CIVILIZATION’S WILD EAST:
NARRATING EASTERN EUROPE’S COMMUNISM AND POST-COMMUNISM
By
NATAŠA KOVAČEVIĆ
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2006
Copyright 2006
by
Nataša Kovačević
TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
ABSTRACT.........................................................................................................................v
CHAPTER
1
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................1
Bleaching Eastern Europe’s Cultural “Blackness”.......................................................1
Dissident Narratives......................................................................................................6
“The Hinterland of the New European Reich”: Democracy’s Border or
Democracy’s Limit?...............................................................................................19
2
“DOUBLY OBSCURE” DISSIDENT NARRATIVE: VLADIMIR
NABOKOV’S PALE FIRE.........................................................................................36
Writing “Nabokov”.....................................................................................................36
Testimony to/of Colonial Overidentification..............................................................50
Charles Kinbote’s Monstrous (Self) Re-presentations ...............................................67
3
SHIFTING TOPOGRAPHIES OF EASTERN/CENTRAL/EUROPE IN JOSEPH
BRODSKY’S AND CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ’S PROSE WRITING.............................76
Typographies and Topographies: Writing Brodsky and Miłosz.................................76
(De)Centering Europe.................................................................................................83
Joseph Brodsky, or, the Crescent meets the Sickle and the Hammer.........................90
New Catastrophies in the Air: Brodsky versus Brodsky ..........................................105
Czesław Miłosz, or, Self-Hating Slavs .....................................................................112
Leaving the Ghetto: Journey to the West .................................................................125
4
DEVIANT STEPCHILD OF EUROPEAN HISTORY: COMMUNIST
EASTERN EUROPE IN MILAN KUNDERA AND GÜNTER GRASS ...............141
“The Mass Production of Martyr Virtue”: Kundera's Graphomania before 1989....143
History on Speed: “Imagology” and the Politics of Forgetting in Kundera’s
Slowness and Ignorance.......................................................................................154
Europe's “Fanatical Moderate”: Günter Grass and Liberal Discourse in Crisis.......175
The Predicament of “Europe” in The Call of the Toad ............................................187
iii
5
PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION AND NEANDERTHAL
LIBERALISM:VICTOR PELEVIN, GARY SHTEYNGART AND CRIMINAL
EASTERN EUROPE................................................................................................200
Criminal Lands behind the Schengen Curtain ..........................................................200
Homo Zapiens: The Path to Your (Ethnic) Self Is a Shop........................................212
Inside the Language of the Market ...........................................................................224
Let Us Drown the Russian Bourgeoisie in a Flood of Images .................................230
Che and the Impossibility of Revolution ..................................................................238
Beta Immigrants and Mafia Thugs: Capitalism’s “Others” in The Russian
Debutante’s Handbook ........................................................................................242
The Crime of Refusing to Work: Reclaiming the Time of Capital ..........................251
Conservative Mimicry: Capitulation into an Alpha Immigrant................................261
6
ETHNICIZING GUILT: HUMANITARIAN IMPERIALISM AND THE CASE
OF (FOR) YUGOSLAVIA.......................................................................................267
Critical Intervention..................................................................................................270
Enjoy your Bombing! Slavoj Žižek’s Ethnic Hierarchies ........................................283
Croatian, Balkan, Eastern European, or “Other”? Dubravka Ugrešić and the
Condition of Global Dissidence...........................................................................297
Against Pater/Patria: Aleksandar Hemon’s Sarajevo Blues .....................................310
7
CONCLUSION.........................................................................................................323
LIST OF REFERENCES.................................................................................................338
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...........................................................................................352
iv
Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
CIVILIZATION’S WILD EAST:
NARRATING EASTERN EUROPE’S COMMUNISM AND POST-COMMUNISM
By
Nataša Kovačević
August 2006
Chair: Julian Wolfreys
Cochair: Malini Schueller
Major Department: English
My work posits post/communist Eastern Europe as a neo/colonial terrain to show
how contemporary discursive underpinnings of global capitalism and liberal democracy
have been shaped by a combined Orientalist demonization of communist regimes and
Eastern European cultures. Thus far, scholarship has focused primarily on Orientalist
imaginings of the Balkans (in the wake of the 1990s’ wars in former Yugoslavia); when it
did tackle Eastern Europe, it looked mostly at Western historical, sociological and literary
texts about the region, offered an overview of related discourses and incorporated
insights from postcolonial theory cautiously at best. I update existing scholarship by
analyzing how old Orientalisms surface in the Cold War period, re-articulated in
narratives that define a “European” or “civilizational” ideal as an essentially liberaldemocratic project against the discursive palimpsest of “totalitarian,” “barbarian,” and
“Oriental” communists. The establishment of this discourse has helped to justify
transitions to market economy and liberal-civic society in post-communism; it
v
increasingly provincializes Eastern Europe by suppressing its communist histories and
legacies, placing it in an economically and politically subordinate position with respect to
the EU and US and continuing its dependence on the West as a point of reference for an
articulation of identity.
I shift the focus from Western narratives to texts written by Eastern European, anticommunist dissidents and exiles, or by authors who ethnically and linguistically straddle
the borders between “civilization” and the “Wild East” as they present post/communism
to (largely) Western audiences. As with texts emerging in traditional post/colonial
situations, exile or incessant border-crossing frequently signifies fragmentation and
disjunction in terms of national, cultural, or linguistic identification. I examine the
discursive conditions that prompt Nabokov, Miłosz, Kundera and others to present
themselves as native, “Eastern European” experts and emancipate themselves—and their
homelands—as “civilized,” “Enlightened,” or “Westernized.” Importantly, the authors’
articulations of such seemingly oppositional identities create discursive openings for
recognizing and analyzing the Orientalist discourses that seek to contain them. These are
valuable for deconstructing the basic concept of “Eastern Europe,” and exposing Eastern
Europeans’ preoccupation with their reflections in the Western mirror and the
concomitant tradition of self-Orientalization.
vi
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Bleaching Eastern Europe’s Cultural “Blackness”
The perfidious Chinese, half-naked Indians and passive Muslims are described as
vultures for “our” largesse and are damned when “we lose them” to communism, or
to their unregenerate Oriental instincts: the difference is scarcely significant.
—Edward Said, Orientalism
The collapse of the Wall, the Curtain and much more besides, deprived “Europe” of
its partition along the militarized and policed frontier which had defined its identity
as opposed to the presumed alternative culture of Leninism. It turned out that this
alternative was not merely a failure, but had for a long time been no more than a
pretence; mass action and mass sentiment rejected it, because for many years
nobody had believed in it enough to make it work; and the liberal-democratic
capitalism of the Community was faced with the task, not of transforming a
counterculture, but of filling a vacuum and tidying up a gigantic mess . . . in late
1991 it seems apparent that “Europe”—both with and without the North whose
addition turns it from “Europe” into “Western Civilization”—is once again an
empire in the sense of a civilized and stabilized zone which must decide whether to
extend or refuse its political power over violent and unstable cultures along its
borders but not yet within its system: Serbs and Croats if one chances to be
Austrian, Kurds and Iraqis if Turkey is admitted to be part of “Europe.” (emphasis
mine)
—JGA Pocock, “Deconstructing Europe”
The Said and Pocock quotes beautifully encapsulate the key concepts I intend to
tackle in this work: first, the reification of Eastern Europe as a civilizing project (task) by
the European Union and North America; and second, the reification of its communist
legacies as “unregenerate Oriental instincts” that must be abandoned in this process.
Indeed, as many news reports which anticipated and followed the EU Enlargement on
May 1, 2004 imply, Eastern Europe is finally on the road of becoming “European” by no
longer being “communist.” This binary belies a disturbing political vision, which gives
1
2
little cause for celebration of a “common” EU future—it indicates that Europe continues
to be predicated on the idea of conditional inclusion/exclusion and that any true dialogue
between its Western and Eastern members is impossible. Rather, Eastern Europe, in this
latest attempt to “modernize” and catch up with the ever-elusive Western prosperity and
civilization, cannot negotiate the rules of the game: it must satisfy the EU, IMF and
World Bank criteria prescribed for achieving “democracy, “privatization,” “capitalism,”
“diversity,” “human rights protection” and many others in order to become emancipated
as “European.”
It is appropriate here to recall that this impossibility of dialogue, unidirectional
flow of directives and their acceptance as necessary for emancipation from economic or
cultural “inferiority” typically defines a colonial, or a proto-colonial relationship. But
when writing about Europe, Eastern Europe in particular, postcolonial critics and
historians have been wary of using this terminology. Certain Eastern European states are
only begrudgingly discussed as postcolonial even in terms of its Soviet, AustroHungarian or Ottoman imperial legacies (or the legacy of German rule in Poland). Only
recently—and even then reluctantly—has Eastern Europe been discussed as a colonial
terrain of the Western tradition, perhaps more famously in Larry Wolff’s valuable work
on the discursive “invention” of Eastern Europe by the Western European imaginary over
the last two centuries and Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić’s anthology Balkan as Metaphor
which blends the discussion of the Balkans and Eastern Europe as Western
post/neocolonial “others.”1
1
I am here referring to Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the
Enlightenment. In literary and cultural studies, the consideration of Eastern Europe’s post/coloniality is
even more recent; for instance, promising work has been done by Dragan Kujundzic on Russia’s postcolonial cultural Westernization beginning with Peter the Great, by Andrew Hammond on Cold War and
3
The more entrenched argument goes—paralleling Maria Todorova’s discussion of
the Balkans in Imagining the Balkans—that no Eastern European country ever suffered
the type of colonial disenfranchisement, exploitation and racism typical in, for example,
Asian or African colonies. While this is a valid distinction, I argue that this line of
thinking ultimately obfuscates a long history of Western attempts to identify itself as
“enlightened,” “developed,” and “civilized” in distinction to Eastern Europe and as a
result, to intellectually master Eastern Europe through description and classification,
fixing it into stereotypes of lamentable cultural, political and economic “backwardness”
(e.g., agrarian, old-fashioned, despotic, totalitarian, obedient, abnormally violent,
bloodthirsty) or, alternately, praiseworthy conservation of its “noble savages” (here,
pallid Western city dwellers, enervated by industrial fumes or corporate discipline, are
contrasted with big, healthy, lazy and gregarious Eastern Europeans).2
Furthermore, the difficulty of recognizing this pernicious proto-colonial
relationship is compounded by the contemporary euphemistic discourse about the
European Union as an occasionally bumpy and antagonistic, but ultimately benevolent,
equality-oriented and multicultural enterprise, which, like the equally obfuscating term
“globalization,” suppresses the mechanisms of capitalist expansion, withdrawal of social
welfare policies and creation of new peripheries and widespread impoverishment.3
post-Cold War cultural representations of the Balkans and Eastern Europe and by Roumiana Deltcheva in
the field of Eastern European, especially Balkan, film studies.
2
The assorted stereotypes have been discussed at length by Wolff, Todorova and the contributors to Bjelić
and Savić's anthology.
3
In “Europe in the Twenty-First Century: The World's Scandinavia?” Göran Therborn compares Eastern
European countries' results of “transitions” thus far, offering bleak prospects for Europe's united future:
greater class polarization, as well as greater upper-middle-class rapprochement ,West and East, higher
unemployment and overall strengthening of illegal and criminal business networks. He also cites the
portentously worded World Bank recommendations to Eastern European countries: “Forget Western
4
Uncovering these mechanisms dropped, by and large, from official political discourses,
Étienne Balibar has vehemently criticized the myth of a multicultural, egalitarian
European Union in the face of its assimilationist policies, its disappearing labor unions,
as well as its predication of citizenship rights on member states’ national origin.4 Finally,
the very term Eastern European makes for a particularly confusing and schizophrenic
position. On the one hand, Eastern Europeans have been defined and define themselves
as “European,” especially in distinction to their more “Oriental” neighbors, an act that
could be explained in terms of Milica-Bakić Hayden’s “nesting Orientalisms” which she
applies to the formation of ethnic identity in the Balkans.5 But on the other hand, Eastern
Europeans, while not “other” as much as Asians or Africans, are also “not quite”
European; rather, they are semi-European, semi-developed, with semi-functioning states
and semi-civilized manners (perhaps this also explains, as Wolff demonstrates in
Inventing Eastern Europe, the oscillations between racial designations of Eastern
Europeans as “whites,” “blacks,” “gypsies,” and even “apes”).
The establishment of “real” colonial rule and subsequent imperialist projects that
legitimated it (a worthy distinction made by Robert Young in Postcolonialism)
necessarily creates a context of study different from that of Eastern Europe, marked by
the absence of “real” colonies or the various imperialist institutions, discourses, or people
Europe. Look to Latin America or South-East Asia (Singapore). In particular, look to the Chilean private
pension funds” (379). Although there is faith and optimism that the European Union may eventually
overcome some of these problems, they nevertheless haunt both old and new EU states — and the ones
whose EU entry is perpetually delayed. Witness the titles of recent articles by BBC in anticipation of the
EU Enlargement: “Germans Fear EU Economic Drain” (April 14), “New EU States Risk Brain Drain”
(4/21/2004), “French Fear Diluted EU Role” (4/24/2004) and “Russia Eyes EU with New Concern”
(4/26/2004).
4
Especially see his recent books Politics and the Other Scene and We the People of Europe? Reflections on
Transnational Citizenship.
5
See Bakić-Hayden's “Nesting Orientalism: The Case of the Former Yugoslavia.”
5
implicated in their rule. However, this work takes the viewpoint of Larry Wolff that “as
in the case of Orientalism, so also with Eastern Europe, intellectual discovery and
mastery could not be entirely separated from the possibility of real conquest” (8). In other
words, I argue that this “intellectual discovery and mastery” of Eastern Europe is alwaysalready implicated in the political, economic and cultural interactions between the West
and East and in this, I challenge Aijaz Ahmad and other critics of Said who, in a
dialectical fashion, accuse him of emphasizing “textuality” at the alleged expense of
exposing “material” consequences of Orientalism.6
In Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s terms, this “geo-graphing” of Eastern Europe not only
produces “knowledge” of an essentially arbitrary space (i.e., “geography”), but also
creates certain geopolitical contexts for its imperial management (7). For instance, the
geo-graphing of Eastern Europe is reflected in such “material” decisions as the
“rescuing” of Greece, the “cradle of European civilization” (but not the rest of Eastern
Europe) from communism and Stalinist rule after World War II, the NATO bombing of
Serbs and Montenegrins because they could not get over “ancient ethnic hatreds,” or the
greater financial aid by the West to post-communist states that are Catholic or Protestant
rather than Orthodox.7 Not less importantly, this is also reflected in the attempts of
various Eastern European peoples to market themselves as civilized, developed, tolerant,
or multicultural enough to be geo-graphed as European, as well as in their internalization
6
7
See Ahmad's In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.
For the historical trajectories of Greece's exceptional status with respect to Eastern Europe and the
Balkans, see Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe and Todorova's Imagining the Balkans. The differential
treatment received in the post-communist period by Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox states is noted by
Milica Bakić-Hayden in “What's So Byzantine about the Balkans?”.
6
of the stigma of inferiority, manifesting itself in a host of instances from selfstigmatization to glorification of stigma as a form of anti-Western identification.
Dissident Narratives
I deplore the attitude of foolish or dishonest people who ridiculously equate Stalin
with McCarthy, Auschwitz with the atom bomb and the ruthless imperialism of the
USSR with the earnest and unselfish assistance extended by the USA to nations in
distress.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions
[The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia] did not happen irresponsibly, as an act of
aggression or out of disrespect for international law. It happened, on the contrary,
out of respect for the law, for a law that ranks higher than the law which protects
the sovereignty of states. The alliance has acted out of respect for human rights, as
both conscience and international legal documents dictate.
—Václav Havel, “Kosovo and the End of
the Nation-State”
Among the recent historical, sociological and cultural studies accounts which delve
into Eastern European colonial in(ter)ventions, most focus on either the period before the
twentieth century (for instance, Larry Wolff) or as is sometimes the case with Balkan
studies, on the overlapping of discourses on early twentieth-century Balkan Wars, World
War I and the recent Yugoslav civil wars.8 Additionally, while some of these studies
analyze ways in which Eastern European narratives look to the West and engage with
discourses that perform their civilizational “inferiority” (like, for instance, the many
studies of Russian national identity in the nineteenth century and earlier and the conflicts
between Slavophiles and Westernizers), the majority instead focus on the constitution of
8
In the wake of Western imaginings of the Balkans during the Yugoslav 1990s’ wars, there have been
many more studies about the Balkans specifically than about Eastern Europe as a proto-colonial terrain
constructed through imaginary geography. As a consequence, many studies of the Balkans span both
historical and more recent, twentieth century discourses; see, for instance, Andrew Hammond’s collected
edition The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945–2003 and Vesna Goldsworthy’s
Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination.
7
various Western European and/or North American identities through constructions of
“otherness.” Among the studies that use Eastern European narratives as a point of entry,
few look at specifically literary and film narratives which can, as I will suggest, yield
fruitful readings if analyzed as post- or anticolonial texts, while simultaneously allowing
us to revamp some of the ossified concepts in postcolonial theory in order to engage with
the present moment.
In the context of the above discussed discourses on Eastern European cultural
“blackness,” I therefore shift the focus of study from Western narratives that map this
locale to Eastern European narratives which are haunted by these same discourses, as
Nabokov’s and Havel’s quotes attest. This preoccupation of Eastern Europeans with their
various reflections in the “mirror” that is the West and concomitant self-stigmatizations
or self-celebrations, are perhaps the most elusive and least discussed avatars of what
could be called, for lack of a better theoretical term, Eastern European Orientalism.
Because of Eastern Europe’s direct geographic, political and cultural proximity to
Western Europe and indirectly, to North America, its acceptance of Western models has,
overall, been far smoother, more voluntary and more urgently executed than in other
colonial locales. In fact, it is this voluntary—and largely unrecognized—self-colonizing
tendency vis-à-vis the West which distinguishes Eastern Europe from other targets of
Western colonialism and which will be one of the primary topics of this work.9
According to Rastko Močnik, the same “Orientalist ideology that downgrades and
holds down” the region as a whole “also holds up the ruling position of local political
classes, which in turn act. . .as the local agents of the international system of domination”
9
For a commentary on this voluntary mimicry of the West see, for instance, Csaba Dupcsik’s “The West,
the East and the Border-Lining” and Dragan Kujundzic’s “’After’: Russian Post-Colonial Identity.”
8
(85).10 This double domination, in turn, facilitates and is facilitated by a generally
favorable attitude to the ideal of “European civilization” and an almost fatalistic
consensus that the current model of Western social development is the way to go (postcommunist “transitions” are necessarily difficult and may take centuries, but it is worth it
because prosperity—and acceptance by the “world” community—awaits us). Because of
the urgency of the present moment and because this has been neglected by academic
study, I am particularly interested in tracing the contours of Eastern European
Orientalism in literary and visual texts emerging throughout the communist and postcommunist periods. I focus on cultural texts, because they often articulate and analyze
collective anxieties and identity crises resulting from self-Orientalization which are
missing from the more “visible,” official political discourses.
The term “postcolonial” traditionally signifies fragmentation, disjunction, the
crossing of national, cultural and linguistic borders, figuratively and/or literally. Many of
the Eastern European authors that occupy the chapters-to-come indeed write from a
position of linguistic and/or national border-crossing, articulating identities in conflict
with the Orientalist discourses that seek to contain them. In this respect, narratives by
Eastern European exiles11 in Western Europe and North America during the communist
period are of special interest, as they can help theorize the trajectories of self-
10
Here, I have slightly adapted Močnik's terms—he refers primarily to “Balkanism” and Croatian and
Slovenian attempts to escape it by proving their “Europeanness.” But, I believe his conclusions apply to
Eastern Europe in general, as similar mechanisms of power operate in any country desiring emancipation
through entry into the European Union.
11
Although some of the authors discussed in this work “willingly” left their countries after communist
takeovers (e.g., Nabokov, Milosz), I refer to them as “exiles” because this term, unlike the terms
“expatriate” or even “émigré,” adequately expresses their political undesirability at home and the
irreversibility of their decisions. They are, in effect, “exiled,” either directly or indirectly, because the
return to their countries during communist regimes was impossible and/or would have imperiled their lives.
9
colonization, as well as strategies for its subversion. It is in those texts that the
disjunctions of identity, the aporia of, on the one hand, denouncing communist
“barbarians” to Western audiences and on the other hand, being personally victimized as
an Eastern “barbarian” in need of civilizational disciplining, becomes especially
prominent.
This denunciation of communist—frequently Russian—barbarians and the need to
overcome the stigma of Orientalism, by proving one’s allegiance to Western
civilizational achievements, is already discernible in the texts written by that famous
Eastern European emigrant Joseph Conrad long before the October Revolution. Although
an analysis of his texts exceeds the scope of the present study, it is important to mention
that in essays such as “Autocracy and War,” “A Note on the Polish Problem” and novel
Under Western Eyes, Conrad establishes Orientalist themes that we will see reverberating
throughout the texts written during communist and post-communist periods. For Conrad,
Russia is a semi-Asiatic country which has no place meddling in European affairs; even
the worst European autocracies guilty of militant imperialism preserve a sense of ethical
decency, responsibility and rationality, but Russia is "an abyss of mental darkness" based
upon irrationality, illogicality, mysticism and "the apathy of hopeless fatalism”
(“Autocracy and War” 98).
In contrast to Western enlightenment, democratic development and general political
normality—which, Conrad argues, also characterizes Poland, so the West should embrace
Poland as one of its own—Russia stands out as a moral aberration, embodying complete
lawlessness, degeneration and ideological emptiness. Not surprisingly then, Conrad
portrays communist or socialist attempts to violently change this system in Russia as
10
politically immature, emerging from political evil as desperate gestures and producing
their own evil in turn. In Under Western Eyes, the unfavorable portrayal of assorted
Russian revolutionaries only enforces Conrad’s assertion that Russia’s madness is
incomprehensible to a Westerner and that the pathology of tyranny only breeds the
pathology of revolution, which is equated with terrorism and anarchism.
In the schizophrenic narratives emerging in response to communist takeovers
across Eastern Europe, Milan Kundera, echoing Conrad’s gesture, similarly wrests his
“Bohemia” from unwieldy Russian paws and claims it for the liberal, democratic Europe
(ontologically distinct, of course, from Russia). Czesław Miłosz mixes his fascination
with Paris, to him a phantasmagoria of capitalist consumerism, with his consternation at
the “No Poles allowed” sign at the French border, while Nabokov’s many Pnins haunt the
North American academic landscape, patronized in their badly dressed, socially
awkward, Russian ways. One could argue that Eastern European literature, for the large
portion of the twentieth century, in fact reached Western audiences primarily in the
context of the Cold War, which directly or indirectly contributed to the fetishizing of
these exiled authors—so much that some of them willingly embraced the role, “writing”
themselves as stock dissident martyrs and/or satirizing this Western fetish.12
At the same time, this political climate implicated their narratives in the various
other attempts by the West to understand, map, geo-graph the communist “other.” In this
respect, I am interested in ways in which these narratives are brought to a moment of
crisis through a recognition of self-stigmatization and/or recognition of the attempt at
containment by the Western “other,” and the avenues of reading that this crisis opens up.
12
I will discuss this gesture in more detail especially in the chapters on Vladimir Nabokov and Milan
Kundera.
11
I intend to trace, as Homi Bhabha writes, the “ex-centric sites of experience and
empowerment” that the “poetics of exile” creates by bringing the present moment into
disjunction with itself, in this case exploding the articulation of history through Cold War
mythology (4).
Chapter 2, therefore, opens with Vladimir Nabokov’s self-fashioning as a martyred
Russian exile in the United States, arguing that his political and cultural “othering” of
communist regimes aligns him with Western liberal discourses, while his “Russianness”
makes him acceptably exotic and “different” to American audiences. Pale Fire expresses
this double bind, rather than liberatory potential, of anti-communist exile: Charles
Kinbote seemingly exemplifies an emancipated, Westernized subject but exceeds the
acceptable level of “foreignness” afforded him, thus ultimately exposing and escaping
discursive containments by Cold War Orientalisms. Chapter 3 analyzes the relationship
between a similar exilic self-fashioning and geo-graphing of Eastern/Western/Central/
Europe in Joseph Brodsky’s and Czesław Miłosz’s autobiographical-philosophical
essays, where a critical respect for the validity of their “lived experience” behind the Iron
Curtain has made it difficult to contest the “truth” of their delineation of “Easternness”
and “Westernness.” I show how geographic divisions of Europe are invested in
ideological binaries which cast the “East” as immutably totalitarian—whether monarchic
or communist—against the “West” as progressive, politically fluid and respectful of
human rights.
