The Squid and the Whale à la russe: Navigating the “Uncanny” in Dmitry Bykov's ZhD

Abstract

In ZhD, Bykov tests what happens when a nation defines itself in terms of the ethnic community. In doing so he borrows from the demographic theories of Lev Gumilev, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and Nicolas Marr, which pose modern Russians as a relatively recent and, therefore, non‐native population while placing them in a long historical battle for primacy with the Jews. If Western literature of colonialism, such as Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, often conceives of the native populations as symbolically necessary to the ruling minority's self‐image, Bykov creates a silent majority whose deliberate disengagement from politics is the lynchpin of their survival. This attitude mocks contemporary Russians' aversion to self‐governance. The novel also parodies the “Nordic” spirit of the Russian army, whose main goal is to destroy itself (a dead soldier is a perfect soldier), and the Khazars (Jews) who deal in moral usury by making everyone feel indebted to them. The natives' values, in the typical fashion of the “noble savage,” consist in cyclical time, shamanism, transparent language, personification of the land, and animal‐like closeness to nature. What does this collection of clichés strive to accomplish? Perhaps to demonstrate that the “founding lies” of our “imagined communities” are so interwoven that any attempt at reification leads to absurdity. This article will examine the ways in which Bykov negotiates the different cultural narratives that comprise Russian identity by following Slavoj Zizek's advice that the best way to subvert the racist attitude is by means of overidentification.