modem era, the main vehicle for the most concentrated and vivid forms of carnivalization.5 According to Bakhtin, the most important characteristics of carnivalesque literature are its parodic nature, questioning of traditional authority, sharp criticism of contemporary life, and challenge to established norms of social behavior and forms of logic. When the critic considers its political valence, he argues that such fiction tends to be firmly anchored in contemporary reality, and as result is always infused with political energies. This article will explore range of subversive elements in Voinovich's book which, in interesting and productive ways, respond to readings within the context of Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque. In its utilization of broad and impressive array of carnivalesque narrative techniques that recall Bakhtin's descriptions of the carnival, I suggest that Voinovich's novel clearly epitomizes the carnival as discussed by the critic. To begin with, the relevance of Bakhtin's emphasis on the importance of parody if applied to Voinovich's work is obvious even at cursory reading. …