Chapter 4 analyzes Milan Kundera’s and Günter Grass’s articulations of a
European (civilizational) ideal, in political and cultural, rather than geographic terms: as a
conglomerate of Western Enlightenment traditions of human rights, democracy and
12
freedom of expression and some form of humanized, “soft” capitalism. From this
perspective, both communism and fascism are discursively demonized as deviations from
the European ideal. I also identify potential for recognizing this ideal’s Orientalist
trappings, especially in Kundera’s Slowness and Grass’s The Call of the Toad, which
criticize Western colonial attitudes toward post-communist Eastern Europe and the rise in
nationalist/identity politics enabled precisely by Western liberal, multiculturalism
discourses.
The figurative, as well as literal, borders between Eastern Europe and the “free
world” thus survive the Cold War to resurface, in familiar guises, in post-communist
texts. In this period, Eastern European narratives again posit displaced identities, this
time not communist exiles, but rather refugees from the post-communist civil wars and/or
emigrants from the economically devastated locales of Eastern European “transitions” to
capitalism. While Cold War Orientalisms continues to permeate the narrative landscapes,
they are accompanied by the more fashionable discourses of globalization, critically
evaluated in their many guises as narratives of world peace, human rights,
multiculturalism and consumerism. In addition to narratives which thematize disjunctions
resulting from the movement from East to West, I also look at those that bespeak the
“unhomeliness” created in Eastern locales through an introduction of Western neoliberal
capitalist models and discourses into the shambles of socialist welfare systems. In recent
novels by Dubravka Ugrešić, Victor Pelevin and Gary Shteyngart and films by Emir
Kusturica and Wolfgang Becker, the prospects of globalized existence and inclusion into
the EU, NATO or the ultimate master-signifier—“the free world”—are narrated with
13
excitement as much as with skepticism and disenchantment, as new subjectivities and
opportunities, but also new inequalities and hierarchies surface within the global space.
Another significant feature of these works, one that is starkly absent from the
existing critical readings, is what I refer to as “communist nostalgia,” although I
acknowledge that this term hardly exhausts the multiple, often contradictory, layers of
meaning that emerge in the narratives of various communist legacies. My interest in
Eastern European discourses of “communist nostalgia,” which I will discuss at more
length later, lies in their attempt to open up another instance of a present that is out of
joint with itself, to reclaim the specters of the communist past in order to posit an open
future—one that is, again, not appropriated and fixed by the teleology of capitalist
globalization. Hence, finally, the deliberate naming of this section “dissident narratives”:
the goal of this work is to explore how the designation of Eastern European “dissident,”
generally signifying an anti-communist dissenter, already contains potential for
“dissidence” from or interruption of any hegemonic narrative.
In the remainder of the work, therefore, I focus more on the mechanisms of
recognition and critique of self-Orientalization which arise from the gesture of dissidence
from hegemonic narratives. Chapter 5 discusses Victor Pelevin’s and Gary Shteyngart’s
mock-nostalgic novels, Homo Zapiens and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
respectively, to explore utopian possibilities contained in remembering and critically reevaluating the legacy of communism. This memory collapses the distinction between the
criminal, transitioning post-communist East and the orderly, developed West which
enables Western discursive and political management of Eastern European societies.
14
Chapter 6 further explores the contemporary criminalization of Eastern Europe
through a discourse on the unwieldy, murderous Balkans, its most irredeemable region. I
problematize Slavoj Žižek’s seemingly leftist-liberal position on the Yugoslav 1990s’
wars, showing how he presents himself as a native expert to Western audiences by
nevertheless slipping into multiculturalist racism, ethnicization of guilt and identity
politics, which have garnered support for the “free world’s” intervention in the wars. I
also look at Aleksandar Hemon’s and Dubravka Ugrešić’s novels as alternative narratives
of the Yugoslav wars and Yugoslavia in general, placing it outside of (Western)
discourses of multiculturalism and identity politics. Finally, I conclude the work by
establishing connections between several films, Theo Angelopoulos’ Eternity and a Day,
Emir Kusturica’s Underground and Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye, Lenin!, to examine
utopian possibilities for redefining the concept of Europe (and the European Union) in
terms of an anti-colonial and anti-nationalist politics.
I have so far been using the term Orientalism in order to show my indebtedness to
Said, although I am aware that this also exposes my argument to some of the same
criticism to which Said’s seminal work was subjected. Lest I be accused of what Dennis
Porter, James Clifford and Robert Young, among others, have called the “continuity,”
“ahistoricity,” or “homogeneity” of Said’s methodology in outlining an Orientalist
discourse, I want to stress that, although I look at a particular historical range and notice
similar patterns of cultural stereotyping during this time (some of which certainly echo
earlier historical patterns), I do not argue that there is a uniform or uninterrupted narrative
of Eastern European Orientalism.13 This is also one of the reasons I consider the literary
13
See Porter's “Orientalism and Its Problems,” Young's Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction and
Clifford's The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art.
15
and visual texts I analyze as disparate rather than representative of any discursive
“tradition,” and do not generally attempt to glean an “accurate” history of the discursive
formations that highlight this Orientalism, an impossible task in itself. Each narrative is
analyzed as a singular intervention within and into this discourse, entering into a
constellation,14 but not continuity, chronological or otherwise, with other texts. My focus
is on concepts, themes, etc. as they may emerge, rather than on formulating a structured
narrative of Eastern European Orientalism.
But, while the task of historicizing and looking for Foucauldian “epistemological
breaks,” interruptions and contradictions is a worthy one, it also leads to an excessive
preoccupation with the internal consistencies/inconsistencies of a discourse, which was, I
feel, perhaps the unwitting effect of much academic criticism of Said. As a result, the
discourse folds back into itself instead of expanding into other fields of study, where it
could have shown how it figures in the creation of particular subjectivities, how it
participates in political exchanges.
For the same reason, I am reluctant to define where exactly the “Eastern Europe” or
the “West” mapped in my chapters begins or ends. Arguably, there are a number of
historically concrete countries that have traditionally been considered Eastern European.
As Larry Wolff shows, Russia has almost always been “Eastern Europe” if not outright
“the Orient.” And arguably, the borders of Eastern Europe (and Western Europe, or the
West), have shifted a number of times in different historical periods, or sometimes in
different accounts of the same historical period, frequently depending on the author’s
14
I borrow the concept “constellation” from Walter Benjamin. Benjamin considers historical events in
constellations that they might form with one another at different moments, which allows for a more
dynamic interpretation of history than its traditional understanding as a linear narrative.
16
location in this discursive geography. Thus, to Czesław Miłosz, Prague is often the
threshold into Western Europe; to Milan Kundera, it is Central Europe (itself a term
marking a desperate attempt to escape designation as Eastern European); to Shteyngart, it
is Eastern Europe, morphing into the fictional city of “Prava,” an every-Eastern
European-city. In the communist and post-communist periods, Eastern Europe has been
geo-graphed as the lands behind the Iron Curtain, i.e., communist lands and because I am
writing about this particular mapping of Eastern Europe many of the authors discussed
are from post/communist Europe.
But defining the border so clearly problematizes a potential inclusion of Greek
director Theo Angelopoulos into the discussion (Greece is both “Balkan/Eastern
European” and “the cradle of Western civilization”), of East German director Wolfgang
Becker (East Germany was both “German” and “Eastern European” after World War II),
or of any Yugoslav authors/directors (Yugoslavia was “Eastern European” but without
Iron-Curtain communism). So instead, I keep the borders of Eastern Europe open and
shifting, while analyzing ways in which the narratives themselves engage with this
imaginary geography. I emphasize how “Eastern Europe,” “Europe” or “the West” figure
as concepts rather than monolithic geo-historical entities, while at the same time
inevitably affecting concrete peoples by engendering all sorts of “real” borders among
them.
So far, I have been including the Balkans in my discussion of Eastern Europe, since
the Balkans, despite spawning a separate field of study recently, remain Orientalized as
“extreme” Eastern Europe. That it is impossible to disassociate the Balkans from Eastern
Europe is also confirmed by Wolff’s and Todorova’s projects, which, despite their stated
17
focus, consistently and symptomatically implicate one within a discussion of the other. It
is especially difficult to theorize the Balkans in isolation from political and social patterns
in the rest of Eastern Europe during the communist and post-communist periods. As
Tomislav Longinović writes, the Balkans are frequently subsumed under Iron-Curtain
Europe before 1989; after the fall of communism, the alleged absence of old divisions
“polarized Eastern Europe into a North-South division between the advanced Central
Europe and the bloodthirsty Balkans” (41).15
Of course, as is the case with Eastern Europe, the borders of Central Europe and the
Balkans (or the non-Central Eastern Europe?) shift depending on the account. A
renowned Eastern European scholar Timothy Garton Ash offers definitions that are
particularly exemplary of the geographic arbitrariness of these categories: he divides this
“other Europe” into a “second” (“Central”) and “third” (?) Europe, grouping the Czech
Republic, Hungary and Poland, the Baltic States and Slovenia in “Central” Europe and
Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Serbia in the “third” Europe (121). What is especially
interesting here is less a definition of clear borders and more the political and cultural
overdetermination of concepts such as “Central Europe” and “the Balkans.” In my work,
therefore, I investigate how Eastern European narratives engage with the discourse of
“Central Europe” as a “redeemable” Eastern Europe and with “the Balkans” as
“irredeemable,” “extreme,” and “problematic” Eastern Europe.
15
Todorova's analysis of the phenomenon of “Central Europe” agrees with Longinović's account in that she
shows how the Balkans were included by some and excluded by other visions of Central Europe before
1990, but how they were consistently excluded afterwards. She argues that the reason was that the Central
European idea “made its entry from the cultural to the political realm” after 1990 (154). That is to say,
while prior to 1990, Central Europe was seen as a cultural identity used to either oppose Russia's
ideological appropriation and show allegiance with Western cultural traditions, or else reject both Russia
and the West but pose as an intermediary identity, after 1990, it became a political tool in a general
competition for acceptance into the European Union, NATO and other premier clubs. As such, it had to
distance itself from Balkan civil war barbarisms.
18
By repeatedly flaunting terms such as “Eastern Europe,” “Central Europe,” and
“the Balkans” I do not mean to negate or dismiss as unimportant the specificity of
numerous ethnic, linguistic, or any other identities that comprise this space. Indeed, since
Said, many theorists have been careful not to portray a particular geo-discursive area as
monolithic for fear of suppressing differences, minorities, or, indeed, creating “margins
and outsiders” in Bart Moore-Gilbert’s words (72). Additionally, some theorists have
devoted their efforts to distinguishing between the different “Orientalisms” emerging in
different national imaginaries; notable here is Lisa Lowe’s effort to compare and contrast
French and British “Orientalisms,” both challenging and supplementing Said’s project.16
Similarly, Maria Todorova and the editors of Balkan as Metaphor methodologically
depart from Said who set “the stage for peaceful coexistence by dismantling difference”
and instead “affirm constitutive differences and paradoxes,” but nevertheless with the
same political goal in mind as Said—“multicultural coexistence” (Balkan as Metaphor
5).
While my project necessarily addresses these “constitutive differences and
paradoxes,” they will not be analyzed merely for their own sake (in terms of discussing
the specificity of German Orientalizing of Poland, or American Orientalizing of Russia,
for instance), but rather with the goal of tracing their participation in the general
discourses and anxieties that accompany the concepts “Europe” and “Eastern Europe.”
The political vision of this work is that theorizing what is assigned as a general or
common attribute to always-already divergent national or any other identities is fruitful
not only because it reveals the trajectories of globalization and opens up the possibility of
16
See Lowe's Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms.
19
a unified struggle to deconstruct such attributes, but also because focusing on specificity
for the sake of its affirmation, i.e., “emancipation” into global visibility, potentially locks
it into the logic of “multicultural coexistence.” I see this as an essentially conservative
ideal which in its mainstream liberal form in fact perfectly coexists with the myths of
“Western civilization” and “Eastern Europe.” In that spirit, the literary and visual
narratives included likewise will not perform a multicultural (or gender, or any other)
“sampling” of Eastern European authors for the sake of diversity; rather, these narratives
are selected for their singular interventions into the general discourses I have outlined
above.
Or, in this battle against assigning primacy to national or ethnic specificity, I cite
the Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Drnovšek’s warning to his electorate in 1995 as a
case in point: the choice is not between this Slovenia or that Slovenia; the choice is no
less than “between Europe and the Balkans” (qtd. in Rastko Močnik 94).
“The Hinterland of the New European Reich”: Democracy’s Border or
Democracy’s Limit?
What the proper historical stance . . . ’relativizes’ is not the past (always distorted
by our present point of view) but, paradoxically, the present itself—our present can
be conceived only as the outcome (not of what actually happened in the past, but
also) of the crushed potentials for the future that were contained in the past.
—Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute
The means to get beyond the crisis is the ontological displacement of the subject.
The most important change therefore takes place inside humanity, since with the
end of modernity also ends the hope of finding something that can identify the self
outside the community, outside cooperation and outside the critical and
contradictory relationships that each person finds in a non-place, that is, in the
world and the multitude. This is where the idea of Empire reappears, not as a
territory, not in the determinate dimensions of its time and space and not from the
standpoint of a people and its history, but rather simply as the fabric of an
ontological human dimension that tends to become universal.
—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
20
In his discussion of the Yugoslav civil wars, Étienne Balibar calls Yugoslavia, as
well as the post-communist East, an opportunity for Europe to reconsider its borders, as
well as its “apartheid.” If Europe is to achieve what he calls an “open citizenship,” it must
cease to “other” the Yugoslav situation as “atypical” and rather accept it as “a local
projection of forms of confrontation and conflict characteristic of all Europe” (We, the
People of Europe 5). The metaphor of Yugoslavia, or by analogy Eastern Europe, as a
“mirror” for Europe effectively promotes it from democracy’s borderland, or—in racist
terms of a colleague that Balibar quotes—“the Hinterland of the new European Reich,” to
a crucial symbol of the crisis of identity in the “developed” world (We, the People of
Europe 123).
The Yugoslav wars demonstrate that Europe, as well as the United States (their
union appropriately consummated via NATO), have a schizophrenic identity as well
when it comes to Eastern Europeans: on the one hand, their violent conflicts and political
and economic crises are alien, on the outside, as something that could never happen in the
“developed” world; on the other, the geographic proximity, as well as the cultural, racial,
etc. closeness denote the upheavals as something of Europe, as a terrain where European
civilization must be protected and barbarism contained. This latter way of inclusion is of
course not the one that Balibar explicitly has in mind, since this again leads not to a
reconsideration of the concept of Europe, but to an affirmation of some transcendentally
pure identity of Europe in the name of which the ugly spots must be cleansed.
However, this particular pattern of simultaneous inclusion-exclusion is significant
because it helps us theorize new types of racism that arise globally, after the struggles for
colonial liberation and as old ethnic and racial exclusions allegedly take a back seat
21
through a host of juridical measures. Many postcolonial theorists have expressed
optimism that old, Eurocentric-type racism, is disappearing as the world can no longer be
neatly divided into a European or American “center” or Asian and African “peripheries.”
According to Ajrun Appadurai, we live in the era of complex “transnational” movements
of people, finances and ideas, which undermine the idea of stable boundaries in the
center-periphery model and give rise to hybrid discourses and identities that challenge
racism (299). Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman argues that, through “denationalization of the
state,” the traditional efforts towards assimilation are becoming obsolete in the climate of
cultural plurality and tolerance of differences (168). Among other prominent scholars
who espouse similar views are, of course, Homi Bhabha with his celebration of cultural
hybridity and subversive potential of mimicry and Stuart Hall with his emphasis on
“diaspora, diversity, hybridity and difference” (237).
But the alleged “denationalization” or “deracialization” of state policies does not do
much towards deconstructing the seemingly supranational and supra-racial identities such
as “Eastern European,” “European,” “cosmopolitan,” “global citizen.” “American” is, or
course, reluctantly used because of its explicit association with a country and because
“Americanization” has received a generally bad rap in the rest of the world. This type of
racism, like racism which Orientalizes Eastern Europeans, predicates a simultaneous
inclusion and exclusion: that is, the barrier to one’s inclusion is no longer (on the surface,
at least) one’s ethnicity or race, but rather one’s cultural, political and economic behavior.
In this sense, inclusion is always possible since it is always possible to “tweak” one’s
culture or politics to merit international acceptance. On the other hand, exclusion
(especially through fashionable policies such as economic sanctions or military
22
interventions) remains a permanent feature of this still conditional inclusion. The Eastern
European narratives I analyze mark a passage towards the obsession with not so much
race as behavior, presentation and image, in order to appear “civilized,” or worthy of
Western accolade.
Exemplary here is Dubravka Ugrešić’s description of Eastern Europe in Have a
Nice Day as a “sister” she cannot escape, a disgracefully uncivilized double that wears
“cheap make-up,” “talks too loudly,” “wipes its lips with its hand,” and whose desperate
eyes reveal a “need to stop being a second-class citizen and become someone” (23). In
Kundera’s Slowness we encounter a hapless Czech scientist Chechoripsky whom the
narrator treats satirically for his obsession with denouncing communism during a
presentation to a Western audience, a presentation itself weakened by the scientist’s
extreme anxiety over his cultural insignificance, his hopelessly outdated paper and,
predictably, his ugly clothes. These narrative moments are significant in that they can
help us recognize and theorize the “racism without race” in Balibar’s terms, one that in
fact keeps the ideology of multiculturalism in place and with it, global capitalist
networks.17
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri try to explain why the mechanisms of hierarchy
and logic of inclusion/exclusion are today difficult to recognize and thus make the
ideology of multiculturalism seem truly egalitarian: “The hierarchy of the different races
is determined only a posteriori, as an effect of their cultures—that is, on the basis of their
performance. . . racial supremacy and subordination are not a theoretical question, but
arise through free competition, a kind of market meritocracy of culture” (193). The
17
See Balibar's “Is There a Neo-Racism?” in Race, Nation, Class.
23
language of marketing and advertising is quite appropriate here in light of my earlier
observations on image and presentation of one’s culture; also multiculturalism as an
ideology frequently follows the rhythms of the market as “diversity” in university
brochures, ethnic clothing, restaurants, etc. But I would like to revise Hardt and Negri’s
notion to also include the “older” type of a priori, biological racism which intersects with
the “racism without race.” I argue that both have essentially the same hierarchical
structure, positing an ideal, or primary, “white,” “European/American,” “capitalist,”
“Christian,” identity, although this identity is an absent cause in the latter type of racism.
Because of this, there is no true “free competition” of cultures, as is evident in the
differential inclusion/exclusion of countries and nationalities with respect to the European
Union. Thus, despite satisfying a number of criteria for accession more successfully than
other candidate countries, Turkey’s entry is again delayed; the accession of Czech
Republic and Poland is favored but followed by lingering, unstated anxiety about the
Slavic types it brings. Finally, the very criteria of multiculturalism legitimate isolation
and racist policy towards those proclaimed to be non-multicultural and hence,
paradoxically, “isolationist”: hence the discomfort that NATO exhibited in bombing
Yugoslavia, as a country of white people, yet not quite European (or white) in that it also
has authoritarian, ethnically intolerant, gender-discriminatory policies.18
Indeed, this type of multicultural racism and its crucial role in obviating the need
for dialogue with the “enemy,” legitimating military or other interventions and stripping
18
There is still much emphasis on race and religion — today, most notably Islam — as markers of
difference that are targeted despite Western claims to the contrary. While this is undoubtedly a valid
emphasis (old racism is alive and well), it does not help expose the mechanisms of this other, much more
insidious type of racism exactly because it pretends to be “multiculturalism.” This is possibly one of the
reasons that the bombing of Yugoslavia, a “safe” operation because it could not be accused of racism, is
virtually unmentioned today, while the earlier Gulf war and the Vietnam war are continually invoked.
24
the targeted people of meaningful political agency remains to be theorized. Eastern
European narratives are interesting from this perspective not merely as mimetic
testimony to the existence of multicultural racism, but because they posit subjectivities
that test the limits of multiculturalism, expose its aporias and with it, question the
viability of any democratic politics similarly based on emancipation, on the “rescuing”
from a state of abjection and striving to an a priori determined ideal proclaimed as
universal (i.e., multicultural tolerance, human rights). The moment of crisis in many
Kundera’s novels, for instance, comes with a recognition that the self-victimization of
communist dissidents legitimates their “rescue” into “democracy,” “free speech,” and
other bounties of the West, but at the same time there is a feeling that this discursive field
is borrowed, alien and non-negotiable.
More significantly, the self-victimization turns one, indeed, into a victim on behalf
of which the rescue is taking place but who is, in the last instance, not given a political
voice—the type of non-subject that Slavoj Žižek, following Giorgio Agamben,
humoristically renames “homo sucker.”19 The silencing of characters in the face of this
discursive appropriation almost obsessively haunts many Eastern European narratives,
from Kundera and Nabokov to recent novels by Dubravka Ugrešić, Andrei Makine and
Gary Shteyngart. In Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it is poignantly
reflected in the advertisement for Sabina’s exhibition of her Czech photographs in the
West: as a barbed wire is grafted onto her face to signal communist oppression, she is
silenced both physically and figuratively—communism is essentialized as an
unquestioned abjection, a Badiouian “universal evil” (like the Holocaust, which the
19
See Žižek's adaptation of Agamben's Homo Sacer in Welcome to the Desert of the Real!
25
barbed wire invokes) from which she must be rescued, even as she protests, ineffectively
so, against the ad and the discursive categories it employs.20
This alleged guilt of the West about not “rescuing” Eastern Europe from the evil of
communism indeed resonates today when the European Union Enlargement, like the
simultaneous acceptance by the United States, is advertised as a “payback” for past
wrongs. (Ivaylo Ditchev 242). This self-sanctioned right of a supranational body to
intervene, to rescue, but also the accepted necessity of intervention by the “victim,”
according to Hardt and Negri, marks a passage from old imperialism to Empire.
Especially in narratives that deal with the wars in former Yugoslavia, Europe is invoked
as an idealized agent of Empire that will save Yugoslavia from itself, i.e., “ancient ethnic
hatreds,” but frequently this idealization is brought into a crisis when the “victim”
realizes that there is no ultimate “rescue,” no ultimate “emancipation” (and not only
because Europe and the United States intervene either too early or too late and in less
than ideal ways).
As with Ugrešić’s narrator in Have a Nice Day, an Eastern European can indeed
become a “global” citizen in the United States, but always continuing in the logic of
identity politics—always fixed in the identity of a Balkan war refugee and all the
accompanying exotic stereotypes. In Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,
similarly, the protagonist Vladimir Girshkin, a Manhattanite, can never quite shake off
the “expansive Russian soul” stereotypes because it is hip to be “multicultural.” The
limits of multicultural tolerance are in fact beautifully announced through Shteyngart’s
portrayal of Rybakov, a Russian refugee in New York who is officially flaunted as a
20
See Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.
26
mascot of New York’s openness to foreigners until he reveals himself as a flaming racist
who refuses to be re-educated, all the while proclaiming his love for “America,”
“democracy,” “capitalism” (397). Multiculturalism becomes, in Balibar’s terms,
“otherness-within-the-limits-of-citizenship,” within the limits of what is non-threatening,
assimilable, conducive to cooperation instead of rioting (Politics and the Other Scene
159).
In this respect, the narratives at hand not only question multiculturalism, identity
politics and the politics of emancipation, but also allow for a radical re-envisioning of
these ideas. The dissidence comes first through a criticism of communist and/or
nationalist grand narratives of identity containment, but that discernment does not make
for an easy acceptance of the grand narratives of democracy, multiculturalism, progress,
or capitalism. Rather, the postcolonial condition of these narratives opens up the
possibility of recognizing some of the same strategies of containment floating in the “free
world.” Hence there is rarely a celebration of cultural hybridity or cultural nativism as a
radical option, but possibly, there is a movement to something (an undefined something)
beyond. What is certain is that multicultural racism is haunted in these narratives by the
unstated hierarchies of older racism, perhaps paralleling the way in which we can glean,
behind a de-centered Imperial logic, the older, Wallersteinian core-periphery divisions.
The “core” today is not only the United States and its explicit imperialist pretensions, as
David Harvey warns us in his latest book, but also the Europe that subtly advertises itself
as a non-imperial(ist) project.21
21
See David Harvey's The New Imperialism.
27
As a strategy of simultaneous identity emancipation and containment,
multiculturalism is also suspect because, as Gayatri Spivak writes, it is “determined by
the demands of contemporary transnational capitalisms. It is an important public relations
move in the apparent winning of consent from developing countries in the dominant
project of the financialization of the globe” (397). Thus a multicultural, liberal identity is
also one that can be safely contained and streamlined into the corporate
work/marketplace, the logic being that one will not question class polarizations if one can
speak one’s language, practice one’s religion, etc. What multiculturalism and
accompanying discourses of liberal democracy successfully “other” is any leftist politics,
which they repeatedly associate with Stalinist-type totalitarianism, human rights
violations and lack of basic consumer goods, in comparison with which they indeed
appear as more desirable.
It is no secret that today’s cultural racism targets any communist politics, but what
has not been sufficiently investigated is how this attack on communism reinforces and is
in turn reinforced by other racist discourses, biological and/or cultural, about the peoples
who venture into communist adventures. My project suggests that the “othering” of
Eastern European communism was aided, among other things, precisely by the existing
discourses on Eastern European racial inferiority, barbarism and overall backwardness
and in fact, the two Orientalist strands are difficult to distinguish in anti-communist
narratives. Hence the hope of, once again, becoming “European” or a member of the
“civilized world” once communism is dead, invoking the myth of some organic preOctober-Revolution European unity that, as we know from the much longer tradition of
Eastern European Orientalism, never existed. However, this myth is so strong that even
28
Étienne Balibar wonders if the end of communism did not signal the “lifting of the
obstacle that was blocking the progress of European unity,” as if communism were some
temporary aberration, a European lapse into madness; capitalism is never, meanwhile,
described as an “obstacle” (We, the People of Europe 90).
Since I posit Eastern Europe as a postcolonial terrain, I also consider the
significance of communism to its history and the formation of its identity in postcolonial
terms. I here draw on Robert Young’s important conclusion that “the historical role of
Marxism in the history of anti-colonial resistance remains paramount as the fundamental
framework of postcolonial thinking” (6). In this sense, Eastern European communist
legacies should not be analyzed only in terms of the degree of economic innovation upon
or departure from Western capitalist practices. Indeed, if one does that, then one will
conclude, like Immanuel Wallerstein, that communism and capitalism are parts of the
same “world system,” or like Slavoj Žižek that “‘actually existing Socialism’ failed
because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism,” used its “instrumental reason,” was
not radical enough (The Fragile Absolute 19).22 These are of course valid assertions, but
what this type of approach misses is the significance of communism as a line of flight for
Eastern Europeans from, not only the power grids of Western nations, but also the stigma
of economic and cultural inferiority, escape from the logic of capital and the logic of
being the “other.”
Because this escape was executed largely with the gaze turned towards the Western
mirror, the obsession was nevertheless with modernization, production and, basically,
22
Wallerstein theorizes the co-dependency of capitalist and communist regimes at length in Geopolitics and
Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System. Because he essentially sees them as offshoots of the
same “world system,” he predicts that the demise of communism in 1989 will lead to a crucial crisis in
capitalist societies as well.
29
catching up with those considered developed, in a similar way that today’s obsession is
catching up with Western consumption. But the innovations of Eastern European
communism were nevertheless great in the area of social welfare policies and the
egalitarian ideology of social solidarity which today’s post-communist democracies are
rapidly replacing with ideals of “individualism,” “civil liberties,” and “de-personalized
relations of economic dependence” resulting in “an atomized field of free and equal,
equally abstract individuals, who entertain shifting packages of beliefs and who manifest
no evident social anchorage” (Močnik 87). In this respect, Eastern Europe's communist
legacies are also important because of their attempts to counter fears of poverty,
economic anxiety and competition that capital thrives on, which, I will suggest, is closely
related to countering fears of racial stigmatization and competition for emancipation from
“second-class” civilizational status. This interrelatedness is especially conspicuous in
contemporary post-communist narratives rife with references to Eastern Europe as a
“second-class citizen,” a “poor relative” of Europe. Also, the renewed competition to, as
Ditchev appropriately phrases it, “occupy the place of some big Other's desire,” combines
the candidates' proofs of success in economic and social remodeling with their claims to
racial/cultural closeness to Europe; thus, Romanians invoke their Latin origin, the Polish
their Catholicism, etc. (235).
Because of their ghastly human rights records and their ultimate inability to catch
up with Western models of production and consumption, Eastern European communist
regimes probably helped strengthen the stigma that they tried to escape. But their legacy
is important primarily because of what they did partly achieve, as well as because, as
Žižek writes, they “simultaneously opened up a certain space, the space of utopian
30
expectations which, among other things, enabled us to measure the failure of actually
existing Socialism itself” (Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 131). Žižek even goes as
far as to suggest that what anti-communist dissidents overlook is that the very position
from which they denounced communist terror in the name of human solidarity was
opened up, made possible exactly by the communist regimes themselves (131). While I
would probably revise Žižek and argue that this position could have been made possible
by the utopia of communist solidarity as much as by the utopia of liberal democratic
solidarity, his line of reasoning deserves serious consideration because it illuminates the
utopian potential itself in dissident narratives.
If Eastern European narratives measure the failure of real existing communism
against its promise, they also measure similar failures of liberal democracy. Especially in
post-communist narratives, there is a movement towards salvaging the memory of
communist rule in order to work through its trauma, but also to discern and validate the
types of social structures or subjectivities that are disappearing through Eastern European
initiation into global capitalism. Hence we witness an astonishing shift in Milan
Kundera's writing in his latest novel, Ignorance, where, instead of attacking the stock
evils of communism—authoritarianism, herd mentality and kitsch—the characters lament
the loss of utopian ideals, also hinting that the occupation of the Czech Republic by
global capital is, indeed, worse than the Soviet occupation.
What is at stake, therefore, is an interruption of the present by the past, or, rather,
the inability of the present to shake off the specters of the past which it continually
proclaims to be dead. Relying on Walter Benjamin’s notion that this “dialectics at a
standstill”—the past moment seen in conjunction with the present moment—opens up
31
the possibility of radically changing the vision of the future, I propose to read the various
guises of communist nostalgia as Benjaminian “memory” that “flashes up at a moment of
danger,” the present process of transforming Eastern European countries into global
capital’s dreamworld: dependent economies, highly stratified societies and sources of
cheap labor (255). Eastern European texts that narrate communist pasts can today
constitute what Dipesh Chakrabarty, following Martin Heidegger, calls “affective
histories,” to him “subaltern” histories not conceived of in ethnic, racial, or gender terms,
but rather as ways of being-in-the-world that exist both inside and outside of the narrative
of capital, supplementing it but also exposing its limits, its inability to “translate” into its
own language all human experience (95).
Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook, for instance, thus reads the mafia
circles in post-communist Eastern Europe from the schizophrenic perspective of global
capitalism and multiculturalism—both as testimony to Eastern European ontological
inability to mimic Western business practices and as a necessary evil of transitions sure
to disappear once democracy is in full swing (hence a satirical portrayal of American
expats bent on bringing “democracy” to the East). But the mafiosi are also persistent
reminders of the communist times by whose downfall they were disenfranchised and
impoverished. Moreover, their deliberate ridiculing of Western “good” business
practices, their refusal to subject their time to the rhythm of the corporate workplace and
the “irrationality” and “absurdity” of their Situationist-type interventions resist
appropriation by the narrative of capital. I am interested in ways in which this and other
texts resist the urge to relegate Eastern Europe to a place in the global march of history,
or under present conditions, to a neocolonial status.
32
It is significant that in devising his notion of “affective histories” Chakrabarty also
uses the term “minor histories,” following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's discussion
of “minor literature” in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. To Deleuze and Guattari,
Kafka, a Prague Jew, creates “minor literature” by radically deterritorializing German,
“language of the masters”; Kafka brings German to “the desert” by exposing its poverty
and preventing its appropriation by nationalist cultural myths (26). A “minor literature” is
thus conceived of as literature of “immigrants,” of “nomads” for whom it is both
impossible to write in a “major language”—also the language that establishes a national
“great literature”—and impossible to write otherwise (16). I read the Eastern European
narratives at hand similarly as “minor literature” that expresses this twofold impossibility,
although I want to complicate Deleuze and Guattari's notions of “major language” and
their conception of it as a national language. For Czesław Miłosz, writing in English
while residing in the United States is tantamount to capitulating to the logic of capital, to
a Western “civilization” which he criticizes as a vulgar ideology of consumerism. His
opting for Polish instead is thus less a way to “reterritorialize” himself into a Polish
identity, than to “deterritorialize” English as a “major language” of capital rather than a
specific national tradition. For Joseph Brodsky, who writes in both Russian and English
while in exile, the decision to write in English—a “major language” of his new country—
similarly serves to “deterritorialize” Russian which he understands as the “major
language” not so much of a national identity but of widespread communist oppression.
In other words, the trauma of nomadism and exile is not revealed only through
writing in an alien language, for Deleuze and Guattari an oppressive language from
which one is nationally and culturally alienated. Rather, “minor literature” is also one that
33
signals exile from and within one's own national and cultural language, in terms of the
hegemonic political discourses through which this language makes possible its
oppression. “Major languages” are these discursive fields that police, regardless of what
national language or regional dialect is actually used, what can be said. In this respect,
Eastern European narratives variously participate in, as well as “deterritorialize” the
discursive fields of official communisms, anti-communist discourses, Orientalist
reifications of Eastern Europe and the language of civilization, progress, human rights,
liberal democracy, multiculturalism.
As with multicultural racism, the notion of supranational “major languages”
(although not without clear national interests, as in the case of “racism without a race”)
opens up another possibility for theorizing the oppressive mechanisms of globalization,
especially those rhetorical categories that police behavior by advertising themselves as
common sense, universal human values. Victor Pelevin's Homo Zapiens, from this
perspective, becomes “minor literature” in its attempt to expose the absolute violence, as
well as the absurd incongruity, of the incursion of the “major language” of capitalist
marketing and advertising into Russian in the post-communist era. Pelevin, like Kafka,
exposes the poverty of this language, as well as the language of Russian nationalism,
when he portrays attempts to add an “ethnic” Russian flair to Western-type marketing
campaigns in order to appeal to the natives. This unwieldy marriage at the same time
signals the collusion of the two discourses of power, countering arguments that postmodern nationalisms are a challenge to the process of globalization.
Eastern European “minor” narratives in this way reveal the various strategies of
identity containment crucial to what Hardt and Negri have termed the “biopolitics” of
34
Imperial “society of control,” but also allow for formulating new subjectivities, new
kinds of collectivity that do not rely on the familiar strategies of identity politics crucial
to the reproduction of multicultural complacence and global capitalism (23). When
Slavenka Drakulić, for instance, discusses her use of “we” to talk about Eastern
Europeans, she explicitly criticizes the dominance of the “we” of communist-nationalist
identification over the individual “I.” Yet, she also endorses it as a path to a non-coercive,
non-nationalist collective of Eastern European peoples with communist pasts who need to
critically reconsider their shared myths about Europe, their inferiority complexes and
their self-Orientalization (4). When at the end of Emir Kusturica's film Underground the
undead protagonists of Yugoslav communist and post-communist conflicts float away
happily on an anonymous piece of land, what we have is perhaps a collective without a
nationality, a state, or a master plan for the future.
The memory of communism resuscitated throughout these narratives creates not so
much conditions for a simple repetition of the past (itself already impossible), but a
heterotemporality that challenges the cooptation of time by capital, or in Bhabha's words,
“poses the future as an open question” through “history's intermediacy” (231). This
excessive, unruly remainder that resists translation into the narrative of global
development and unity creates potential for the impossibility of translating Eastern
Europeans into the Volksmuseum of global cultures based on that stereotypes that, indeed,
make them “Eastern European.” Posing the future as an open question also poses
European identity as an open question. As Jacques Derrida writes, the idea of a
democracy that is not coopted by a master narrative of the future, the democracy which is
always anticipated but never definitively arrives, is related to the idea of a European
35
identity that is not coopted by a transcendental ideal. If Europe is to strive towards this
idea of democracy, it must likewise keep “opening [itself] onto that which is not, never
was and never will be Europe” or opening itself to an other it “can no longer even relate
to itself as its other” (77, 76). Of course, the challenge is to maintain open not only the
European identity, but indeed the identity of any other unifying project whose
membership promises to bring liberation and emancipation. But then, the notion of a
radical opening may bring into question the very possibility of existence of such projects,
based as they are on defining their identities against the identities of the excluded others.
CHAPTER 2
“DOUBLY OBSCURE” DISSIDENT NARRATIVE: VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S PALE
FIRE
Writing “Nabokov”
Lolita is famous, not I. I am only an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an
unpronounceable name.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions
It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have
devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions
In Chapter 2, I examine a number of Vladimir Nabokov's American texts, with a
special focus on Pale Fire, asking how his literary production can be contextualized in
and how it reflects on, the intellectual climate of the Cold War in the United States and
the treatment of Russian dissidents. Of particular interest is how Nabokov's oeuvre
participates in American political and cultural attempts to understand, “figure out,” praise
and/or reject the communist “other,” Soviet Russia. Nabokov arrives in the United States
at the beginning of World War II and leaves it for Switzerland before that tumultuous
decade, the sixties, begins. His presence and influence in the American intellectual
landscape, nevertheless, is prominent both while he is in the United States and when he is
away: he speaks to America when he publishes his autobiographical writings in The New
Yorker in the late forties and desecrates many proprieties with Lolita in the fifties as
much as when he gives numerous interviews and “strong opinions” in Montreaux,
Switzerland in the sixties (many addressing the political and cultural upheavals in
36
37
America, Cold War topics and Soviet politics). He speaks to America, I say, because
Nabokov's self-fashioning—his literary self-production—as a dissident, RussianAmerican author, as an expert on all things Russian, is in a way inseparable from his
insistence on apprising the American public of the evils of “Leninization”1 and of
Russia's short-lived, but crucial potential for (Western) liberal development, embodied by
enlightened emigres like Nabokov himself.
Nabokov has frequently claimed that he is neither a Bolshevist “red” nor a
monarchist “white” Russian, rejecting the allegedly vulgar political binarism with which
the American public categorized Russian emigres: instead, he has described himself as a
child of democratic liberalism.2 Aside from this self-categorization, Nabokov has mostly
rejected other attempts to locate him along the left-right political continuum, opting,
instead, for the language of universalist, human-rights values that determined his support
for or opposition to a particular politics. In their condemnation of totalitarianism
regardless of a state that enforces it, his novels Bend Sinister and Invitation to a
Beheading already foreshadow the statement in Strong Opinions that he cannot tell
Democrats from Republicans, that a social or economic structure of a state is irrelevant:
his only condition is “no torture, no executions” and no “regimentation of thought,
governmental censorship, racial or religious persecution” (34, 48).3 As we will see, many
1
This is an expression borrowed from Nabokov's Pnin; Pnin is said to have escaped from “Leninized
Russia” (8).
2
Nabokov politically allies himself with Western-type liberalism that seems to be inspired by his father's
political engagement. Nabokov's father was a member of the Constitutional-Democratic party and became
elected to the first Russian parliament under the Tsar, but “[h]istory seems to have been anxious of
depriving him of a full opportunity to reveal his great gifts of statesmanship in a Russian republic of a
Western type” (Speak, Memory 176).
3
Nabokov’s understanding and endorsement of Western liberal democracy is probably closer to its
American Democratic than Republican versions in terms of his support of progressive rather than
38
critics have taken Nabokov's lead by shying away from blatantly political readings of his
novels that would rely on the pre-established jargon of left, center, or right politics—and
indeed, Nabokov's novels would frustrate such attempts with their narrative complexity,
their playfulness and fluidity. So one can talk about Nabokov's allegiance to human rights
or his fight against oppression in general; another “safe” way to approach Nabokov has
been through the discussion of the implications of exile (literal and/or figurative), of the
cultural and linguistic dis/placements in his writing.
But how can one politicize Nabokov the playful and daring human-rights
supporter, the Russian exilic writer with enviable English skills? In Chapter 2, rather than
applying a specific political jargon to a reading of Nabokov's texts, I want to tease out the
ways in which Nabokov's own position on non-oppression, especially when targeted at
Soviets, serves a political function in the Cold War struggles in America. Also, I want to
show how his exilic narratives—including the narrative of his own exile—are made
possible precisely by the discursive tropes of and about the Cold War, which persistently
attempt to determine the terms of Nabokov’s (self) representations. If representation in
the sense of darstellung, as “re-presentation” or “portrayal,” is according to Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe an impossible attempt at “unveiling” the “truth,” because of an
impossible position of rhetorical articulation as if “from the outside” of the “truth”—
conservative political and social democratic policies. Nabokov faults the Soviet regime for obliterating
political freedoms and institutions provided by a liberal democracy in any version, such as a multi-party
system, free elections, democratic representative bodies and rule of law. He is in favor of social-cultural
liberalism reflected in the rights of individuals to different lifestyles, including sexual and religious
freedoms, freedoms of speech and thought and protection from government intrusion into private life (in
this respect he is opposed to, as we will see, to both American conservative Civil Rights opponents and
Russian or German anti-Semites). His discussion of liberal democracy never includes a praise of economic
liberalism, typically more important to conservative democrats. Finally, he is a strong supporter of
American Cold-War foreign policy in both its Democrat and Republican versions: he has been kind to
McCarthyism and the Vietnam War and has criticized May 1968 protests.
39
which would somehow allow for its unveiling or unfolding—then it is necessary to read
Nabokov’s narratives about himself or Russia’s history as an endless play of rhetorical
tropes and images, of contexts and representations without recourse to any originary
“truth” (The Subject of Philosophy 2). In other words, I am interested not in Nabokov as
an exiled or dissident author but rather in the textual articulation of this figure, the
discursive conditions of his self-fashioning; similarly, instead of looking at ways in
which Nabokov “unveils” the “true” (hi)story of Russia, I focus on Russia’s history-asnarrative, as a historicist re-presentation of the past.
On the one hand, Nabokov’s invocation of recognizable Cold War tropes and older
narratives that posit Western democratic heritage as the political goal for Russia help
Nabokov and his views on Russia and Soviet communism become “visible” in the
American intellectual landscape. However, this situation also renders his influence
precarious and even marginalized. This is not only because of the fluctuation of interest
in Soviet Russia in different times and among different audiences, but also because
Nabokov in a sense becomes politically conformist and thus “invisible” when he
submerges his writing in existing Orientalist re-presentations on wild Russian
communists/tsarists and tries to prove to his American audiences that Russia is capable of
a “civilized” democratic development.
First of all, a certain number of Nabokov's engagements were directly brought on
by the Cold War and in this sense can be qualified as directly political. For instance, his
novel The Gift was the first title to be picked up by Radio Liberty's CIA-sponsored
publication project, dedicated to procuring emigre literature into the Soviet Union. Such
material was largely uncensored, distributed gratis and appeared under a contrived
40
publishing house name. Also, it could be argued that Nabokov's engagement at Cornell,
at the height of McCarthyism, was facilitated by his impeccable anti-communist
credentials: as Andrew Field has pointed out, “Cornell was in the main a very
conservative campus” (headed by President Malott, priding himself as a “rock-ribbed,
reactionary Republican”) and even warranted “its own secret FBI bureau in Ithaca” with
which Nabokov, as a professor of Russian, had a regular and quite friendly relationship
(303). Among such political decisions we can certainly contextualize Nabokov's many
anti-Soviet lectures and debates—from his early denunciations of Bolshevism during his
studies at Cambridge to his 1958 lecture at Cornell titled “Readers, Writers and Censors
in Russia,” where he famously ridiculed Soviet socialist realist literature (Brian Boyd,
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 360–61; Andrew Field, The Life and Art of
Vladimir Nabokov 305).
In this respect, it is significant that Nabokov's rhetoric on Soviets, which according
to Nabokov originated from a liberalism of a Western type and from a hatred of extreme
right and left politics alike,4 coincides with not only liberal-progressive, but also with
right-conservative Cold War rhetoric. Indeed, Nabokov's views on the phenomenon of
McCarthyism echo Lawrence Durrell's sentiment that “the USA witch-hunting and all is
taking a far more sensible line than anyone else,” and the triumphant statement, “What a
madhouse Communism is. And how grateful we are to the USA for taking it seriously”
4
Nabokov claims, for instance, that he was embarrassed when his anti-Soviet cause was embraced in
England not only by liberal democrats, but by the “English ultraconservatives,” and goes on to say he hates
all similar “jolly empire-builders in their jungle clearings, French policemen, the unmentionable German
product, the good old churchgoing Russian or Polish pogromshchik, the lean American lyncher” (Speak,
Memory 264). A similar enmity toward left-wing politics can be seen in his protestation against the London
Sunday Times claim that his father was assassinated because he was too left-wing: “This nonsense. . .is
remarkably similar to the glib data distorting truth in Soviet sources; it implies that the chieftains of the
Russian emigration were bandits. . .My father. . .merely continued the strain of West European liberalism”
(Strong Opinions 214).
41
(qtd. in Todorova 135). Although Nabokov was not always thrilled by McCarthyist
methods, he was nevertheless grateful that the United States was taking the communist
threat seriously. George F. Kennan's famous “Long Telegram” established Soviets as
unrelenting fanatics, prepared to take over the entire planet and, of course, destroy the
“American way of life”; surrounding this image of Soviets is the discourse on
international communism in general as an uncontrollable disease, which must be stopped,
or for the time being, quarantined.5 In Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric
of the West, Suzanne Clark shows that the language of disease and of communism as a
dangerous parasite, was compounded by the descriptions of Soviet political discourses as
shifty, unreliable, merely rhetorical and ideological, in contrast to which the American
political culture appeared as transparent, objective and truthful (hence an insistence on
“objectivity” and “transparency” in questionings and trials organized by the CIA and
FBI). Perhaps this can be related to the situation in which an Eastern European émigré
like Nabokov, having arrived in the safety of a Western democracy, is assumed to be
finally unveiling the “truth” about Russia, leaving shifty ideological discourses behind.
In Inventing Eastern Europe, Wolff argues that Churchill's Fulton speech, which
established Bolshevism as a challenge to the Christian civilization, also helps to justify
the political placing of Eastern Europe in quarantine behind the Iron Curtain (2). For
Churchill, who was, nevertheless, anxious to “rescue” Greece (the cradle of European
civilization) from the clutches of Soviet fanatics and establish British influence in
Greece, even the leftist anti-Nazi Greek guerrillas were “bandits,” “gangsters” and
5
See especially Norman Graebner's “Myth and Reality: America's Rhetorical Cold War” in Martin J.
Medhurst and H.W. Brands' Critical Reflections on the Cold War. In the same collection, Robert L. Ivie's
“A New Democratic World Order?” traces the changes in this rhetoric, from Eisenhower's insistence on
Soviet brutality and unaccountability to Carter's conciliatory discourse of “moral suasion,” or “conversion”
of Soviets.
42
“brigands” and he fought ruthlessly to suppress them (qtd. in Todorova 135). This
portrayal of communism as a disease and a related criminalization of communist rule,
denying it international legitimacy, also characterizes Nabokov's comments on the socalled “Lenin's gang” (Speak, Memory 241). He frequently describes Lenin as a
“madman” leading a band of “thugs” and Bolsheviks as social “parasites,” advocating an
attack on the “Russian Bear's territory,” which employs an established racist stereotype
used to portray Russians (Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years 168; Vladimir
Nabokov: The American Years 143–44).
Of course, one could argue that Nabokov had justified concerns about the
legitimacy of Soviet revolutionary expropriation, or of the “radical” qualities of a
revolution that, in his words, mutated into “Philistinism” and “petit-bourgeois”
materialism of the Western type (Strong Opinions 149). But what is at stake here is the
overlap of the discourse on communism as a disease and of a classist dismissal and fear
of communist revolution as an expression of “mob” mentality, with Orientalist discourses
on Eastern European peoples prior to and post communism, which warn of the dangers
they pose to the “civilized,” European and by extension, American world. Prior to
communism, the peoples of Eastern Europe are frequently portrayed as the wild, warring
nations (a dangerous “mixture of races”) whose national conflicts, especially as the old
European empires that “held them in check” fall apart, threaten to spill over the Western
borders, like a disease or an infection (Adam Burgess 51). While their social elites are
sometimes praised for having assimilated a modicum of Western civilized manners, the
majority—the poor, the “mob”—are to be feared (Burgess 51). Perhaps this attitude is
responsible for the hatred of communists, as forces that allegedly do away with the
43
“civilized elites” that the West could count on. In the post-communist period, the
metaphors of infection and criminal behavior resurface in a number of public discourses:
from the threat of “Balkanization” of the West, to the fear of the hungry masses
(illegally) flowing across the borders into the European Union, to the discourses on literal
diseases introduced by Eastern European prostitutes.6
This is not to claim a perfect continuity between Nabokov's writing on—of—
Russia and the Orientalist tradition on Eastern European communists or peoples in
general; rather, I aim to illuminate their shared rhetoric which can help us politicize
Nabokov. Such a relationship is particularly interesting in light of Nabokov's
legitimization of Western liberal democracy as the ideal political system, embodied in the
“spacious freedom of thought we enjoy in America and Western Europe,” and his
recommendation that Russia should have developed a democracy of a Western type
(Strong Opinions 113, 176). Also significant is the lack of any systemic critique when it
comes to US politics, which leads Nabokov to an embarrassing endorsement of the
Vietnam War and collaboration with the CIA and FBI. I would also argue that his classist
dismissal of the “mob” mentality of the Lenin regime is relevant in light of his dismissal
of the anti-Vietnam-War protests as expressions of conformist, crowd, Philistine
mentality: for Nabokov, the protesters are “goofy hoodlums—with a sprinkling of clever
rogues” (Strong Opinions 139).
These rather problematic pronouncements, however, are tempered by Nabokov's
self-portrayal as not some backward “White Russian” but as a progressive, modern,
democratic liberal. Thus he is beyond reproach: being neither the vilified (or to say the
6
Even as late as 1992, Philip Longworth makes the following statement in his The Making of Eastern
Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, “If one regards Soviet communism as a disease, then it seems
that Eastern Europe may have had a predisposition to the infection” (7).
44
least, controversial) communist nor the outdated conservative monarchist, he occupies the
place of America’s imaginary desire for Russian (Eastern European) “elites” that are
rational, in step with the “progress” in the world and reliable as Western allies. He speaks
from a position of authority, therefore, when he warns pro-Soviet enthusiasts of the evils
of “Lenin's beastly regime” and regrets his Russian novels had not been translated earlier
for the benefit of Western audiences (Strong Opinions 207). In this paradigm, he also
stages himself—and others like him—as a “true” Russian exile, because he is not of the
decadent Russian gentry who bemoan the loss of their property to the Reds and are thus
morally despicable, but rather of the Russian political and cultural vanguard. The Reds
are placed beyond redemption, blamed as they are not only for the exodus of the most
progressive Russians, but also for robbing people like Nabokov not of material goods
(supposedly), but of their memories, of their childhoods (Speak, Memory 73). Nabokov
romanticizes his exile, seemingly placing himself outside of politics: the beastly
communists corrupt nothing short of the purity of childhood.
Because Nabokov is bent on portraying himself as the Russian cultural vanguard,
much of his battle takes place in the field of literature, where Nabokov sees the danger of
having “true” exile literature (a continuation of the “great tradition” of Russian novels)
contested by official Soviet socialist-realist literature. Perhaps the ferocity of this battle is
aptly illustrated by the struggle between Nabokov's Lolita and Pasternak's Doctor
Zhivago for the first spot on the bestseller list in the United States (Boyd, Vladimir
Nabokov: The American Years 370). While pro-Soviet enthusiasts welcomed the
controversial Dr. Zhivago as a sign that Soviet Russia, after all, is not so strict on matters
of censorship, for Nabokov the novel was still Leninist but in subtle way (Strong
45
Opinions 205–07). Nabokov's hatred of Soviet literature (with several exceptions) has led
him to refuse to teach it during his university appointments and to characterize it as
simplistic, uncouth and uncivilized, a “provincial courtyard”—in short, portraying
Soviets and by extension communists not only as thugs, but as uncultured thugs (Boyd,
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 25). At the same time, to escape total
Orientalization, he has had to “rescue” his own achievement as a writer and the “great
tradition” in Russian literary history from such a categorization. Again, the only way for
Nabokov to do this is to show what is so “Western European” about Russian literature:
his university lectures on Pushkin, Gogol and Lermontov as “West European writers”
belie a desire to undo the shameful unworking of “civilized” traditions by Soviet
communists and an attempt to escape from the inferior to the privileged position within
such an Orientalist discourse (Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 36).7
On the one hand, then, Nabokov writes himself as a “true” inheritor of the liberal
tradition in Russia (of the same kind as one in the “free world”), implying that this option
is still haunting Russia's descent into totalitarianism and barbarism. To establish this
connection, he points out a number of similarities between what he describes as Russia's
brief spell of democracy during the last period of the tsarist era and the liberal democratic
development in Europe. Although Russia under the tsarist regime is narrated as, on the
whole, a “rather appalling country,” Nabokov is at pains to show that it could have
become a modern, democratic country if only the communists hadn't taken over: “Since
7
In a sense, this is a tough battle for Nabokov to fight: throughout the Cold War, it was customary to
portray the countries of the Soviet bloc as semi-Western, ones where democracy could have flourished had
they not been so brutally invaded by Russia. But Russia, in contrast, was not in the least considered
Western European, or capable of a liberal, democratic development — it was beyond hope. See Adam
Burgess' Divided Europe: The New Domination of the East for an elaboration of this theme.
46
the reforms of the eighteen-sixties, the country had possessed (though not always adhered
to) a legislation of which any Western democracy might have been proud, a vigorous
public opinion that held despots at bay, widely read periodicals of all shades of liberal
political thought and what was especially striking, fearless and independent judges”
(Speak, Memory 116, 264). Nabokov performs a work of mourning for the potential in
Russia that is always-already idealized by the very fact that it is deemed lost, at the same
time as he attempts to lift Russia's image in the eyes of Americans who consider Russia
absolutely backward (and absolutist), as well as those on the political right and left who,
albeit from different perspectives, see the communist takeover as the only option for
Russia.8
In this process, Nabokov's gesture is that of “mimicry,” of a partial representation,
or repetition of the metropolitan claim to liberal democracy, what Homi Bhabha
describes as the paradoxical “desire to emerge as 'authentic' through mimicry,” to be
taken seriously only if one repeats, however unsuccessfully, the metropolitan image of
itself (88). On the other hand, “to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English,” and,
by extension I might add, for Nabokov to claim that Russia is (or can be) Westernized
implies that it emphatically is not Western, that there is always an excess of otherness
which is both a fetish and a menace to the metropolitan colonial discourse (Bhabha 87).
Thus Nabokov must also show what is so unique about Russia, must in a sense play an
exotic Russian performing a cultural difference—what Gayatri Spivak calls the “staging”
8
A one-time Soviet sympathizer, Edmund Wilson frequently disputed Nabokov's claim that there was a
tradition democracy in Tsarist Russia and claimed that “except for Lenin's democratic reign, Russia had
remained unchanged from the Middle Ages to Stalin” (qtd. in Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American
Years 21). Another common leftist assumption was that, since the Soviet Union had no tradition of
democracy anyway, the people did not perceive the communist takeover as an act that deprives them of
civil, democratic liberties.
47
of “culture”—to his American audiences on both the left and right (and the shades in
between), if he is to interest them in the story of his exile (Critique of Postcolonial
Reason 405).9 Yet even in re-presenting this “difference,” as we will see, there is a sense
of discursive pressure on Nabokov to fall into what Spivak calls “the lines laid down by
the official institutional structures of representation,” speaking of the difficulty the
“subaltern” faces when making an attempt at self-representation (“Can the Subaltern
Speak?” 306).
In other words, if the subaltern makes an attempt at self-portrayal that resists
reading by his/her audience and cannot be stabilized into any known “identity,” then this
attempt may not be truly heard or recognized. Here we arrive at another problem of
darstellung, of representation of one’s subalernity or “difference”: if it is necessarily an
act of citation, of invoking pre-determined images and tropes of what qualifies as
“difference,” then the resulting “uniqueness” is not all that alien to official vehicles of
discursive representation—much like the desire to appear “authentic” through a mimicry
of the metropolitan image. For Nabokov, the path to articulating a “safe” cultural
uniqueness—safely “different” in so far as it close to the “same,” in so far as it articulates
“universal” human concerns across cultural boundaries— lies, again, seemingly outside
of politics. Symptomatic here is Nabokov's use of sentimental and emotional language
whether he talks about the loss of his childhood, homeland, or his “infinitely rich and
docile Russian tongue,” about nostalgia as “one of a thousand tender emotions,” or about
the larger social irrelevance and complete singularity of Pushkin's rich, invented Russian
9
Even Nabokov's famed biographer, Brian Boyd, is not safe from the appeal of Nabokov's Slavic
exoticism: as a young man at Cambridge Nabokov “found a barrier between himself and English
undergraduates around him. The whirlwinds of the soul natural to a Russian provoked incomprehension on
a well-scrubbed English face” (Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years 167).
48
world in the commentary to his translation of Eugene Onegin (Strong Opinions 115,
149).
In this respect, Nabokov becomes extremely popular in critical and intellectual
circles when he publishes his Russian memories, what will later be collected and is today
best known as Conclusive Evidence, or later, Speak, Memory, in The New Yorker in the
late 40s and early 50s.10 Obviously, he shoots into much greater prominence with the
publication of Lolita a bit later, but the fame that he achieves both as a Russian émigré
writer publishing in The New Yorker and as a lecturer, particularly at Wellesley and
Cornell, before this time cannot be discounted. At the conservative Cornell at the high
point of McCarthyism, Nabokov's lectures and talks fit in well with the higher powers'
Cold War political correctness; at Wellesley during and shortly after World War II,
Nabokov's anti-Soviet stance, in the face of Wellesley's greater liberalism, as well as
(politically correct) sympathy for and interest in the Soviets in light of the war alliance, is
deemed “bold” and “rebellious,” all the more exotic coming from a “charming” and
“romantically poor” professor (Boyd Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 37).11
So here we have Nabokov, who, much like his hapless professor Pnin, insists on
educating his students and readers on the uniqueness of Russian history and culture and
on imparting his Russian memories. But of course the very possibility and conditions of
such a narration are immediately politicized because of what Nabokov can or cannot say,
to the American left or right: on the right hand, Cornell or the FBI solicits his anti-Soviet
10
Conclusive Evidence seems to have met with a great reception from critics, but failed to impress the
popular audiences (Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 192).
11
According to Boyd, Nabokov's lectures were a “purring success” at Wellesley and he was made a regular
at “soirees, banquets and meetings” (Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 25).
49
narratives; on the left hand, The New Yorker editors ask him to tone down his anti-Soviet
remarks and Wellesley department chairs and enthusiastic students bring him to a
compromise of interspersing his syllabus with some Soviet literature.12 What is at stake
here—and what will be crucial to my discussion of Pale Fire in the second part of this
chapter—is the moment at which Nabokov, in order to represent his “unique” life story
and opinions or a “unique” Russia, must, paradoxically, repeat the American colonial
desire for a Russia, that is, depending on one's political perspective, a Cold War “other”
to be feared and quarantined or reformed, an “other” that is a model for an American
communist revolution, or an “other” that highlights the failures of America's liberal
democracy. Russia as a mirror.
Given Nabokov's social milieu at the universities where he taught and in the
magazines where he published, he was probably somewhat of a conservative oddity
among the leftist, or left-liberal editors and professors.13 Hence Nabokov's feeling of
alienation in these locales and a self-image of a revolutionary, “rebellious” or “bold”
author who is truly rocking the boat of the public consensus on Soviets. Nevertheless, this
is a somewhat romanticized position as the left-liberal intellectual and social milieu was
itself somewhat of an oddity in relation to the American mainstream, anti-communist
sentiment, particularly in the postwar period. This mainstream, in fact, is the wave on
which Nabokov's career rides. But what is significant for both the mainstream and
marginal positions (however precarious and protean these qualifications may be) is that in
12
Nabokov's periodic negotiations with The New Yorker editors over revising the political references in his
submissions and his persistent disparagement of Soviet literature, at Wellesley and elsewhere, are
documented throughout Field's and Boyd's biographies.
13
Also, for a detailed discussion of the American left (both pro- and anti-Soviet) and left-liberal, intellectual
landscape throughout the Cold War era, see William O'Neill's A Better World: The Great Schism: Stalinism
and the American Intellectuals.
50
neither case does Nabokov radically escape the interpellation of a Russian emigre subject
who will tell America the “truth” about Soviets. We can literally see the violence of this
interpellation, the breakdown of its supposed transparency or independent articulation, in
the persistent attempts from both camps to police the terms on which the “truth” about
Soviets can be told.
I propose that we read this situation in the context of what Homi Bhabha calls the
“colonizer's demand for narrative,” which “articulates the narcissistic, colonialist demand
that the Other should authorize the self, recognize its priority, fulfill its outlines,” or, as I
want to suggest, affirm its authority (sometimes an authority of intervention) through
providing it with testimony (98). For Jacques Derrida, as Bhabha points out, this demand
for a narrative is simultaneously a call of the police14—“Tell us exactly what
happened”—and here we can ask how the institutional structures through which the FBI
can demand testimony of suspected communists relate to those through which Nabokov
can give his own testimony to the American public, parting the Iron Curtain and exposing
the obscenity of the forbidden lands (qtd. in Bhabha 98). In the pages that follow, I want
to explore how this interpellation, although it invests Nabokov with anxiety over
obscurity and marginalization (“Lolita is famous, not I. I am only an obscure, doubly
obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name”), also becomes exposed and satirized
in some of his texts, most strikingly in Pale Fire (Strong Opinions 107).
Testimony to/of Colonial Overidentification
Pale Fire plays on the Cold War fascination with and precariously privileged status
of, communist dissidents in the Western—here concretely American—imaginary,
14
And the term “interpellation,” in Althusser's writing, similarly refers to the call of the police, to one's selfrecognition as a subject of testimony, bowing to the power of the police.
51
embodied in Charles Kinbote and his fantastic story of royal escape. Without dismissing
the “actual” event of exile in Pale Fire, I will look at the ways in which Kinbote also
actively creates, or indeed invents his exile for consumption by American audiences,
through an almost fairy-tale narrative of a distant, exotic Zembla, which I posit as a
metaphor for Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain. Before Pale Fire, Nabokov used
the motif of an imaginary land or language several times, perhaps most famously in
Invitation to a Beheading (1935) and Bend Sinister (1947). Although, as in Pale Fire,
there is no direct reference to “actual” countries in these novels, there is an attempt at
thematizing certain features of the “real” totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet
Union; the narrative of Bend Sinister thus satirizes Nazi efficiency and includes parts of
Lenin’s speeches and the Soviet constitution.
The possibility of Kinbote-style, dreamlike escape, or escape from the world of
totalitarian dictatorship which itself appears surreal or illusory, also informs the
aforementioned novels through the acts of their persecuted protagonists Cincinnatus and
Adam Krug, respectively. However, in Pale Fire, Kinbote escapes not only his Zemblan
persecutors but also the attempt at discursive containment by the American social
milieu—something that Pnin fails to do, in spite of all his “Westernized” anticommunism which echoes Kinbote’s and in spite of the attempts to affiliate himself with
American metropolitans, to become “American.” Of particular interest is the way in
which Nabokov's narrative in Pale Fire, paradoxically, both recognizes and ridicules the
Orientalist mechanisms of domestication and containment at work in Kinbote's selfpresentation and resorts to a straightforward use of such mechanisms to promote an anticommunist critique.
52
As the very condition of possibility of Kinbote's Zemblan narrative, the Cold War
climate allows for the exile's seeming empowerment and self-promotion, but also tries to
domesticate the discursive terms on which the narrative of Zembla, or the “other” Europe
can be told. Kinbote's position can thus be considered alongside that of Pnin, who
markets his communist martyrdom and “expertise” on Russia at the same time that he is
patronized and paralyzed within Orientalist stereotypes and that of Nabokov's own
ideological commodification which has been discussed thus far. Kinbote's story is, to use
Nabokov's self-description, “doubly obscure” because it can only articulate itself through
an accepted metropolitan institutional discourse, in this case the critical discourse of
American academia and even when it “inappropriately” keeps inserting itself in the
“serious” explication of Shade's poem, it can only do so through an exaggerated use of
Orientalist stereotypes to pitch Zembla to American desire.
However, this is not to imply that “authentic” Kinbote is thus victimized or
silenced: quite the contrary. In a Derridean sense, Kinbote's narrative must sacrifice itself
to these discursive limitations in order to actually succeed in exposing their violence, in
exposing the types of narratives that they suppress or neglect: it mocks them precisely
through an ironic overidentification. Just as colonial mimicry, for Bhabha, contains the
dangerous potential for ironizing the colonial model, so for Žižek, overidentification with
the hegemonic discourse is potentially more dangerous than its contestation (Žižek, Did
Someone Say Totalitarianism? 90). On a related note, Kinbote cannot produce an
“authentic” Zembla no more than Nabokov can produce a “unique” Russia, divorced
from the preconceptions and discursive conditions that already guide its understanding.
What is required of Kinbote, instead, is a double mimicry, in which the foreigner is
53
required to be mostly “like us” (here Kinbote mimicks the venerated discourse of
academia) and then be maybe a little “different”, “unique,” “exotic” but in a familiar way
(here Kinbote mimicks the familiar Orientalist imagery). As Julian Wolfreys notes in his
Rhetoric of Affirmative Resistance: Dissonant Voices from Carroll to Derrida, this
overidentification with—or surrender to—“self-acknowledged figures of other
discourses, other contexts we think we know” precisely points to the irreducibility or
undecidability of any one “identity” (15–16). This is because the very idea of the copy, of
mimicry, “implies a failed fidelity and the constantly frustrated desire for . . .
verisimilitude”; it is this frustration of verisimilitude, the inherent “failure” to mimic an
established discourse perfectly that becomes an “affirmation of difference” (Wolfreys
16).
This precarious balance of sameness and difference is both desired and feared by
the would-be Kinbote's—and Nabokov's—audiences, since their tendency to read for a
stable, recognizable “identity” is thus at once seemingly possible and endlessly
threatened, frustrated. It is desired because it introduces a bit of (expected, “known”)
quirkiness and eccentricity into the otherwise bland, repetitive discourse, in a similar way
that Nabokov's “unique” Russian experience introduces “difference” to his Western
upbringing and his affinities with liberal democracy. We can see this at work in the
various critical reactions to Nabokov's monumental translation and commentary on
Eugene Onegin, which bears the aura of transgressive, controversial literary criticism as it
includes many non-traditional elements: Nabokov's word coinages in an attempt to
maintain fidelity to the “literal” translation of Pushkin, footnotes for all the minute
literary, social, economic and ecological details surrounding Eugene Onegin's text and
54
tirades against a number of critics or authors, mostly unrelated to Pushkin's text itself.
Many critics find Nabokov too transgressive and thus he is accused of promoting his own
ego, of a “transposition into Nabokovese, rather than translation into English,” of being a
“foreigner who has not quite learned the language with the extreme perfection required”
(Robert Conquest 174). Edmund Wilson chides Nabokov for not respecting tradition, for
“inflicting” on the reader “a system of prosody. . .invented by himself,” and, overall, for
not observing the boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate critical discourse:
Nabokov's long-winded, tedious commentary would not be “detrimental to the fantastic
fiction he writes. . .of which it is. . .an essential element, but which in an erudite work of
this kind is a serious disadvantage” (Wilson 177).15
But others have been more merciful to Nabokov's unusual project. Ronald Hingley
describes it as a “fantastic project” despite its “bizarre features” and concludes, “Its very
eccentricity means that it fulfills the first necessity of a Russian work in the eyes of us
stolid Anglo-Saxons” (172). Christopher Ricks qualifies the translation as “Massively
crochety, superbly opinionated, humiliatingly erudite . . . . Brilliant though and hugely
readable” (167). The dose of Russian “eccentricity,” however, must be just enough so as
not to disturb the “stolid Anglo-Saxon” audience—and by analogy, if one insists on
“telling the truth” about Russia, one can do so but within reasonable limits, in terms of
both appropriate discourse and an appropriate number of references. But if one talks too
much about Russia, like Nabokov's professor Pnin when he shares his sentimental
Russian memories a bit too much during his university lectures, one becomes exposed to
15
Along similar lines is a curious comment that “Nabokov's ambitions as a scholar are thwarted by his
creativity” which says perhaps more about the type of thinking academia favors and less about Nabokov
himself (Clive James 182).
55
pity and even ridicule. Kinbote's narrative similarly tips this balance, but in a more
radical and threatening way, escaping, ultimately, the characterization of a poor,
romantic, or even ridiculous Russian émigré through which Pnin is dismissed and
marginalized—and through which his “identity” is “figured out,” stabilized as something
that “we” in the West can identify with, or contain as safely “different.”
On the one hand, Kinbote's narrative mocks the hegemonic discourses through an
ironic overidentification with them and on the other hand, it finally disregards the rules of
the academic game by persistently, pathetically, narcissistically soliciting attention to
himself and thus “failing” to produce an acceptable “erudite work,” to borrow Wilson's
phrase. While of course one could argue that Kinbote therefore becomes as pathetic and
pitiable as Pnin, I would argue that this becomes a line of flight from the terms of
domestication, especially as Kinbote on the surface solicits the sympathy of American
audiences for his tragic fate (thus playing the part of a poor dissident), but increasingly
undermines the audience's potential for identifying with his fate, for showing sympathy,
or even pity. Kinbote's self-Orientalization grows stranger as the story unfolds, the
foreigner becomes more unfamiliar and outright bizarre, foreclosing the possibility of
understanding or acceptance. In this respect, Kinbote's narrative can be described as
Deleuze and Guattari's “minor literature,” a “becoming-animality,” an appropriation of a
dominant language—or in this case discourse—for “strange and minor uses,” driving it
“to a desert,” exposing its poverty, as well as its inability to dominate, to domesticate
unruly dissidents (26-27).
My proposed reading of Kinbote and Pale Fire in general, will no doubt outrage
many Nabokov scholars, perhaps especially those who approach the novel in terms of
56
character analysis, frequently from a humanist and/or moral perspective and pathologize
Kinbote as a “mad,” “arrogant,” or “narcissistic” character.16 As Jill LeRoy-Frazier notes,
“many critics persist reading Pale Fire as if the novel itself posits an illusionary 'everyday
reality,' from which Kinbote in his madness represents a deviation” (312). In contrast to
such readings, I suggest looking at the context that Nabokov created for such a character
in Pale Fire and focusing less on Kinbote as an “individual” or a “subject” and more on
Kinbote's narrative in terms of what it does (to others and to Kinbote “himself”), how it
functions politically within the novel, as a “minor literature,” or as what Fredric Jameson
calls an “ideological” or a “symbolic act” of a narrative.17 I believe such an approach is
necessary in the context of predominantly apolitical readings of Pale Fire, which
nevertheless include much outstanding scholarship and only testify to the number of
critical possibilities in Nabokov's text. Among such readings are those concerned with
questions of authorship (“Shadeans,” “Kinboteans,” even “Botkinians”),18 those that
approach the text as a literary puzzle, a postmodern game, or an “artistic discovery,”19 as
well as those which deal with Kinbote's exile as a general, metaphysical category, or with
locating Zembla using references to “real” national geographies and/or languages in the
text.20
16
Examples of critics concerned with humanism and morals are Ellen Pifer and Richard Rorty; those who
engage in character analysis and read Kinbote as, at best, as a highly intelligent and sensitive, yet deranged
person, or at worst, as a selfish and dangerous paranoid, include Michael Wood, Peter Welsen, Nina Allan
and Maurice Couturier.
17
See Jameson's The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
18
Some of the more famous participants in this debate are Andrew Field, Brian Boyd, Page Stegner, Charles
Nicol and D. Barton Johnson.
19
Examples are Mary McCarthy, Priscilla Meyer, Robert Rawdon Wilson and Brian Boyd.
20
For instance, Priscilla Meyer, Manfred Voss, Lucy Maddox, Gavriel Shapiro and Peter Steiner.
57
In a sense, Zembla is no more “real” than Kinbote is a “real” character (and here I
mean the “reality” as established by the novel) and thus I would like to read it as a
metaphorical articulation of a political situation or regime rather than as a mimetic
reincarnation, however imaginary, of a specific (Eastern European or other) country. Of
course, that it is reasonable to trace an analogy between Zembla and the communist
countries of Eastern Europe is implied by the famous lines in Pale Fire in which Kinbote
places Zemblan side by side with many languages of the countries behind the Iron
Curtain:21
English and Zemblan, English and Russian, English and Lettish, English and
Estonian, English and Lithuanian, English and Russian, English and Ukrainian,
English and Polish, English and Czech, English and Russian, English and
Hungarian, English and Rumanian, English and Albanian, English and Bulgarian,
English and Serbo-Croatian, English and Russian, American and European. (Pale
Fire 235)
This association invests Zembla with an aura of political marginalization and
isolation similar to that of the Iron-Curtain countries, implying that Kinbote's situation is
similar to, or speaks for, that of other anti-communist dissidents exiled to America and
can be understood only in that context. Indeed, the very lines of Shade's poem to which
this is Kinbote's commentary describe an “exile. . .dying in a motel” and thinking of the
past: the exile “conjures in two tongues/the nebulae dilating in his lungs” (55–56, lines
609–16; emphasis mine). That English is always one of the “two tongues” and that all the
Eastern European/Zemblan tongues have to square with it, always in a secondary
21
There are, obviously, more overt links with communist countries of the Eastern Europe: Zembla is never
too far from Russia, geographically and figuratively. Soviet generals help the native Zemblan Extremists
take over the government and Zembla hosts a visit by Khrushchev (130, 274).
58
position, becoming almost interchangeable, infuses English, or the motel America where
the exile dies, with a dose of superiority, of primacy.22
This relationship is not to be ignored as throughout his commentary Kinbote
assigns primacy to English by obsessively “proving” how well versed he is in the nuances
of this language and the same attitude extends to his expertise in Anglo-American
literature and related traditions of critical scholarship. In a sense, Kinbote must
overcompensate, must show that he is capable of doing “serious” scholarly work on
Shade's poem because of the intersection of a number of transgressive lines that frame his
reading of the text: apparently he absconds with the poem under shady circumstances, he
is deemed unqualified for the job as he is from a department other than English and he is
widely considered to be deranged.
While he is accused of desiring, in a somewhat obscene manner, complete control
over the poem which does not rightfully belong to him, his act reveals, of course, the
desire for complete control over the text by the English department: the desire for not
disturbing the established protocol of critical scholarship, which strengthens its own
authority by suppressing many “unqualified,” unconventional—deranged—readings.
Kinbote's recommendation for reading his annotations to the lines in Shade's poem is that
“the reader is advised to consult them first and then study the poem with their help,
rereading them of course as he goes through the text and perhaps, after having done with
the poem, consulting them a third time so as to complete the picture” (28). This
recommendation, in its exaggerated claim to the reader's attention, is not so much about
22
And, by analogy, when Kinbote complains that instead of Shade's line that reads “killing a Balkan king,”
he was hoping to see “killing a Zemblan king,” this might suggest a similar interchangeability, in terms of
similarly marginalized histories vying for a spot in the metropolitan text in order to be acknowledged,
brought to light, redeemed from narrative oblivion (262).
59
Kinbote's personal tendency toward control as it is an identification with and therefore a
jab at, the discursive control presumed by an authoritative reading of a literary text.
Kinbote's commentary exposes the conditions of possibility in the authoritative
critical discourse of American academia which would domesticate his “rebellion.” The
commentary simultaneously ironizes academic conventions as it repeatedly resorts to
them, pretending that it wants to uphold them; this means that the narrative is fully
“aware” of the conventions, but nevertheless breaks them, going off into a different
direction, deterritorializing them, exposing their poverty. In order to establish his
credibility as a literary critic, Kinbote ostentatiously claims, “I have no desire to twist and
batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel” (86).
Although this promise is, as we shall see later, betrayed throughout the
commentary, it highlights the monstrous nature of a critical reading that does not remain
within the boundaries of Wilson's unambiguous “erudite discourse” and instead strays
over into “fantastic fiction,” like Nabokov's commentary to Eugene Onegin. Kinbote
similarly declares his commitment to a number of different conventions, including
composing a paean to the “great poet” Shade in the very introduction. There is an inkling
that Shade is a recovering alcoholic and that others “[take] Shade for granted”; his
appearance is decidedly unattractive: Kinbote says Shade has a “misshapen body,” “gray
mop of abundant hair,” “yellow nails,” “pudgy fingers” (27, 26). In this light, Kinbote's
attempt to romanticize Shade's literary greatness sounds all the more ridiculous and
exaggerated: he “[drenches] every nerve. . .in the romance of [Shade's] presence,” as he
watches Shade “perceiving and transforming the world. . .so as to produce at some
unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse” (27).
60
This praise is inseparable from Kinbote's insistence on praising other authors from
the Anglo-American canon, aimed at establishing himself as a qualified critic, but more
importantly, as a qualified foreign critic: that he is a Zemblan versed in the metropolitan
canon is meant to endow him with the aura of intellectual elitism, in a similar way that
Nabokov the Russian portrays himself as a member of the enlightened, educated elite that
Westerners can count on. Kinbote assigns primacy to the knowledge of Anglo-American
literature when he insists on mentioning how he translated Shade's poetry into Zemblan,
how his uncle Conmal translated many of the canonical English writers into English,
including Shakespeare, Milton and Kipling and how Kinbote himself, despite being a
Zemblan monarch, became so knowledgeable about literature that he taught, albeit in
heavy disguise, “Finnigan's Wake” and “Southey's Lingo-Grande” at a Zemblan
university (285, 76).
The translation—as well as the teaching—is unidirectional as no Zemblan works
seem to be worthy enough to infiltrate American academia: the power differential is
highlighted, among other things, by the very fact that none of Kinbote's references to
Zembla make their way into Shade's poem and even if they did, it would signal that the
only possibility for the “other” to be recuperated is through the text of the “self.”
Kinbote's exaggerated insistence on name-dropping from the English canon exposes
Zembla's internalized position of political and cultural inferiority, from which it can
seemingly be emancipated only if it proves that it is “civilized,” that it benefits from the
cultural traditions of the metropolis. The overwhelming power of the colonial inscription
of metropolitan culture is illustrated—and satirized—by Kinbote's enumeration of street
names around Zembla's royal palace. Even they are “colonized” by a fascination with
61
Shakespeare: Kinbote's underground passage leads “under the three transverse streets,
Academy Boulevard, Coriolanus Lane and Timon Alley” (126).
Kinbote further mimicks acceptable academic discourse and flaunts his erudition
by highlighting and attempting to decipher literary references to other canonical authors
in Shade's poem: Hardy, Goethe, Pope, Browning, Tennyson, etc. He even attempts to
insert himself into the canon by recasting his strolls and conversations with John Shade as
an incarnation of the famous exchanges between James Boswell and Dr. Samuel Johnson,
imitating the aphoristic, dialogic form of Life of Dr. Johnson: “Talking of the vulgarity of
a certain burly acquaintance of ours: 'The man is as corny as a cook-out chef apron.'
Kinbote (laughing): 'Wonderful!'” (155). Of course, this also self-reflexively looks
forward to future critics of Nabokov, who will, observing academic conventions, attempt
to similarly trace and decipher references to Boswell, Johnson and others in Nabokov's
own text. Although Kinbote's commentary ultimately “fails” on its mission to discuss all
the literary references—ostensibly because all he has on himself at the time of writing a
commentary is a Zemblan translation of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens—its stated
commitment points to the validity of the claim by a number of Pale Fire critics that
Zembla, indeed, can be read as a “semblance” of America. Zembla, like Nabokov's
idealized Russia, will only be emancipated into “civilization” as a semblance of the
metropolis, in a similar way that Kinbote's commentary must, by and large, resemble the
“great critical tradition.”
A semblance, but not quite the sameness: in this sense, Kinbote's narrative is in a
double bind as it attempts to, on the one hand, reproduce the discourse of academia and
on the other, reproduce its own “otherness” that supplements the “semblance.” To expose
62
this “other” discourse that would domesticate Kinbote, Nabokov articulates the distant
Zembla as a veritable Orientalist paradise, designed to both titillate and scandalize
Kinbote's American audiences as they are imagined in the novel, but above all, to
overplay the exoticization of Kinbote the anti-Extremist—anti-communist—exile in the
American imaginary. Kinbote's commentary is thus interspersed with a fragmented
account of his childhood and youth in Zembla, until the moment of his royal escape,
representing a curious mix of an adventure tale, a fairy-tale and an erotic romance spiced
up with Orientalist imagery. Satirizing the primary racial stereotype of Zemblans,
Kinbote, still “hiding” his royal origin, states “All brown-bearded, apple-cheeked, blueeyed Zemblans look alike and I who have not shaved now for a year, resemble my
disguised king” (76). Kinbote's overidentification with the stereotype in a sense ridicules
it, as one knows it is impossible for all Zemblans to look alike: his appropriation of this
stereotype as “truth” in fact calls for its rejection from the outside, perhaps by the same
people likely to argue that all Zemblans are brown-bearded, etc. This strategy is
especially significant in light of Kinbote's nickname around Wordsmith College, the
“Great Beaver,” which itself echoes racial stereotypes of Russians, described as “Great
Bears” or as “bearded children” with an “excess” of feeling (Wolff 87).
That Zemblans too act like “bearded children” is reinforced by Kinbote's account of
pre-Extremist times, rife with playful, carefree and sometimes “excessive” erotic
encounters, confusions of gender and blurring of boundaries between homosexuality and
heterosexuality. King Charles (i.e., Kinbote) “never could decide what he enjoyed
more—the study of poetry—especially English poetry—or attending parades, or dancing
in masquerades with boy-girls and girl-boys” (104). In this context, future Queen Disa
63
first appears before the King in drag, “as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave
and lovely,” and Oleg, the “bedfellow” of his adolescent years, looks like both a girl and
a boy: “When stripped and shiny in the mist of the bath house, his bold virilia contrasted
harshly with his girlish grace” (173, 123). This fantasy of carefree sensuality laid bare, in
which both men and women are “excessively” eroticized, is of course characteristic of
Orientalist descriptions that typically entail an Asian locale. As if to play this up
deliberately, Kinbote's narrative positions the description of Oleg against an appropriately
Orientalized background: “On that particular afternoon a copious shower lacquered the
spring foliage of the palace garden and oh, how the Persian lilacs in riotous bloom
tumbled behind the green-streaming amethyst-blotched windowpanes!” (123–24).
The overwhelming use of Orientalist topoi especially permeates the episode where
King Charles/Kinbote seduces and later abandons seventeen-year-old Fleur, whose
graceful walk is described as that of “Arab girls” (108). In the course of two paragraphs,
Kinbote describes “the Persian rug-covered floor” in his royal chamber, where on a huge
down pillow slept the scantily-clad Fleur, “under a coverlet of genuine giant panda fur
that had just been rushed from Tibet by a group of Asiatic well-wishers” (110). Meantime
the King himself is dressed in “Turkish garb” (110). All these exotic (and erotic)
attributes of King Charles's court in fact fit perfectly in the stereotypical image of a
distant, decadent monarchy, whose forbidden pleasures are at once odious and intriguing
and as far removed from the American experience as the notion of monarchy itself.
Here Kinbote not only provides an insight—or, indeed, a “testimony” gone wild—
into the obscene pleasures of Zemblan nobility, but also tries to enhance the image of his
reign, to portray its interruption as a tragedy. His martyrdom is aptly established by first
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his virtual imprisonment in the castle and later by his long and involved escape from
Zembla through various “secret passages.” This portion of the story is likewise told in
sensational—and sensual—terms, resembling an adventure novel graced with incredible
occurrences and chance encounters. As the King makes his way through Zemblan farms,
he runs into a shepherdess Garh, who, predictably, looks like a boy; the King's image as a
sexy, desirable man is enhanced by Garh's immediate impulse to strip naked and try to
force herself on him (“Zemblan mountain girls are as a rule mere mechanisms of
haphazard lust and Garh was no exception”) (142). This pastoral sexual fantasy is
followed by the King's sojourn through an apparently magic forest, where he is seized
with “alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by elves),” and finally, by a Hollywood movietype escape from the Extremist police who are confused by encountering hundreds of
impostors dressed and looking exactly like the King (143–44). Pale Fire here plays to the
exotic, exaggerated tropes employed by the American film industry, which, perhaps more
than any other rhetorical gesture in Kinbote’s narrative, serves to highlight its fictional
quality. But for King Charles this serves to establish him as a loved king, a desired king,
a smart trickster who escapes the police of the revolutionary regime.
As Kinbote's narrative establishes him as a popular, colorful, enlightened—even
university-teaching—monarch, his subsequent exile to America and feeling of
displacement on the prosaic Wordsmith campus only enhances his image as a martyr who
deserves understanding and sympathy. Indeed, the fact that only the “chosen few,” like
John Shade for instance, seem to appreciate Kinbote further strengthens his position of
romantic(ized) alienation. Some of this affinity has to do with Kinbote's and Shade's
shared political beliefs, in which they represent the minority at the “pink” Wordsmith
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campus. In Kinbote's report, Shade's views closely resemble his own and this intellectual
endorsement by a renowned American poet invests Kinbote's own politics with some
credibility. Kinbote's hatred of leftist academics, especially those who believe in
“Progressive Education, the Integrity of anyone spying for Russia, Fall-outs occasioned
solely by US-made bombs, the existence in the near past of a McCarthy Era, Soviet
achievements including Dr. Zhivago” fits in nicely with Shade's critique of Marxism, to
which even Freudianism is preferable: “Marxism needs a dictator and a dictator needs a
secret police and that is the end of the world; but the Freudian, no matter how stupid, can
still cast his vote at the poll, even if he is pleased to call it [smiling] political pollination”
(266, 156).
It would be difficult to ignore the striking resemblance between these KinbotianShadean statements and Nabokov's political views. Douglas Fowler points out,
“Kinbote's Pink list is. . .not really the list of a royalist. . .it is drawn up from the point of
view of an American conservative and anticommunist”; in other words, Nabokov's
American concerns manage to overshadow Kinbote's Zemblan concerns (115). In light of
this overlap, the commentary is fraught with a discursive tension between, on the one
hand, the narrative's critical “awareness” of the Orientalist conventions that allow for, as
well as contain the testimony of, an anti-communist exile and on the other, the narrative's
uncritical internalization of these conventions (which renders them invisible, so to speak)
and assumption of communist victimization as a position of enunciation. For example,
when Kinbote tries to “prove” to his American audiences that pre-Extremist, monarchist
Zembla was a great country, his views markedly echo Nabokovian paeans to preRevolutionary Russia, even in the discussion of communism as a virus that infects
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healthy bodies: “until corruption, betrayal and Extremism penetrated it, the People's
Place (parliament) worked in perfect harmony with the Royal Council . . . . The polite
arts and pure sciences flourished . . . . The poor were getting a little richer and the rich a
little poorer . . . . Medical care was spreading to the confines of the state” (75; emphasis
mine). But then Kinbote's praise becomes a bit too enthusiastic and exaggerated and
Zembla—Russia—becomes almost too ideal and harmonious: in this liberal monarchy,
even the “climate seemed to be improving. Taxation had become a thing of beauty. . . .
Parachuting had become a popular sport. Everybody, in a word, was content” (75).
Nabokov may very well be poking fun at Kinbote the “White Zemblan,” whom one
would expect to glorify the monarchy while remaining oblivious to its flaws. However, I
suggest that Nabokov's narrative here also meta-textually satirizes Nabokov's own
frequent laments over the forever lost, idealized liberal-democratic-monarchist Russia,
which were meant to illustrate to his audiences both the extent of his personal tragedy
and the tragedy of the communist takeover. After all, Kinbote's narrative may commodify
him as decadent, self-indulgent Eastern royalty, but many of his political views are too
“progressive,” i.e., Nabokovian for a stereotypically authoritarian image of a king. Like
Nabokov, member of the Russian intellectual elite, Kinbote presents himself as an
educated, enlightened and liberal king, whose court is appalled by the violent takeover of
“a Russia that hated tyrants and Philistines, injustice and cruelty, the Russia of ladies and
gentlemen and liberal aspirations” (245). Kinbote therefore seems to solicit sympathy and
understanding primarily from American liberal democrats and tries to disabuse Soviet
(“Extremist”) admirers in America of their illusions. Predictably, then, his narrative
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discusses Zemblan Extremists in the context of the Russian Revolution, continually
pointing out their similarities, points of cooperation, common goals.
Charles Kinbote’s Monstrous (Self) Re-presentations
In the previous section of this chapter, I have argued that Kinbote's extreme selfexoticization satirizes the terms of the Orientalist discourse to which he is subjected. In
this section, I am interested in the serious, i.e., non-satirical, narrative employment of
vitriolic—and by all means, Nabokovian—Orientalisms to give an account of Extremists
and, by extension, to force an anti-communist critique. Kinbote presents the Extremists
metonymically, through frequent disparaging portrayals of Gradus, a Zemblan
revolutionary obsessed with locating King Charles' hideaway and executing him. Kinbote
recounts Gradus's progress through Western European countries and onwards to America,
where he comically bungles almost every attempt at gaining information about the King's
whereabouts. Speaking of this murderer who crosses the Atlantic to fulfill his mission,
Michael Wood makes an intriguing observation that Gradus is “in large part a portrait of
a Stalinist and it is no accident. . .that the assassination of Trotsky hovers over the plotline of Pale Fire” (202). But the fact that Gradus does not even manage to kill his
“Trotsky” in the end, bungling the very goal of his mission, adds to his overall portrait as
a pathetic, provincial and dim-witted character. In short, this is what an Extremist looks
like—to Kinbote and Nabokov—whether this code word implies a communist of a
Leninist, Stalinist, or Trotskyite orientation.
There is a suggestion that Gradus's very penetration of the border between Zembla
and the “free world” is somehow obscene and his travel through the “civilized” countries
doomed to continual betrayals. Kinbote notes that Zemblan Extremists share with Soviet
Russian's “gloom,” which is “the outward sign of congested nationalism and a
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provincial's sense of inferiority” (243). Gradus's progress through Europe in search of the
King is haunted by this alleged “provincial's sense of inferiority,” and he cannot carry out
any of his plans successfully simply because he is too uncouth, too uncultured and doesn't
understand the fine customs of civilized countries. Gradus is, for instance, ridiculed when
he tries to pass for an agent of an art dealer in Switzerland, as he is culturally
conservative and knows nothing about art. As we are informed later, Gradus is a
voracious reader of “newspaper, pamphlets, chance leaflets” but this sums up his
intellectual curiosity (232). He does not even know how to savor the cultural or
entertainment choices offered to him in Europe; he is not interested in “sightseeing or
seasiding,” drinking, going to concerts, gambling, or even sex: “Sexual impulses had
greatly bothered him at one time but that was over” (253). Here is the stereotypical
conservative, Puritanical, anti-intellectual communist that haunts other texts by
Nabokov's discussed earlier in this chapter. As for Kinbote, this disparaging portrait of
Extremists helps him present the overthrown regime as one that is educated in the ways
of the world, open to cultural influences and at least capable of enjoying oneself—
sexually or otherwise. Kinbote's sensuousness stands in stark contrast to Gradus's Spartan
abstinence, his perfect knowledge of English (denoting a member of the Westernized
elite) in contrast to Extremists conspirators' “broken English” (215).
The description of Gradus's moral, emotional and intellectual condition is
inseparable, however, from the condescendingly classist contempt toward the “lowerclass” people, as they are called in the novel. There is much emphasis on Gradus's
physical appearance, which is predictably Neanderthal, almost simian: Gradus has “thick
eyebrows and a wart on the chin,” “melancholy nose with a crooked ridge,” a
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“chimpanzee slouch,” and “repulsive black hairs coat the back of his honest rude hands,
the scrupulously clean hands of an ultra-unionized artisan” (277–78). The description is
accompanied by another communist, as well as lower-class, stereotype, that Gradus has
no fashion sense: he wears a “creased suit,” with an “imitation silk” tie, in the “Zemblan
fashion of the nineteen thirties” (278). This sets the stage for the description of Gradus
and Extremists as “automatons,” as spiritually non-existent and moral “dummies”
pursuing other dummies. In fact, the Extremists are nothing else but imitators of Soviets,
who turn ideas into “machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed,
the interval walled up” (243). In this respect, there is a sense that Gradus's progress
through the liberal Europe and the United States can only infest them with something
criminal, fanatical and intellectually simplistic: Extremism, like communism, is a
dangerous disease. Kinbote's commentary in fact abounds in the common Orientalist
criminalization of communism: Gradus, that “half-man” who plans to kill another human
being without remorse is a “thug,” a “hoodlum,” and so are the Soviet agents, who, in
cooperation with Zemblan authorities, obsess over locating the disappeared crown jewels
(279, 149).
By portraying the uneducated, brutal Extremists as “half-men” and himself—and
the disempowered elite—as exotic and foreign, yet intellectually, politically and morally
“normal” by comparison, Kinbote apparently tries to win America to his side. But while
he ostensibly plays the part of the good foreigner who can remain within the limits of
digestible “otherness,” his commentary to Shade's poem keeps crossing these limits. It
disturbs the balance of “erudite” scholarship to include much more “fantastic” fiction
than acceptable, it pushes Kinbote's self-Orientalization beyond the exotic or even
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scandalous to the bizarre and it makes it difficult for his Americans hosts to identify with
him, with his “excessive” homosexual escapades on Wordsmith campus, his scathing
criticisms, belligerence, aggressiveness, etc. Nabokov's Pnin is ridiculed for his quirky
personal habits, his thick Russian accent and his lack of a sense of humor and although in
the end he manages to leave his old campus, he is disempowered and marginalized by his
academic supernumeraries throughout the novel. Kinbote, in contrast, actively
appropriates the critical discourse of American academia only to wreak havoc upon it and
only after he has also appropriated Shade's manuscript; his commentary turns not so
much against himself as it does against the terms and the violence of the hegemonic
discourses which he, the immigrant, is supposed to accept. The personal habits and
characteristics so repulsive to the Americans who surround him should also be read in
this context, as mechanisms of anti-identification, anti-sympathy which expose the limits
of the “tolerance” for “the other,” even as the commentary, on the surface, coaxes one
into exhibiting “tolerance.” In this act emerges what Wolfreys terms the “rhetoric of
affirmative resistance,” implying the irreducibility of difference to its darstellung, or the
presentation of “otherness” which neglects real “others” entering the multicultural
landscape, outside of the “lines laid down by the official institutional structures of
representation” (Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak” 306).
Kinbote no sooner declares that he is against turning his “apparatus criticus” into a
“monstrous semblance of a novel,” than he betrays it by reflecting on himself as an
omniscient narrator of a novel rather than as a literary critic (86). Trying to get a glimpse
of Shade's daily activities from his house, Kinbote says, “Windows, as well known, have
been the solace of first-person literature throughout the ages. But this observer never
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could emulate in sheer luck the eavesdropping Hero of Our Time or the omnipresent one
of Time Lost” (87). A parallel gesture takes place when he critiques one of Shade's
obituaries and then immediately checks himself— “A Commentary where placid
scholarship should reign is not the place for blasting the preposterous defects of that little
obituary”—only to, of course, proceed to blast the wretched piece and its author (100). A
continual betrayal of what “apparatus criticus” should represent in fact comprises most
of Kinbote's commentary, where virtually every line from Shade's poem is considered in
(and overshadowed by) the context of Kinbote's account of Zembla.
This act has a twofold effect on the narrative. First, it self-reflexively breaks the
illusion of darstellung, that one’s self-representation is the unveiling of “truth” about
one’s “identity,” as I have argued earlier Nabokov “himself” sets out to do by unveiling
his “life” before his American audiences. Indeed, it highlights the fictional quality of
one’s personal history, showing that it always-already reaches us as a story, as a narrative
where one act as an omniscient narrator of one’s “life.” Second, by purporting to blend
fiction and criticism, it collapses the binary between literary criticism as an “objective”
and “truthful” discourse and literature as “fiction” on which this criticism can comment
as if “from the outside.” This is especially significant in light of Suzanne Clark’s
observation that American literary critics shared with Cold-War policy makers the
discourse of “national realism,” underpinned by truthfulness and transparency. Clark
notes that “critics who wrote about literature favored the antiheroic,” ostensibly to oppose
the heroic quality of popular mass culture revolving around hypermasculine Cold-War,
all-American heroes; in this way, they “denied . . . the need of a culture for fables. That
is, they opposed any writing/reading of literature as rhetoric or as moral or ideological
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allegory” (9). However, Clark continues, this disassociation from the “hypermasculine
heroics” occluded the gendering of literary criticism itself—as well as the “realist”
political policy—as masculine, albeit in a “hypermasculine antiheroic” version.
In fact, the “truthful,” “rational” and “reasonable” discourse of literary criticism
was gendered as masculine, interpreting and imposing shape on the “feminine” overflow
of emotion and creative sensibilities in “fictional” narratives. “The literary body was
womanly,” Clark argues and “emotional flow was contained by the formal properties of
the aesthetic whole,” which gendered not only literary criticism but literary authorship in
general as male— “a female author would loosen the boundaries of the object” (32).
Kinbote’s collapsing of this firm binary between criticism and literature, truthfulness and
fictionality, masculine containment and feminine overflow, delivers a blow to the claim
to transparency by American metropolitan critics and Cold-War politicians alike. His
“effeminate” overflow of personal or irrelevant references in the criticism of Shade’s
poetry and the “failure” to control it and impose a definite shape, also exposes the
permanent threat of slippage, of return of the repressed, in the established paradigm of
literary criticism.
Because of such a gendered paradigm it is significant that Kinbote’s “fantastic”
fiction not only overtakes the “truthful” and “controlled” critical reading of Shade's
poem, but also that Kinbote’s sexual orientation and thus masculinity, is not properly
heterosexual—or even clearly homosexual. His image of Zembla is pleasantly romantic
and exotic, yet controversially sensuous and eroticized. Even this image intermittently
transcends the register of Orientalist fantasies and becomes, simply, too strange, too far
removed from any “familiar” foreign fetish. For instance, one wonders whether the
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King's mistress Fleur is not, really, an animal rather than a woman: Kinbote describes her
as an Orientalist object of desire, but his characterization assumes an increasingly
unfamiliar air, becoming almost absurd. For instance, Fleur has “four bare limbs and
three mousepits (Zemblan anatomy),” whatever these “mousepits” may be (110). When
she walks, Fleur is said to swing on “slim haunches,” and for the predominantly
homosexual Kinbote, she is “pretty yet not repellent (as some cats are less repugnant than
others to the good-natured dog told to endure the bitter effluvium of an alien genus)”
(112). Her animal (decidedly not “animalistic” which could be eroticized) appearance is
further established when Kinbote describes having to reject her sexual advances: “he had
to push away her burrowing dark curly head with one hand while writing with the other
or detach one by one her little pink claws from his sleeve or sash” (111). Kinbote's
narrative thus undermines the anticipation of a familiar foreign referent for his American
readers, as it is not quite clear what exotic stereotype—or even taboo—this description is
supposed to imply.
Along similar lines lie some of Kinbote's decidedly unpleasant characteristics and
habits, which make it difficult even for anti-Soviet Americans, whose sympathy
Kinbote's narrative seemingly solicits, to sympathize with his “tragedy,” or to welcome
him as an exile. Kinbote will not be kind to his American hosts, even when they, like
judge Goldsworth, literally provide him with a house to live in: indeed, Kinbote bluntly
attacks Goldsworth's narcissism, cruelty and self-righteousness when he finds the
“morocco-bound album in which the judge had lovingly pasted all the life histories and
pictures of people he had sent to prison or condemned to death” (83). Just as Kinbote
won't play by the rules of academic discourse, he won't comply with Goldsworth's
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obsessive “recommendations, explanations, injunctions and supplementary lists” telling
him how to take care of the house “properly.” Kinbote the foreigner “unhomes”
Goldsworth's house, in which he replaces family portraits with his own Picasso
reproductions and neglects the family cat, as much as he “unhomes” the Wordsmith
campus, where his controversial homosexuality raises many eyebrows and earns a rebuke
from the university officials (24).
Kinbote's Orientalist-homosexual fantasies may not be threatening as long as they
concern his experience of Zembla, but become alarming when they are brought “home,”
and when his appropriation of the academic critical discourse threatens—and exposes—
its implicit masculine gendering. At the same time, therefore, that Kinbote's sensuality
distances him from Puritanical Extremists, it also distances him from mainstream
Americans. In this respect, there is something unacceptably threatening about Kinbote's
attempt to Orientalize his young American gardener: “How I longed to have him. . .wear
a great big turban and shalwars and an ankle bracelet. I would certainly have him attired
according to the old romanticist notion of a Moorish prince” (292). Americans, especially
American men, will not be feminized, turned into objects of Orientalist desire. That
Kinbote’s narrative in fact does this is significant in light of, as Suzanne Clark has
shown, an implicit promotion of an ethics of unflinching hypermasculinity in American
men as a tool for confronting the threat of communism. Rather than being a model anticommunist/anti-Extremist exile, Kinbote thus comes across as a manipulative, deranged,
aggressive, sexually deviant “woman hater with a German accent” (25).
In Pale Fire Nabokov employs the trope of Cold War testimony from anticommunist dissident emigrants in the United States about the various Eastern European
75
communist “others,” in order to radically question the conditions under which this
testimony can take place and function politically. While Nabokov's own employment of
Orientalist discourses against communist regimes still, symptomatically, surfaces
throughout Pale Fire, his deconstruction of this very gesture, immersed as it is in the
classist divisions between the “intellectual elites” and “lower-class thugs,” and
inferiority-complex divisions between the “enlightened Westernizers” and “provincial
Russian nationalists,” deserves serious critical attention. Simultaneously, Nabokov's
Kinbote provides the testimony that undermines itself as it both excessively mimicks the
colonial discourse, to the point of rendering it absurd and meaningless and offers
“deranged” insights that the colonial discourse simply can't absorb. In this way,
Nabokov's mock dissident narrative in Pale Fire escapes the conditions of interpellation,
fails to respond to the call of the metropolitan police.
CHAPTER 3
SHIFTING TOPOGRAPHIES OF EASTERN/CENTRAL/EUROPE IN JOSEPH
BRODSKY’S AND CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ’S PROSE WRITING
Typographies and Topographies: Writing Brodsky and Miłosz
In Chapter 3, I will discuss the trajectories of Eastern European Orientalisms in
selected essays by Joseph Brodsky (from Less than One and On Grief and Reason) and
Czesław Miłosz (from To Begin Where I Am, The Native Realm: A Search for SelfDefinition and Visions from San Francisco Bay). Specifically, I highlight the problematic
of treating the essayistic writing by Miłosz and Brodsky, which has largely helped them
achieve and maintain public visibility in exile, as mimetic, objective representations of
the lands behind the Iron Curtain. Critical scholarship has largely focused on these
authors' poetic output—where the “real,” unrestrained artistic innovation worthy of
literary critical attention allegedly surfaces—somewhat neglecting, in turn, the vast and
diverse body of their essays, lectures and open letters, which have nevertheless served as
an important context for interpreting (and prompting interest in) their poetry. 1
I would like to suggest that such neglect is caused by a traditional categorization of
this type of writing as itself critical and philosophical—rather than poetic or fictional—
and that the fictional quality of Miłosz’s and Brodsky’s prose is further obfuscated by its
autobiographic dimension that claims it, however precariously, for “truth.” As in Chapter
2, we again have to grapple with the problematic binary between “literature,” on the one
1
For both authors, the appreciation of their prose writing in the West came before and/or tended to
overshadow the appreciation of their poetry. See Bozena Karwowska’s “Czeslaw Milosz’s SelfPresentation in English-Speaking Countries,” and Valentina Polukhina’s and Chris Jones’ “The Prose of
Joseph Brodsky: A Continuation of Poetry by Other Means.”
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hand and “philosophy” or “autobiography,” on the other, between the discourse of
“fiction” and the discourse of “truth.”
I set out to challenge such entrenched binary distinctions by critically dissecting the
textuality of Brodsky’s and Miłosz’s “lived experience.” As shown in Chapter 2, Charles
Kinbote’s self-representation through internalizing the mechanisms and discourses used
to represent the “other” only highlights the analogical discursive limits and prison walls
in Nabokov’s “own” auto-biographical representation, wherein Nabokov “himself” is
effectively textualized in the broad sense of the word, the tragedy of his exile understood
and invoking sympathy only through the unproblematic, Orientalist discourses employed
throughout the Cold War period. Brodsky’s and Miłosz’s dissidence is similarly
narratively constructed—their “lived experience” always-already reaches us in narrative
form. Their autobiographical writing, therefore, will be treated as the “writing” of
Brodsky and Miłosz, without assigning primacy, chronological or otherwise, to “life
under communism” which is to be observed from a distance and represented objectively
(mimetically, or even metaphorically). The unmasking of this autobiographical ruse
which, as I have explained in Chapter 2, relates to the ideologically inflected demand for
testimony from anti-communist exile authors about “life under communism,” is central to
this work and it will leave its traces across the remaining chapters, especially in my
discussion of Milan Kundera in Chapter 4.
This is not to argue that “lived experience” did not take place, or that it does not
matter where or how Miłosz or Brodsky grew up, but that, as in the case of Nabokov, its
narrative articulation is ideologically loaded and hardly occurs in a political and cultural
vacuum. This ideological dimension, the narrative non-transparency, arises at the
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intersection between the intended audience, since much of this prose was intended
primarily for Western consumption (or consumption by anti-communist, democraticminded reformists at home),2 the implicit authority accorded the philosophical insights by
the power of “direct” engagement with communist politics and the authority of
victimization. In this respect, it becomes almost obscene to treat the
autobiographical/philosophical essays by Brodsky or Miłosz as anything other than
articulations of exilic “truth,” the unmasking of the evils of Soviet/communist politics, or,
following the authors’ own pleas to be treated apolitically, theorizations of exile as a
metaphysical, ubiquitous creative category.3
Exemplary in this case is David Bethea’s study of Joseph Brodsky, which argues
that Barthes’, Foucault’s and other theories about the “death of the author” do not apply
in the case of Eastern European writers victimized by communism. Bethea proceeds to
resurrect the “real” author and his/her biography behind the writing and insists on reading
Brodsky’s essays as exilic/dissident renderings of a particular biographical context.4
Despite such a nuanced definition, this approach nevertheless falls into the trap of
assigning primacy to “biography,” which, because it is so primarily “tragic,” inspires a
2
Brodsky wrote his poetry in Russian, but his essays in English (many were originally lectures delivered at
American universities, or editorials published in American magazines or journals), “explaining” Russia to
English-speaking audiences. Milosz notes that his fantastically popular The Captive Mind, which launched
him into the dissident spotlight, was “only a pragmatic of even pedagogical undertaking” intended for
Western intellectuals (Madeline Levine 113). Interest in Milosz’s poetry grew significantly only after he
was awarded the Nobel Prize; until then, his American audiences knew him primarily for his essays and his
English translations of Polish poetry. The Captive Mind was subsequently translated for Polish audiences
and circulated in samizdat channels.
3
On the “metaphysics” of exile, see especially Brodsky’s “The Condition We Call Exile.” Milosz resists
being cast as a political writer because of his exile and says, “The Captive Mind imprisoned me . . . in a
special category . . . .I wanted to be myself and not a political scientist or a sociologist” (“Intellectuals and
Writers since the Thirties” 537). This chapter argues, though, that their attempts at self-depoliticization, are
frequently disingenuous.
4
See Bethea’s Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile, esp. “A Polemical Introduction.”
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critical blindness in Bethea to the ideological discourses in which Brodsky’s
autobiographical narrativization participates. Thus, “East” and “West” are treated as
unproblematic categories (since Brodsky is a victim of “Eastern” authoritarianism and a
subscriber to a cosmopolitan, i.e., “Western” identity), Brodsky’s praise of Western
literary traditions is seen as a tool of resistance to Eastern cultural “Stone Age,” and
much attention is devoted to Brodsky’s identification of “essential” differences between
the “anglophone and russophone traditions” (211, 40, 227).
Bethea’s critical approach highlights the crucial problem Chapter 3 will tackle: a
reluctance to analyze the ideological coordinates of Brodsky’s and Miłosz’s Orientalisms,
manifested in their essays as imagined European topographies and classifications, due to
the respect given their implicit authority of direct engagement with communism. The
authors’ narration of the “self” is often inseparable from the narration of European (and
global) geography and from the delineation of Easterness and Westerness, which colors
their discussions of relevant histories. Bethea’s reading leads to what Gearóid Ó Tuathail
describes as a depoliticization of the geographic discourse, where geography is seen as a
“permanent, self-evident realm of necessity . . . independent of our beliefs and attitudes
about it,” in other words, as part of “Nature” (51). Brodsky’s and Miłosz’s obsessive
mapping and geo-graphing of Eastern/Central/Europe does not occur in a cultural and
political vacuum, as a mimetic rendering of natural distinctions, but rather participates in
Orientalist traditions which construct Byzantium or the Ottoman Empire as more
“Eastern” than Russia, Russia as more “Eastern” than Poland, or Poland as more
“Eastern” than France. These shifting, unstable boundaries themselves highlight the
constructed, perspectival nature of such delineations, dependent on the imagined
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geographic position (and national affiliation) of the author who bestows meaning:
Brodsky in Russia and Miłosz in Poland/Lithuania. In this respect, Bakić-Hayden’s
intriguing insights about the “the gradation of ‘Orients,’” the “nesting Orientalisms” and
shifting hierarchies of Easternness and Westerness in the constructions of Balkan
identities, can be extended to the construction of European hierarchies in Brodsky and
Miłosz (918).
The narration of “self” and classification of European geography is connected in
these essays in another way: Miłosz’s and Brodsky’s employment of Orientalist
stereotypes belies their anxiety to distance themselves from communist politics and to
simultaneously emancipate their remembered homelands from stereotypes of cultural
backwardness. The authors’ authoritative autobiographic positions can be said to follow
in the logic of “onto-typo-logy,” a concept coined by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in
Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics. Broadly speaking, “onto-typo-logy”
expresses a tendency to think the problem of (human) being as an idea, by invoking
transcendental “figures” of being; this tendency is the “proper site for the unfolding of the
most modern metaphysics” whose beginnings are already visible in Plato (54). Although
Brodsky’s and Miłosz’s plight is “different” from anything experienced in the “Western”
world—to which this “difference” must offer its testimony—their writing and frequently
their critical reception nevertheless aspire toward presenting them as what LacoueLabarthe calls a “type,” a transcendental “form, figure, imprint, type of a humanity,”
which can presumably speak for that seemingly universal humanity by establishing itself
as its transcendental subject (52). This sublation into “universal humanity” allows
Brodsky and Miłosz to rise above marginalized, provincial Eastern European
81
significance—and the stigma of being Eastern European—by presenting themselves and
their insights as “universal,” typically meaning “Western.”5
As such transcendental figures, they impart insights that both Easterners and
Westerners can presumably identify with, affirming their common human lot: Easterners
can potentially recognize the tropes employed to describe (re-present) communist
countries, whereas Westerners receive a warning about what communism might do to
their own lives and societies (while observing and judging from a safe distance the
supposedly common human experiences). This establishment of the author—the
humanist subject—as a transcendental figure to whom “belongs the role of giving
meaning,” of the “bestowal of meaning,” to the world in fact allows for the world to be
mapped, geo-graphed and divided into understandable parts through a perspectival,
Cartesian vision (Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography 55).6 In addition to appropriating a
traditionally Western prerogative of cognitively mapping the world, Miłosz and Brodsky
also evade charges of Eastern European backwardness by fashioning themselves as
authors who are more or less autonomous, original, logical, centered—above all, as
individuals emancipating themselves by being able to recognize and narrate their plight to
a sympathetic audience. In this process they gain credence as “Western” subjects, leaving
5
For instance, Milosz has been famously called a “witness” of history and even presented himself as a
prophetic bearer of “secret knowledge,” of “hidden truths”; Brodsky never quite managed to shake off the
designation — indeed, the figure — of a “persecuted poet.” Arguing that this image has somehow become
the final image of Brodsky, Richard Kostelanetz cites as an example Brodsky’s obituary in The New York
Times which begins, “Joseph Brodsky, the Persecuted Russian Poet” (240). Milosz vehemently protests
against the New York Review of Books’ “reduction of his long and complex career to a single term”:
“Witness” (Clare Cavanagh 351). According to Bozena Karwowska, though, Milosz actively works on this
self-presentation, marketing himself as a “seer” of “hidden knowledge,” almost a prophet-like figure (286–
87).
6
Lacoue-Labarthe suggests and explores a connection between “the representation of Being as figure (the
metaphysics of Gestalt) and Darstellung, (re)presentation — or, if you will, exposition or ‘literary
presentation’” (59).
82
their misguided (and silent) “Eastern” brethren behind and effectively perpetuate the
conditions for discrimination, conditions that make the Orientalist discourses under
discussion possible.
In Brodsky, the Soviet regime is repeatedly feminized, seen as a logical
continuation of czarist tyranny and as a parallel to the Ottoman Empire (itself a harmful,
“Asiatic” influence on the more “Western” Russia, which, among other things,
“Orientalized” the Russian brand of Christianity). On the other hand, Brodsky, no
apologist of the czarist regime, responds to the Western Orientalizations of Russia by
reaching into its past: “real” Russia used to be, after all, a civilized, Christian country
with some tradition of democracy, despite its temporary lapse into godless communism.
Miłosz similarly Orientalizes Russia in order to recuperate the markedly more “Western”
Poland as a “civilized” country. A feminized Russia—which needs a “Polish husband” to
be strong—is locked into familiar stereotypes of historical immutability or a historical
and cultural void, of an ontological distinction from a more democratic, more enlightened
Poland. Russians' pretensions toward spreading communism in the West (for Miłosz
beginning in Prague) are portrayed as unnatural and obscene, since Russians cannot
understand the Western civilization.
At the same time, there are moments in Miłosz and, less so, in Brodsky, where they
move towards the possibility of deconstructing this discourse of Orientalism, especially
when this critical space is, paradoxically, opened up by the very communist ideology that
they denounce. Brodsky, for instance, credits the communists for exposing Russia's
internalized Orientalism and obsession with mimicking Western patterns; he also takes
them to task for betraying their own utopian promise to create a society that will
83
completely break with Western capitalist practices. For Miłosz, embracing communist
politics is a way to highlight and criticize what he sees as Western political conservatism,
classism and consumerism, as well as to expose racist attitudes towards the Polish as a
result of an imperialist ideology that calls into being exploited international labor. This
potential for recognizing the Orientalist discourse through the very language of Marxist
theory and/or the communist legacy and for deconstructing the imagined topography of
Europe, is of particular interest in Chapter 3 and the section on Miłosz will turn to it in
more detail.
(De)Centering Europe
In the meantime, a few words on the discursive traditions of mapping
Eastern/Central/ Western Europe in order to “center” Miłosz’s and Brodsky’s own
positions on the subject. The terms Eastern and Western are typical accoutrements of
Orientalist narratives, while Central may deserve some more explication, suspended as it
is between the two. While the name “Central Europe” historically evokes “Mitteleuropa,”
in the mid-nineteenth century denoting a German ideal of a broad economic union in
Europe with Germany in the center and at the outset of the twentieth century implying the
German expansionist project of moving its sphere of influence eastward to include many
of the lands of the Habsburg Empire,7 for our purposes the concept of Central Europe as
used during the Iron-Curtain communism and Schengen-curtain post-communism is of
primary interest. In the 1960s and 70s and especially in the 1980s, the term Central
Europe is used by writers and intellectuals across the Eastern Bloc countries (sometimes
7
See Tony Judt’s “The Rediscovery of Central Europe,” Jacques Rupnik’s “Central Europe or
Mitteleuropa?” and Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans for a historical discussion of this concept,
especially its dependence on German unification and its articulation as a defense mechanism against the
German threat of Drang Nach Osten.
84
in Yugoslavia too) to denote an oppositional culture and to create a political and cultural
distance from “Eastern Europe,” almost invariably meaning the Soviet Union. After the
Eastern Bloc crumbles, this term becomes somewhat obsolete, but is in turn rearticulated
as a “proof” of democratic, free market “maturity” in the meritocratic system of European
integration: the “mature” Central Europeans define themselves in opposition to the still
“Eastern” Soviet Union and with the civil wars in Yugoslavia, in opposition to the
“Oriental” Balkans.
Although the boundaries of Central Europe shift throughout centuries and across
texts, the question of where these borders truly “are” becomes an impossible question.
Along the same lines, although Central Europe almost always includes Poland, Czech and
Slovak Republics and Hungary, the project of researching and defining their shared
cultural characteristics—which could explain why they represent the “kernel” of Central
Europe—becomes ultimately irrelevant. As Csaba Dupcsik says, “the essence of this
question is not in the ‘underlying structural factors,’ or in the ‘participating of the most
important European cultural tendencies (the Renaissance, Reformation, or the
Enlightenment)’ etc. The essence is the border-drawing activities: how these borders had
been made, drawn, defined, had been accepted or questioned” (31). Nevertheless, a
meticulous enumeration of these “underlying structural factors,” meant to invest the term
Central Europe with the respectable aura of “reality,” to mask the discursive nature of
cultural reification and hierarchization, was precisely the path adopted by many “Central
European” intellectuals. As we will see in more detail in Chapter 4, Milan Kundera was
one of the celebrity subscribers to this idea and is in fact credited with the “oppositional”
articulation of Central Europe in the Cold War period. In “Tragedy of Central Europe”
85
and other texts, Milan Kundera establishes Central Europe as a zone of small nations
historically victimized by their powerful neighbors (Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary)
and insists on their cultural proximity to (Western) Europe and their distinct contributions
to the Enlightenment, the development of the concepts of democracy, human rights and
respect for the individual.
In the years leading up to the downfall of the communist regimes, this selfdifferentiation gains currency, as Susan Sontag notes, primarily as an advertising concept
“for the West, for consumption by Western intellectuals” (“The Lisbon Conference”
119). Central Europe battles its assumed invisibility on the European map—and its
assumed ontologization as a Soviet realm, without political or cultural specificity—by
contrasting its tradition of democracy to Soviet “totalitarianism,” its political modesty
and insignificance to Soviet (and German) imperialist pretensions, its cultural and
novelistic spirit of irony, absurdity and experimentation to communist soc-realist art. In
fact, this active campaign to join the European family—and the word “family” is quite
appropriate here as narratives of “Central Europeanness” abound in metaphors of “longlost relatives”8—confirms Csaba Dupcsik’s observation that the colonial framework in
what he terms “Broader Eastern Europe” differs from the ones in Africa or Asia in the
former’s greater contribution to self-colonization, as it was “more often traumatized by
the powers’ uninterestedness, rather than by their colonization” (37). To merit this
attention, numerous publications devoted to teasing out the Central European idea emerge
8
Both Kundera and Milosz employ such metaphors; this particular expression comes from a recent article
by Sean Hanley, Kazi Stastna and Andrew Stroehlein, “Central Europe Review: Re-Viewing Central
Europe.”
86
in Western academic circles and Eastern samizdat publishing houses;9 many conferences
delve into the concept, more famously the Lisbon Conference on Literature and the
Budapest Roundtable, bringing together “Central European” and “Russian” writers,
including Miłosz and Brodsky.
The very conceptual framework of the conferences makes a distinction between
“Central Europeans”—among whom it predictably counts Hungarian, Polish and Czech,
but also Albanian and Yugoslav authors—and Russians. Among the participants in the
conference, Miłosz himself is more inclusive in his conception of “Central Europe,”
welcoming Ukrainians, Estonians, Lithuanians and Serbo-Croats into the family,
although this is still a line of defense against Soviet Russia. It is to this attitude that
Joseph Brodsky and Tatiana Tolstaya, who also took part in the Lisbon Conference, react
by questioning the “reality” of Central Europe in favor of specific national cultures.10
While their own positions are reviled by other participants as Russian/Soviet
imperialist arrogance—notwithstanding the fact that Brodsky is Jewish and in exile from
the Soviet regime and that Tolstaya has never been kind to the regime—a more nuanced
reading of the discourse of “Central Europeanness” reveals that Brodsky and Tolstaya
react precisely to this ontologization of Central Europe’s cultural specificity and its
hierarchical (martyr) position with respect to Russia and question the blind spots of the
discourse which falsely celebrates cultural singularity and freedom from
“totalitarianism,” while understanding Brodsky and Tolstaya as “Russians” (who are
totalitarian, arrogant, imperialist). In this respect, Danilo Kis’s statement that “Central
9
See Todorova for a list of these (147); the more prominent publications include Cross-Currents: A
Yearbook of Central European Culture, East Central Europe, Daedalus, etc.
10
See the transcript of the conference in Cross Currents 9 (1990).
87
Europe” is not only an “anti-Soviet” but also an “anti-Russian” concept presents the
project of a “democratic” fight against Soviet imperialism and for a right to selfdetermination as one that depends on a racist distancing from Russia and on the existence
of an enemy for its articulation (“The Lisbon Conference” 122).
Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the enemy shifts (somewhat) from Soviet
Union to the Balkans in the post-communist period and that the cultural, oppositional
articulation of Central Europe becomes closely linked to its political and economic
relationship vis-à-vis Western Europe and the United States. The naming of Central
Europe, like its geography, remains unstable, although the enemy is still recognizable.
Thus, for instance, Bogdan Czaykowski opts for a more inclusive Eastern Europe, which
is recuperable from the evils of centralized economy and culturally distinct from its
shared oppressor, the Soviet Union. He notes that Eastern Europeans have been more
exposed to Western ideas than Soviets and since the 1970s, “permeated by the spirit of
consumerism and generally convinced of the superiority of the capitalist system.” He
concludes, “the transition to the market economy is less of a shock to the mentalities of
Eastern Europeans than” to Soviets (15). In many other texts, however, the “kernel”
countries of Central Europe are singled out for praise and contrasted to the other, more
backward areas of Eastern Europe. At the 1991 Budapest Roundtable, Gyorgy Konrad
discusses the developments in Central Europe and states that “in Poland, in Hungary, in
Slovenia and perhaps in Croatia too” we can “experience something close to the normal
Western-style democratic political campaign” (15–16). This inclusion of Slovenia and
“perhaps Croatia too” in Central Europe in fact underlay the cultural self-definitions
throughout the 1990s’ civil wars in Yugoslavia, drawing civilizational—indeed,
88
schizophrenic—fault lines in the country between “Central” or “Western Europe” on the
one hand and “Balkans” on the other.
As late as 1999, the discourse repeats itself, albeit with a difference: in the
introduction to the first issue of Central Europe Review: Re-Viewing Central Europe,
editors Sean Hanley et al. state that “people still speak of 'Central Europe'” because “they
sense that countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Estonia and Slovenia
are not properly like the West but are not properly in the post-Communist Wild East
either. They are caught between the problems of the post-modern West they are joining
and the post-Communist East they seem to be leaving.” One noticeable difference is that
Estonia is now fortunate enough to merit inclusion in the family, but the most important
difference is that the discourse is no longer only employed by the self-avowed Central
Europeans, but has also been adopted by so-called Westerners, leading to what Tony Judt
appropriately calls the “rediscovery of Central Europe.”11
Even academic writing is not free of this rediscovery, which occasionally reifies the
divisions between Central/ Eastern/Europe/the Balkans through a retroactive imposition
of these attributes, as if they were historically given geo-political entities. For instance, in
her overview of recent publications on the post-World-War-II cinema of East-Central
Europe, Roumiana Deltcheva notices “an implicit comparative scale based on the
distinction Central (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary) and East (Bulgaria, Romania,
Albania) Europe . . . as a result of which there emerges a positive-negative polarity
according to which ‘Central’ is positively valorized . . . while ‘East’ is negatively
11
See the aforementioned Judt article, “The Rediscovery of Central Europe.”
89
valorized,” its movies being but examples of the official soc-realist paradigm (“East
Central Europe as a Politically Correct Scapegoat: The Case of Bulgaria”).
In spite of my claim that Central Europe—along with other similar namings of
European regions—is primarily a project that relies on hierarchical cultural valorization,
cultural essentialism and racism, I would like to propose an alternative reading which
looks at the more radically oppositional, non-hierarchical and culturally fluid
characteristics of this concept and which may be related to a similarly radical political
move in Miłosz’s discussion of Central Europe and Brodsky’s discussion of Russia. At
the Lisbon Conference and at the Budapest Roundtable, the conceptualization of Central
Europe was primarily anti-Soviet/Russian and advertised its cultural and political
superiority. It looked to the West with a goal of overcoming its “uninterestedness.” As a
result, it either proved that it was as good as the West, or that it was “better” than the
West, engaging in the discourse of exceptionalism in order to compensate for its assumed
insignificance.
Miłosz, for instance, argues that “decades of pain and humiliation” importantly
differentiate Central from Western European countries and this experience differentiates
the Central from Western European novel (“Budapest Roundtable” 19). Claudio Magris
warns that, although Central Europe is trying to look more like the West, it also needs to
teach them what has “become rarer in the West,” a “human dimension, which was
developed through Central Europe’s tragedies and in resistance to them” (30).12 Of
course, this discourse casts Central Europeans as noble savages, imagined to have
12
As we will see in Chapter 3, the discourse of Central European exceptionalism also characterizes
Kundera’s writing. Also in Chapter 3, Grass offers images of the unspoiled East which provides what the
West is imagined to have “lost”: thus, East Germany becomes a repository of elusive soulfulness, a
redeeming influence on the “soulless” West Germany.
90
somehow preserved authentic, originary human dimensions and as such only reinforces
its existing marginalization and supplementary position in relation to the “West.”
On the other hand, these forums and a number of related texts propose a vision that
explodes the traditional rhetorical and geopolitical boundaries of Central Europe,
rendering them fluid and inclusive, less concerned with claiming cultural superiority
along the West-East axis and more with offering an alternative to the national and
cultural divisions of Europe, including the Cold War and the Schengen visa regime. This
is the “Europe” whose “identity,” at best, relies on similar historical experiences—and
similar histories of discursive marginalization—without resorting to cultural essentialism
and negative differentiation. It feels alienated from superpower ambitions of countries
such as Germany or Russia, it is opposed to both institutionalized communism and vulgar
capitalism and it celebrates intellectualism, irony and absurdity, but also multiethnicity,
the absence of clear national affiliation and the experience of a supra-national
community—including the memory of the nomadic Jewish culture, which has virtually
disappeared from “Central Europe.” In my discussion of Brodsky’s and Miłosz’s essays, I
will also look at instances of analogous open-endedness with respect to the definition of
“European,” “Russian,” or “Polish,” identities and geo-graphies, especially the spaces
carved—or that could have been carved—by the spirit of Marxism.
Joseph Brodsky, or, the Crescent meets the Sickle and the Hammer
I am not a historian, or a journalist, or an ethnographer. At best, I am a traveler, a
victim of geography.
—Joseph Brodsky, Less than One
In Brodsky’s essays, the history of Russia, essentialized as the tradition of despotic
rule over the (wild, ignorant, impulsive) masses, becomes expressed in geographical
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terms: as the fault of its proximity to Byzantium and later, to Ottoman Turkey (and
implicitly, Asia). If geography, as Ó Tuathail argues, is “naturalized—it simply “is”—
then the history of Russia in Brodsky becomes the narrative of inevitable causality, of
endless repetition of the same, in short, of immutability. Of course, historical
immutability as a quality of the East—in contrast to which only the West progresses,
from royal despotism into democracy and human rights—is one of the pillars of
Orientalist narratives that constructed Asia as ahistorical. Brodsky seems to place blame
primarily on this “Asiatic” corruption of Russia which, by virtue of being somewhat close
to Europe, has had potential for becoming Enlightened (Westernized). However, because
of its Eastern neighbors, it could never fully realize its potential because it would always
be dragged “backwards.” Here we see Brodsky’s simultaneous love and hatred for
Russia: in the rhetoric of Bakić-Hayden’s “nesting Orientalisms,” Russia is portrayed an
innocent victim of geographical tragedy, struggling to fulfill its “Western” character and
break away from Byzantine/Turkish influences; on the other hand, this geography,
especially Russia’s far-reaching internalization of Asiatic influences, always-already
dooms it to failure and for this she is despised.
Perhaps the most striking exposition of this argument—whose reverberations haunt
Brodsky’s other essays—emerges in “Flight from Byzantium.” Brodsky’s visit to the
East, meaning Istanbul, prompts his examination of history13 (on the Orientalist
assumption that the East, unlike the West, is a portal to historical meditation): “There are
13
Brodsky says “I came to Istanbul to look at the past, not at the future — since the latter doesn’t exist
here: whatever there was of it has gone north [to Russia] as well” (444). Neither Ataturk nor any other
Turkish reformists count: Brodsky denies that Turkey can have a present or a future. This again casts
Russia as more “Western” than Turkey — its history is a continuation of Ottoman Turkish despotism, but
at least it is a continuation, into the “future.”
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places where history is inescapable, like a highway accident—places where geography
provokes history. Such is Istanbul, alias Constantinople, alias Byzantium” (“Flight from
Byzantium,” Less than One 406–07, italics mine). The enumeration of the different
names of the same city, invoking its changing yet identical masters and regimes, suggests
a continuity in the Byzantine and Ottoman regimes, essentialized as Oriental and
autocratic, with no history of the separation of church and state, of humanism or
democracy. This is in fact a common reduction of the history of Byzantine Empire to
caesaropapist, unlimited absolutism, whose “negative” legacy has, among other things,
been used to explain the “backwardness” in southeastern Europe, especially the
Balkans.14
In Brodsky’s imaginary, Byzantine emperor Constantine accepted Christianity and
aspired toward building a “Second Rome” in the East, but this would ultimately sever any
political or cultural ties with Western development: here Christianity was “fated to
become Orientalized” and for the Second Rome, “Persia . . . was far more real than
Hellas, if only in a military sense” (413–14). Again there are images of geographic
contamination and inevitability, as Byzantium fails to benefit from either Roman legal
traditions or Greek traditions of democracy: while in Athens a Socrates would have been
tried in open court, in “Ishfahan, say, or Baghdad, such a Socrates would simply have
been impaled on the spot, or flayed . . . . There would have been no Platonic dialogues . .
. . There would have been only the monologue of the Koran” (413). Byzantium comes to
resemble this Baghdad although Constantine does not ultimately realize that “he is
dealing with the East”—and indeed, Brodsky’s fear of the Oriental, Muslim “menace,”
14
See, for instance, Dimiter Angelov’s “The Making of Byzantinism,” and Milica Bakic-Hayden’s “What’s
So Byzantine about the Balkans?” in Balkan as Metaphor.
93
here overtakes his knowledge of historical particulars: it seems irrelevant that
Constantine lived three centuries before the Koran gained any global prominence (413).
Conveniently, Byzantium’s alleged tradition of the non-separation of church and
state is merely continued by the Ottomans, who, because they are not “even” Christian,
are predictably more brutal in degree: “the anti-individualism of Islam would find the soil
of Byzantium so welcoming that by the ninth century Christianity would be more than
ready to flee to the north” (416). When Ottomans take over and create Istanbul, they
continue the Eastern traditions of “obedience, of hierarchy, of profit, of trade, of
adaptability: a tradition, that is, drastically alien to the principles of moral absolute”
(417). The resulting, “Muslim Byzantium,” equates, like “Christian Byzantium,”
“spiritual and administrative authority,” but it is “staunchly ideological,” “heavily
militarized and somewhat more despotic” (427).
Brodsky, by virtue of being from this part of the world or at least from its
neighborhood, speaks as one—Lacoue-Labarthe’s type—who knows its tradition of
obedience and despotism intimately and who is accorded authority and authenticity,
through “lived experience.” Yet his position is that of an emancipated Western subject
who can recognize the “lack” of democracy and human rights, which are endowed with
an implicit positive valorization. From his imagined position in Russia Brodsky can still
“survey” the Orient as a “European,” but one who has the advantage of knowing the
Oriental neighbors: “born by the Baltic, in the place regarded as a window on Europe, I
always felt something like a vested interest in this window on Asia with which we shared
a meridian. On grounds perhaps less than sufficient, we regarded ourselves as Europeans”
(440). In a sense, his distancing from the “East” corresponds to his desire to distance
94
himself from Soviet Russia as well, which, as we will see, inevitably continues the
Eastern traditions handed down to her by Byzantium and later, Ottoman Turkey. Thus,
the Soviet regime is not seen as a product of a particular historical moment, let alone as
something that people actively helped to create, but rather as a historical inevitability:
“the star and the crescent of Islam” are combined as Brodsky wonders, “And that
hammer, isn’t it a modified cross?” (429).
To establish the continuity between Russian and Oriental despotism, Brodsky
points out the existence of many Turkish words in Russian (e.g., katorga, which means
forced labor, contaminating the language with its implied violence), as well as the similar
origin of Constantinople and St. Petersburg—both were created as articulations of an
inferiority complex and as windows onto the West (though they would never become the
West because they were Eastern), the former as Second and the latter as Third Rome
(443). Another instance of the repetition of the same is Brodsky’s mention that the cities
share almost the same meridian: little wonder then that “Rus,” perceived to be directly to
the north of Byzantium, was its “natural geographical prey” (437). In these portrayals of
Russia’s “rape” and victimization by an Orientalized Christianity and an antiindividualist tradition, Russia is feminized and passively innocent, but once it develops
its own imperialist pretensions—especially with the onset of Soviets—it is given
aggressive, conquering, masculine attributes. Brodsky effectively combines Christian
Europe’s racist fears of Asian hordes and Muslim fanatics and its fears of communist
barbarians: “Isn’t my native realm an Ottoman Empire now—in extent, in military might,
in its threat to the Western world? Aren’t we now by the walls of Vienna? And is not its
threat the greater in that it proceeds from the Easternized . . . Christianity?” (438).
95
Declaring that Western Christianity has doomed the East to non-existence by
divorcing Byzantium (since the East always depends on the West for its meaning),
Brodsky implies that it also committed the crucial mistake of future disinterest, of not
knowing the (Eastern) enemy—and here come Brodsky’s autobiographical-philosophical
essays to correct this mistake. By fixing his semi-European, semi-imperial gaze on this
part of the world, Brodsky seeks to again arouse interest in the East among Westerners, to
make it visible and knowable, so to speak. However, Brodsky’s explication of Soviet
aggressiveness and disrespect for human life, both in Russia and abroad, shrouds it in
“irrational” mystique rather than making it comprehensible and accessible to a Western
reader. Since the East always has always shunned “moral absolutes” through its tradition
of hierarchy and adaptability, the Soviet regime predictably provides the West with yet
another example of Brodsky’s metaphysically conceived “human evil.” The argument is
that this “evil” simply cannot be explained in Western terms—it transcends Western
ideas of law, medicine, or “norms of human behavior” used to deal with criminal offense
(423). Whether we are talking about “the Iranian Imam’s butchering tens of thousands of
his subjects” or about Stalin’s “maxim, uttered in the course of the Great Terror, that
‘with us, no one is irreplaceable’” the human negative potential of the East escapes
“rational” explanation: it is inscrutable (422).
Echoing Nabokov, Brodsky similarly casts communists as “creatures who by all
human accounts should be considered degenerates,” ruling in the “most unjust country in
the world” (“Less than One,” Less than One 32). The October revolution is nothing else
but a criminal, unjustifiable coup d’etat and the storming of the Winter Palace merely a
chance for the ruthless Red Guards to “rape half the female unit guarding the palace”
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(87–88). The communist regime, in Brodsky, becomes a continuation of the imperialist
czarist regime whose motto was “Russia must rule shamelessly” (“Flight,” Less than One
438). He frequently equates Russia’s “authoritarian past and totalitarian present,” and in
one breath mentions all the textbook “tyrants,” such as “Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao,
Castro, Qadafi, Khomeini, Amin” (“Catastrophies in the Air,” Less than One 270; “On
Tyranny,” Less than One 114). This continuity of tyranny, the impossibility of “progress”
and thus, of history, to which Brodsky dooms Russia, characterizes Russia’s past,
present, as well as future—the communists “colonize” the unpredictability of the future
with their propaganda. Still, the Soviet regime outplays even the czarist tyranny at the
game of cruelty and hypocrisy and Brodsky notes that “the national upheaval that took
place in Russia in this century has no parallel in the history of Christendom. Similarly, its
reductive effect on the human psyche was unique enough to enable the rulers to talk
about a ‘new society’ and a ‘new type of man.’” (Less than One 270).
Czars were amateurs compared to Lenin and successors and especially striking here
is Brodsky predilection for Peter the Great, whom he contrasts with Lenin in “A Guide to
a Renamed City.” Although Peter the Great’s project of building a city on the Neva was
“ill-conceived” and met with “formidable opposition,” Brodsky still sees him as one of
the rare rulers who managed to overcome Russia’s traditional inferiority complex by
bravely approaching Europe through St. Petersburg, a window onto Europe (Less than
One 71). By contrast, other rulers—especially Lenin—resort to the Russian interior out of
fear of Europe; communists return the capital to Moscow and the country again retreats
“to its womblike, claustrophobic and xenophobic condition” (82). While Lenin’s regime
is indeed associated with imperialist, masculine and aggressive characteristics, Brodsky
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also portrays it as insecure, introverted, effeminate—in short, castrated—divesting it even
of the power to intimidate. In this way, the regime appears more ridiculous than
terrifying, incapable of even facing the world that it supposedly aims to conquer.
But although Russia’s history is immutable, which associates it with the
“emptiness” of Eastern history in general, its proximity to the West is imagined as a
potential for some, albeit insufficient, infiltration of democratic ideas. Brodsky, like
many other Russian authors—and as we have seen in Chapter 2, Nabokov—reaches into
Russia’s pre-October Revolution “Silver Age” as a proof of its tragic longing for world
“civilization,” as a momentary flirtation with democracy and opposition to czarist
tyranny. Again, St. Petersburg’s streets map the possibility of a multiplicity of political
options, the flourishing of cultural innovation and the seductiveness of “worldly”
architecture and fashions. All this is implicitly contrasted to the “uniformity,”
“unanimity,” indeed, the drab asceticism of communist rule:
The giant, infinite, vertical rafts of white columns from the facades of the
embankments’ palaces belonging to the Czar, his family, the aristocracy, embassies
and the nouveaux riches are carried by the reflecting river down to the Baltic. On
the main avenue of the empire—Nevsky Prospect—there are churches of all creeds.
The endless, wide streets are filled with cabriolets, newly introduced automobiles,
idle, well-dressed crowds, first-class boutiques, confectioneries, etc. Immensely
wide squares with mounted statues of previous rulers and triumphal columns taller
than Nelson’s. Lots of publishing houses, magazines, newspapers, political parties
(more than in contemporary America), theaters, restaurants, gypsies. (“The Child of
Civilization,” Less than One 131)
St. Petersburg here comes to resemble Walter Benjamin’s Paris, as a
phantasmagoria of consumerism, of idle flâneuring,15 which communists do not
understand and which they dismiss too easily. St. Petersburg is “just like” any other
Western town, with its Nelson-type pillars, with its American-type political culture.
15
See Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project.
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Brodsky obsessively returns to this theme, arguing in “Catastrophies in the Air” that “the
turn of the century” in Russia was an unusual period indeed because “technological and
scientific breakthroughs . . . caus[ed] a qualitative leap in the masses’ self-awareness”
(285). Again, Brodsky notes, there were “more political parties than in today’s America
or Great Britain,” but Russia was also unique in that there was a “great upsurge in
philosophical writing and in science fiction with strong utopian or social-engineering
overtones” (285). Russia, in other words, was becoming emancipated, had recognized the
“evil” of the czarist regime and its utopianism was not necessarily a dangerous thing.
However, to Brodsky, the final articulation of that utopianism in the October revolution
was a betrayal of the popular aspirations: communists, in other words, were false
Messiahs.
In this respect too Brodsky “writes” himself as a Westernized subject who
embraces the ideals of democracy—freedom of speech and individualism—as a “line of
flight”16 from the dystopian, collectivist (i.e., anti-individualist) communist ideology.
Speaking of growing up in “Leninized” Petersburg, as Nabokov might call it, where he
was drawn to Western movies, music, fashions and literature that were haphazardly
distributed or prohibited, Brodsky remarks, “With our instinct for individualism fostered
at every instance by our collectivist society, with our hatred toward any form of
affiliation, be that with a party, a block association, or, at that time, a family, we were
more American than Americans” (“Spoils of War,” On Grief and Reason 14). This
anticipates Brodsky’s validation of his subsequent exile to England and then to America,
16
See Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.
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as “going home,” since a writer thus “gets closer to the seat of the ideals which inspired
him all along” (“The Condition We Call Exile,” On Grief and Reason 24).
In other words, “from a tyranny one can be exiled only to a democracy,” and
Brodsky refuses to martyr himself for what his critics would habitually name
“displacement”—he sees it as a primarily progressive movement from a “political and
economic backwater to an industrially advanced country with the latest word on
individual liberty on its lips” (24). By highlighting class and economic differences
between himself—an exiled writer—and “Gastarbeiters and refugees of any stripe” and
“menial workers,” Brodsky demonstrates awareness that his is what Caren Kaplan calls
“elite” exile, often portrayed as a solitary, metaphysical and aesthetic displacement of a
foreign author and separate from the historically-inflected, mass movements or
“immigrants” and “refugees” (On Grief and Reason 23; Kaplan 4). While Brodsky never
denies the specific historic circumstances of his flight from Russia (which also isn’t
solitary, but followed by Russian authors en masse), his elitism is nevertheless “written”
through his frequent discussions on exile as a primarily metaphysical condition, as the
state of an individual’s psyche. Brodsky emphasizes the importance of this dimension of
exile along with the “liberty” encountered in the West perhaps precisely because of the
class comforts that distinguish him from “menial workers.”
Thus, the oppression of living in Soviet Russia for Brodsky has to do much less
with the shortage of food or home appliances and much more with the shortage of free
speech and Western literature, the more lofty concerns that can appeal to Brodsky’s nonSoviet, “free” audiences. The youngster portrayed in “Spoils of War,” Brodsky is indeed
fascinated by all commodities Western, from jazz reaching him through the Voice of
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America, to Camel cigarettes, Tarzan movies and Levi’s jeans: St. Petersburg, now
Leningrad, is once again a window to the elusive West, as Brodsky thinks he can “see
Europe” through his radio (“Spoils” 7). But his primary concern is the elusiveness of
Western ideas, proscribed by the Soviet regime; in turn, he tries to “prove” to his Western
audiences that St. Petersburg nevertheless continues its subversive, anti-Soviet—and antiEastern—streak by harboring the circulation of the practically inaccessible and
unaffordable Western literature.
Brodsky’s fascination with serendipitously encountering or “rescuing” a book of
poetry by Yeats, Auden, or T.S. Eliot in effect “triumphantly inaugurates a literature of
empire” in Bhabha’s words, affirming its authority to the extent that it is disseminated
(despite the authorities’ discouragement), translated (despite the threat of incarceration),
exchanged and read, even in such “political backwaters” as Soviet Russia (The Location
of Culture 102). Bhabha is speaking primarily of cultural writings of British colonialism
in which the “fortuitous discovery of the English book” in the “wild and wordless wastes
of colonial India, Africa, the Caribbean” becomes “an insignia of colonial authority and a
signifier of colonial desire and discipline” (102). Although Russia, as we shall see, is not
quite so “wordless” in Brodsky, there is a similar gesture of praising the power of a
metropolitan English text set against the background of a culturally uninteresting
landscape, against a mundane existence punctured by material deprivations. The English
book positively elevates, as Brodsky notes of the English and American poetry
anthologies he obtains: “You could pull them out of your pocket in a streetcar or in a
public garden and even though the text would be only a half or a third comprehensible,
they’d instantly obliterate the local reality” (“To Please a Shadow,” Less than One 366).
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Brodsky is not a metropolitan colonial; yet, he speaks from the place of “colonial desire,”
both in terms of satisfying the narcissistic desires of his projected audiences by affirming
the importance of their cultural heritage and in terms of expressing his own desire for
recognition of a (non-Soviet) Russia that is conversant with Anglo-American literature.
We have seen a similar gesture in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, where this desire to appear
“Western” and “civilized” by “knowing” the metropolitan canon is satirized throughout
Kinbote’s narrative. In fact, Nabokov’s satirization of Kinbote’s admiring attitude toward
Shade, the metropolitan poet, allows us to critically consider Brodsky’s poetic
enchantment with Auden, on whom he frequently writes and lectures. In an uncanny
repetition of cultural haunting, Kinbote’s Shade becomes Brodsky’s “shadow.” In his
essay “To Please a Shadow,” Brodsky explains that he learned how to write in English in
order to “find [himself] in closer proximity to the man whom [he] considered the greatest
mind of the twentieth century: Wystan [sic] Hugh Auden” (Less than One 357). Brodsky
not only perfects his writing in English with the shadow of Auden reading over his
shoulder, but also pictures himself explaining to that great metropolitan poet that Russia,
too, has great literature. “The Child of Civilization,” Brodsky’s paean to Osip
Mandelstam, seems to have been written to counter Auden’s remark, “I don’t see why
Mandelstam is considered a great poet . . . . The translations that I’ve seen don’t convince
me of that” (Less than One 142). Brodsky assumes the role of a “minor,” nonmetropolitan poet when he undertakes the defense of Russian literature already assumed
to be guilty: Auden says he “wouldn’t like to live with Dostoevsky under the same roof,”
but likes Chekhov because he is the only Russian with “common sense” (“To Please a
Shadow” 377). Brodsky finds himself trying to explain even such mundane occurrences
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in Russia as stealing “windshield wipers from parked cars” as “rational” because there
are no spare parts, but his efforts bear no fruit: Auden “obviously had in mind a more
inscrutable reason” (377; emphasis mine).
In order to counter such an Orientalist valorization, Brodsky praises Russian
literary achievements, especially those that emerged on the cultural scene of St.
Petersburg, the city whose geographic location and cosmopolitan spirit allegedly allowed
Russian authors to look at themselves as if from “outside,” from a Western perspective:
geography again makes history, as the “emergence of St. Petersburg” is likened to “the
discovery of the New World” (“A Guide to a Renamed City” 79). In other words,
Brodsky sees Russia in the way that he imagines Auden and other “great” poets, would
want him to see it. Just as Shakespearean references “colonize” the topography of
Kinbote’s Zemblan palace, so classical European allusions intersperse Brodsky’s writing
about St. Petersburg, wresting it from Asia and claiming it for Europe, or for what
Brodsky, in a gesture of inaugurating the primacy of European cultural heritage, calls
“world civilization.” In the version in which this part of Russia participates in the
European cultural development, narrated through the enabling myth of unified Greek and
Roman origins, St. Petersburg is no longer Constantinople/Istanbul, but rather
Alexandria, an “other” center of civilization, coexistent with Athens.17 Brodsky notes of
17
In Chapter 4, we will see how Kundera and Grass capitalize on the myth of a unified European
development, which encompasses Greek democracy, Renaissance and the Enlightenment as its decisive
historical signposts. Kundera uses this narrative to create boundaries between “European” and “nonEuropean” developmental paths, including the Czech Republic, but excluding Russia; Grass distinguishes
between forms of political government, describing liberal democracy as “European,” and fascism and
communism as “anti-European.”
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the vibrant, Silver-Age Petersburg: “If the West was Athens, Petersburg in the teens of
this century was Alexandria” (“Child” 131).18
The city brings Russian literature into being through its schizophrenic “clash of
civilizations”:19 on the one hand, its “impeccable utopian background of classical
porticoes, haunt[s] the imagination of writers” and on the other, it is flooded by the
reality of Russian economic and political impoverishment and populated by “robbed civil
servants, hungry journalists, humiliated clerks, tubercular students” (“Guide” 80). The
tragedy of the latter is enhanced by the fact that St. Petersburg is also the “capital of
Imperial Russia,” which infuses the city with an “organic blend” of “Orthodoxy,”
“Byzantine” political structure and an alphabet that “had been devised by two Greek
monks” (“Child” 130). Progressive yet backwards, Enlightened yet Oriental, St.
Petersburg inspires in poets such as Osip Mandelstam the “nostalgia for a world culture,”
which the architecture of the city itself embodies (130).
The Petersburg poets whom Brodsky greatly admires, Mandelstam and Anna
Akhmatova, cannot escape this enchantment of the city, however and thus both are
promoted from “merely” Russian to “world,” or “civilized” poets. Immersed in “Russian
Hellenicism,” Brodsky’s phrase that describes Russian poets’ longing for what is “out
there” (in the “civilized world”), Mandelstam’s poetry is invested with global
18
A further cultural validation occurs when Brodsky situates Petersburg along North American
coordinates: it lies “at the latitude of Vancouver, in the mouth of a river as wide as the Hudson between
Manhattan and New Jersey” (131). Brodsky clearly writes for a Western, specifically American audience,
so the use of familiar geographic references is meant to make his essay more accessible to the intended
reader. And yet, there is a sense that Brodsky is at pains to prove, by this loaded geographic association,
that Petersburg is “no worse” than Vancouver or Manhattan, just like Alexandria was “no worse” than
Athens.
19
This is, of course, a reference to Samuel Huntington’s notorious explanation of contemporary world
conflicts in “The Clash of Civilizations”; Brodsky’s discussion of the clash of “Eastern” and “European”
civilizations philosophically and structurally echoes Huntington’s.
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significance: it “repeats the development of our civilization: it flows north,” as “Roman
themes gradually overtake Greek references” (“The Child of Civilization” 128).
Akhmatova, too “goes global” as Brodsky “translates” her poetic style into metropolitan
terms: “in its simplicity, her syntax resembles English,” and “among her contemporaries,
she is a Jane Austen” (“The Keening Muse,” Less than One 36).
In this sense, “Akhmatova was very much a product of the Petersburg tradition in
Russian poetry, the founders of which, in their own turn, had behind them European
classicism as well as its Roman and Greek origins” (39). This cultural validation is
crucial in Brodsky because for him the existence of such literature effectively “proves”
that Russia has not been bypassed by the allegedly unified development of world
civilization and has even contributed to it: its literature is “a part of Christian
civilization’s culture and neither the best nor most exotic part at that” (“Catastrophies”
292). In this way, Russia (or at least St. Petersburg) too joins the global march of history
and is rescued from the eternal repetition of the same, from its Oriental ahistoricity.
Predictably, then, Brodsky largely excludes Soviet avant-garde, as well as soc-realist
literature, from history—it simply does not count among civilizational achievements and
it mostly retards development. Since Tolstoy, Russian prose “went down the winding,
well-trodden path of mimetic writing and . . . has reached the pits of socialist realism”;
even avant-garde writers like Pilnyak, Zamyatin and Babel are reduced to “outright
cynicism and their works to tantalizing hors d’oeuvres on the empty table of a lean
nation” (“Catastrophies” 277). Because of the assumption that Soviet barbarians could
not possibly produce anything interesting, Brodsky portrays modern Russian literature as
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a wordless “vacuum,” prophesying, “Russia may exit the twentieth century without
leaving great prose behind” (269).
New Catastrophies in the Air: Brodsky versus Brodsky
In the previous section, I have attempted to outline the major strands of Brodsky’s
Orientalization of Russia with their accompanying, “nesting Orientalisms” through which
European and Asian geographies are conceived. At this stage I turn to the sections and
ideas in Brodsky which problematize, though without ultimately overtaking or
outweighing, his philosophical investment in the cultural framework of “progress” and
“backwardness” which surfaces both when he speaks of the Oriental, Soviet, despotic
Russia and of the Russia that is cosmopolitan, worldly, that has cities like St. Petersburg.
In his famous response to Václav Havel’s lecture published in The New York
Review of Books, “Letter to a President,” there is a momentary recognition of the racist
rhetoric of cultural and political “progressiveness” or “backwardness.” Speaking of the
“nature” of evil, Brodsky chastises Havel for enshrining “communism” and, recently,
“post-communism,” as the “chief nightmares of the democratic world” (On Grief and
Reason 216). Brodsky argues, in contrast, that these are convenient terms for the
“democratic” world to externalize evil as an “error, as a horrendous political aberration,”
especially if it refers to a “proper geographical or foreign-sounding name, whose spelling
obscures its utterly human nature” (218). Brodsky further identifies as problematic
Havel’s enthusiastic participation in the metropolitan discourse that ascribes historical
events to loathed “-isms,” and that distinguishes between “progressive” “cowboys of the
Western industrial democracies” and “backwards Indians” (219).
But this opening into a different discourse goes only so far in Brodsky. Indeed, he
warns Havel against “emulating cowboys”—presumably in a political or economic
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sense—but he folds back into the Orientalist discourse when he recommends “civilizing”
the Czech natives through “great literature” (unproblematically Eurocentric and largely
canonical): “By giving your people Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, Platonov, Camus, or Joyce,
you may turn at least one nation in the heart of Europe into a civilized people” (222). The
mention of Platonov is interesting here because, although Brodsky includes Platonov in
the narrative of European civilizational achievements, he has elsewhere praised Platonov
primarily as an example of the heterogeneity of Soviet prose achievements, in order to
counter stereotypical (Western) assumptions that all Soviet literature is dogmatic,
uninteresting, or “rustic,” thereby effectively contradicting his own indictment of it as a
literary “vacuum” (“Catastrophies” 292). Brodsky admires Platonov in spite of, or
perhaps precisely because of, his investment in the communist ideology, whose
problematic rhetoric, paradoxically, breaks down and is driven to its limits in his novels.
He notes of Platonov’s oeuvre, “The uniformity of the social order doesn’t guarantee that
of mental operation; an individual’s aesthetic never completely surrenders to either
personal or national tragedy” (292). At stake for Brodsky is the treatment of Russian
literature as identical to the regime in power, as a “poor relation” of the “civilized”
world—the type of racism that, among other things, “encourages sloppy translations” of
extraordinary writers such as Platonov and Mandelstam (“Catastrophies” 293).
In a sense, Brodsky resembles Platonov in that he sometimes works within the
philosophical openings created by the communist revolution, exposing the limits of the
communist regime and its ideology, calling them to task over promises they did not
deliver. Of course, Brodsky would think any association with communists scandalous and
thus he is a much more reluctant Platonov. Yet, I propose that we read this reluctant
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investment in communism through Slavoj Žižek’s suggestion that the position from
which anti-communist dissidents denounce communist terror in the name of human
solidarity and emancipation was opened up, made possible exactly by the communist
regimes (Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 131). Žižek writes that such regimes
“simultaneously opened up a certain space, the space of utopian expectations which,
among other things, enabled us to measure the failure of actually existing Socialism
itself” (131). In Brodsky, communists also open up the utopian space from which to
recognize and critically consider the various strands of Russian Orientalization.
Brodsky thus credits communists for critically identifying the tradition of selfOrientalization and seeking to discontinue the Russian obsession with the Western
mirror, especially when they declare war on bourgeois values and the accoutrements of
capitalist modernity that Brodsky sees Russia dangerously immersed in throughout the
nineteenth century. In an expression of aesthetic disgust with St. Petersburg’s nineteenthcentury “mercantile reality,” Brodsky rejects the “Americanized” St. Petersburg of
“banks and joint-stock companies,” of “nouveau riche bourgeoisie,” of a “Russian
execution of the Prussian military ideal of society” (81). In this respect, even the hated
“Comrade Lenin deserves his monuments here for sparing St. Petersburg . . . ignoble
membership in the global village” (“Guide” 85). While Brodsky recounts in detail the
pain of his material deprivations in post-war St. Petersburg, this still appears as a mildly
romanticized time of his life when he and his friends were “poorly dressed but somehow
still elegant,” when they “preferred ideas of things to things themselves” (“Less than
One” 29, 27). Living in the midst of consumer scarcity, young Brodsky comes to realize
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that “what capitalism is all about” is “winning through excess, through overkill”
(“Spoils” 13).
This alienation from the “things” in their excess—and from the aforementioned
bourgeois, mercantilist mentality—can be related to his disappointment with communism
not solely for its mass terror, but for its far less spectacular descent into a “shabby
materialist dogma and pathetic consumerist gropings” (“Less than One” 26). The
communist nomenklatura has become ossified in a bureaucratic “game of promotion . . .
and a search for reliable pals,” a situation that Brodsky contrasts to their utopian pursuits
of “burning issues, false beards, Marxist studies” (117). In its persecution of the most
utopian, interesting and radical Russian writers, even the ones inspired by the communist
revolution itself (like Platonov), the communist regime has become as conservative as the
petit-bourgeois, dominant cultural frameworks of Europe and America which it set out to
challenge. In other words, traumatized by the stigmatizing legacy of “backwardness,”
communists ended up imitating the “cowboys” a little too much.
What happens in Brodsky at those moments, what haunts his “actual” anticommunism, can be described as what Derrida calls the “ghost” of an emancipatory
promise, the “spirit of Marxism,” which both permeates and exceeds “Marxism as
ontology, philosophical or metaphysical system, as ‘dialectical materialism,’ from
Marxism as historical materialism or method and from Marxism incorporated in the
apparatuses of the party, State, or workers’ International” (Specters of Marx 68). The
“apparatuses of the party” and “State” attempt to ontologize this spirit through
appropriation and in the process Soviet future appears to Brodsky as “plenitude . . .
propaganda” (“Less than One” 7). But this act of appropriation can never be fully
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successful and Brodsky articulates and celebrates what remains in the margins, what
represents a more radical possibility of emancipation: cultural and political
undecidability, lack of clear limitations and the diversity of contending choices through
which we can glimpse a new vision of Russia and a gesture of dissidence from
metropolitan discourses and Russian communist/nationalist ideologies alike.
In his essays on Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Platonov and Constantin Cavafy
Brodsky continually underscores the ability of language, especially literary language, to
exceed “historical materialism,” or the jargon of any political regime, exposing the
poverty of hegemonic discourses even as it inevitably participates in them: thus, even the
most apolitical literature will be suspect on the grounds of the sheer complexity of its
language. Echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of Kafka’s use of “poor” German to
write a “minor literature,” Brodsky dwells on Cavafy’s poetry, in particular, because of
its use of “poor adjectives” and “sentimental clichés” as a subversive poetic mask, as a
way to “unbutton” the “meta-language” of modern politics (“Pendulum’s Song,” Less
than One 59, 65). Brodsky’s fascination stems also from Cavafy’s “distaste for
mythologizing” despite his use of Greek and Roman allusions: Cavafy deconstructs
historical and religious narratives, refusing to enshrine any one of them as primary (60).
Like the frequent figure in Cavafy’s poems, Roman emperor Julian the Apostate—famed
for evading dogma by forcing Christians to an open debate of religious issues with
pagans—Brodsky seeks to evade a clear choice of language, political system, or national
identity.
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As a Jew who is nevertheless not quite “Jewish,” he is suspect of Russian
nationalist pretensions, even in their communist trappings.20 An exile in his country—in
any country—he resembles St. Petersburg, a city-exile in Russia, which, as we have seen,
is at once mercantilist, capitalist and communist, yet to Brodsky irreducible to any of
these, as it revels in multiplicity and continually creates openings out of any attempt to
fix its identity. At those moments, a different, infinitely more complex, non-Russian
Russia emerges in Brodsky’s essays, one outside of the framework of “Eastern,”
“ahistorical,” or “Western,” “progressive.”
Brodsky favors Russian for poetry, but without, in Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase,
“reterritorializing” himself in a Russian national identity and English for prose as a way
to “deterritorialize” official Soviet discourses. His linguistic and cultural situation can be
likened to that which Derrida believes is characteristic of the Jewish population in French
Algeria—whether they use French, Hebrew, or Arabic, they “speak a language of which
[they are] deprived,” which isn’t really theirs (Monolingualism of the Other 60). Brodsky
is similarly “thrown into absolute translation, a translation without a pole of reference,
without an originary language and without a source language” (60; emphasis mine). But
this condition of being “thrown” into a language is not tragic in Brodsky; he does not—
and cannot—have a language in any originary sense, but he can nevertheless have a
language in him, without the impulse of (national, cultural) appropriation. As he writes of
Derek Walcott’s line, “I have English in me,” Brodsky notes that “language is greater
20
The fact of Brodsky’s “Jewishness” — although this identity is almost always pasted on him from the
outside, so to speak — remains a blind spot for Russia even in the post-perestroika period. Svetlana Boym
writes that when Brodsky’s works appeared in print in Russia in the late 1980s, “the praise was tempered
by openly anti-Semitic comments and expressions of hostility,” even from many writers and poets. Brodsky
was accused of “not being properly Christian or properly Russian” (Future of Nostalgia 305).
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than its masters or servants” because it enables the writing of poetry as a way to “gain an
identity superior to the confines of class, race, or ego” (“The Sound of the Tide,” Less
than One 171).
And yet, there is, as I have pointed out at the beginning of this section, a
conservative folding in Brodsky’s rhetoric. In spite of these instances of deconstructing
dominant narratives of language, culture, or politics, there is an ideological blindness
throughout much of his prose to the violence of colonialism, to the invisible political
machinery behind such seemingly innocent categories as “world civilization,” which
Brodsky assumes to be metaphysical, “natural.” In the Walcott essay, Brodsky folds back
into the framework of the metropolitan discourse—and the colonial, Orientalist
discourses—when he argues that “the colonial heritage remains a mesmerizing presence
in the West Indies,” and conflates Walcott’s assumed Eurocentric education with “world
civilization.” Homer, Ovid, Dante, Neruda, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Baudelaire—all of
these become “cells of his bloodstream, no less so than Shakespeare and Edward Thomas
are” (“The Sound” 169).
This echoes Brodsky’s earlier recommendations to Havel for “civilizing” Czechs
and undermines Brodsky even at his most utopian. He criticizes communists for
promoting a “shabby materialist dogma,” and while at times he points to the necessity of
transforming this “materialist dogma” and the ideal of “civilized,” “developed,”
“consumer-paradise” Europe, he nevertheless preserves this ideal with the narrative of a
unified culture, of civilizational superiority. He thus remains within the Orientalist
philosophical framework—seeking to invert it and place Russia at the top of its
hierarchical structure—when he inveighs against communists for not making Russia a
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leading spirit of this unified (Eurocentric) civilization. Russia did not have to become a
“drab hell”; instead, “with its magnificently inflected language capable of expressing the
subtlest nuances of the human psyche, with an incredible ethical sensitivity,” it had “all
the makings of a cultural, spiritual paradise, a real vessel of civilization” (“Less than
One” 26).
Czesław Miłosz, or, Self-Hating Slavs
Miłosz’s autobiographical-philosophical writing is characterized by a discourse of
cultural liminality similar to the one in Brodsky. Miłosz’s imagined topography—and the
position from which he “surveys” the East and West—shifts westward, to the postWorld-War-I Wilno (contemporary Vilnius), a city that is mourned over as a hapless
victim of geography as much as Brodsky’s Petersburg. But although Wilno figures on the
European map as a city somewhat more to the west than St. Petersburg and thus closer to
“Europe,” its location does not geo-graph it as unambiguously Western. For Miłosz,
Wilno is both a civilizational bastion against and a whipping boy of, the absolute Russian
“other” lodged firmly in the unpredictable East. Its cultural liminality emerges in the idea
that, while (despite all odds) it managed to nurture a tradition of parliamentary
democracy worthy of a Western government, it was always-already stunted in its
development by Russian imperialist desire, to which it fell victim throughout most of its
history except for the brief period between the World Wars.
Significantly, during most of this period Wilno was occupied by Poland and the
rest of Lithuania, like Poland, was independent. However, Polish nationalism and
imperialist desire, while vehemently criticized throughout Miłosz’s writing, still compare
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favorably in relation to Russian territorial pretensions.21 Miłosz therefore, focuses on the
Wilno of the interwar period as a paradigm of nationalist antagonisms, yet as
simultaneously a space of utopian possibilities for Europe—not unlike Brodsky’s
culturally thriving Petersburg of the pre-October-Revolution era—preceding the descent
into Nazism or Stalinism.
Miłosz’s position is rather complex: his writing is, on the one hand, a testimony to
his Western audiences about the historically Western leanings of Polish culture, allowing
Miłosz himself to speak as an emancipated Easterner who can deftly navigate Western
discourses, translating and making sense of the Polish experience for the “world at large.”
On the other hand, he also offers testimony to the Polish inability to escape the
affinities—ethnic, linguistic, or political—with the hated Russian neighbor. This double
testimony, as in the case of Nabokov and/or his Kinbote, “interpellates” the Poles, to
invoke Althusser once again, as simultaneously the marginalized “others” and as
potentially empowered metropolitans. It would be useful at this point to compare this
binary that denotes both a distinction and a cohabitation to Rey Chow’s reflections on the
cultural politics of “ethnicity” in the Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
where the “ethnic” is distinctly not the “neutral” Westerner and yet must “protest” his/her
ethnicity as a “captivity narrative,” as “captivity-in-existence” in order to affirm—and
supposedly win—the biopolitical rights imagined to be safeguarded by the West (42).
21
I would suggest that Milosz sees Poland and Lithuania as complementary cultures, suffering similarly
from their Russian neighbors; as we have seen, they are both included in Milosz’s conception of “Central
Europe.” In Milosz, Lithuanians figure somewhat more positively than Poles, as they are also, historically,
victims of Polish nationalism and colonialism (in his essays “Place of Birth” and “Ancestry,” Lithuanians
are called the “redskins of Europe” and “noble savages,” harassed by the “civilizing” Poles and Germans).
Yet Milosz frequently speaks of Poles and Lithuanians interchangeably, perhaps doing justice to their
geographic cohabitation in multicultural Wilno and other cities. In contrast, Russia is an “other”
civilization, incompatible with either Poland or Lithuania.
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Interestingly, Chow’s concept of “confession” to being-ethnic parallels my concept
of “testimony,” and she similarly argues that this “confession” is “interpellated,” in an
Althusserian sense, in the dominant political narratives. But I would like to push Chow’s
concept further, as in this case the testimony is less about one being-ethnic than about
pointing accusatory fingers at those responsible for making one “ethnic” when he/she had
all the conditions necessary to become a “neutral” Westerner. In this particular case of
“nesting Orientalisms,” to invoke Bakić-Hayden’s term again, Brodsky points his finger
to “Eastern” Ottomans and Miłosz to “Eastern” Russians.
Miłosz suggests that Poland is held in ethnic captivity, so to speak, because of its
geographic affiliation with Russia, implicitly presented in terms of inevitable contagion,
or of unfavorable cross-breeding. For instance, when he speaks of the Russian influence
on the Polish-Lithuanian Wilno, Miłosz expresses it in almost purely disadvantageous
terms: “the long Russian dominion” had left only “bad paving, the incredible difficulty
citizens had conforming to hygienic regulations,” and a population of Byelorussians,
hated by Lithuanians and Poles alike for their “passivity, shiftlessness and defeatism in
the face of destiny” (“City of My Youth,” Native Realm 56–57). Russia, however, seems
to positively embrace and revel in the unhealthy political and cultural practices that are
imagined to spread through Poland, as all are far more extreme “over there” than in
Poland. While Miłosz “confesses” to Polish “disorder, an inability to control matters . . .
recklessness, drunkenness,” he blasts Russia when he says that “in Russia the inability to
order one’s immediate surroundings . . . reached unheard-of proportions,” and
consequently, “Poles in Russia, whether voluntary or involuntary émigrés, acted as a
civilizing force” (“Russia,” Native Realm 133).
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The Poles are credited with a cultural fascination with the West and a yearning to
overthrow Czarist despotism in favor of establishing democracy, but unfortunately
“Poland’s social structure brought her closer to Russia: in both countries capitalism
appeared late and cut no durable traces in the psyche” (133). Although Russians and
Poles should have been “brothers” in the common struggle against Czarist oppression,
their “incompatibility of temper”—which effectively naturalizes the racist hierarchies
that Miłosz establishes—prevented such a healthy ethnic-political association. Thus, the
Enlightened Poles saw “revolution as a means of conferring on all citizens the old
parliamentary privileges of the Polish gentry”; in contrast, the “Eastern” Russians
“wished to destroy, to change the land into a tabula rasa and then to begin to build
anew,” an impulse that is clearly negatively valorized in Miłosz (134–35).
For Miłosz, Poles are at once “Slavic” (ethnic) like Russians and Western
(cosmopolitan, neutral) unlike Russians, which results in a curious love-hate relationship
with not only Russia, but with one’s own ethnic and linguistic identity. Because Polish
and Russian are linguistic “brothers,” Poles “are able to get an intuition of ‘Russianness’
mainly through the language, which attracts them because it liberates their Slavic half; in
the language is all there is to know about Russia.” But, “The very thing that attracts them
is at the same time menacing” (138). Being-Slavic, for Poles, although inevitable
(because they “are” Slavic, because they are “infected” with Russian Slavdom) and
carrying some potential for positive identification, is nevertheless cast as an impossible
object of love, which must continually be denied through a critical awareness, self-hatred,
or, as we shall see, disidentification. Miłosz compares identical phrases in Russian and
Polish and predictably concludes that the first “connotes gloom, darkness and power,”
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and second “lightness, clarity and weakness.” Lest unsuspecting Poles be seduced from
light into darkness by the deceptive similarities between Polish and Russian, Miłosz
offers this simple practice as an “exercise in self-ridicule and a warning” (138).
Because of this shameful affiliation, Miłosz must also narrate his Wilno into
visibility for Western audiences, rescuing it as a city worthy of gracing the topography of
Europe, recuperating its (semi)Western past from its assumed present invisibility under
Russian-communist occupation. Of course, the imbalance of power between Wilno and a
Western metropolis is suggested in the absence of the former’s associative power, of a
particular discourse of the city that is widely disseminated. Miłosz notes, “a Parisian does
not have to bring his city out of nothingness every time he wants to describe it. A wealth
of allusions lies at his disposal, for his city exists in works of words, brush and chisel”
(“City of My Youth,” Native Realm 55). In the case of Wilno, however, Miłosz must
invent, so to speak, the associative tropes for the architecture and geography of the city,
along with its inhabitants, in order to overcome this historically unjustified silence, for
while “natives lacked perspective” to write on the city, Westerners could not be counted
on to properly map it either: “The foreigners who ventured into these marshlands of the
West were rare” (54). To write Wilno, then, Miłosz invokes tropes that belie his native
intimacy with Wilno while giving it Western legitimacy. Wilno is presented as a city
where Miłosz grew up in the same “cultural circuit” as his contemporaries across
“France, Holland, or America” (59). Miłosz enumerates popular movies, books and
theater performances that kept Wilno “parallel in time with the rest of the world”—and
Poland even “had better organized theaters than many ‘Western’ countries” (60).
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Throughout Miłosz’s essays emerges the image of Wilno as a vibrant confluence of
contending university cultures, student debates, political options, religions, ethnicities
and languages, its “cosmopolitan fragments . . . probably more closer to Paris than to
Warsaw” (“Dictionary of Wilno Streets,” To Begin 46). Wilno in a sense becomes the
urban embodiment of Miłosz’s “Central Europe” discussed earlier in this chapter,
implying a conglomerate of supra-national communities, defying “pure” identity politics,
as well as interior or exterior colonization by single nationalist interests. The very
impossibility of purity forces its way through Miłosz’s meticulous enumeration of the
city’s diverse dwellers, living at close quarters:
Wilenska Street, now even narrower, turned into a street of Christian harness
makers, cobblers, tailors; there was even a Turkish bakery. From it, or perhaps
from another, came my gymnasium colleague Czebi-Ogly, who was a Muslim.
Next, the facades of the buildings became subdivided into a multitude of little
Jewish shops and after a momentary rise in dignity across from the little square
near the Church of St. Catherine . . . . Wilenska was dominated by impoverished
trade all the way to the intersection of Trocka, Dominican and German Streets. (51)
Miłosz himself proudly exemplifies this mélange, consisting of “Polish, Lithuanian
and German blood” which was so common in that part of Europe, that “admirers of racial
purity could find little to boast of” (“Ancestry,” Native Realm 24). Within this utopian
space where Polish, Yiddish and less frequently, Lithuanian, Byelorussian and Russian
languages intersperse, Miłosz politically affiliates himself primarily with the Jewish, antinationalist intellectual movements in Wilno throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Their
opposition to (especially Polish) anti-Semitism, their Leftist internationalist convictions
pitched against Polish (and Lithuanian) Right-wing parties, inspires in Miłosz an “allergy
to everything that smacks of the ‘national’ and an almost physical disgust for people who
transmit such signals” (“City” 56; “Nationalities,” Native Realm 95). Instead of a
“Polish,” or a “Lithuanian” Wilno, whose nationalist mythologies gain ground in the
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1920s/1930s, Miłosz feels closer to the Wilno of the historical Commonwealth of Poland
and Lithuania, with its tradition of religious and ethnic tolerance and parliamentary
politics. In his essays “Place of Birth” and “Ancestry,” this idealized political union is
clearly not a nation-state and Miłosz sees the rise in national consciousness, along with
political anti-Semitism, as a particular concoction of nineteenth-century bourgeois
upheavals and later, post-World-War I rise in nationalism.
At the same time, this appears like a retroactive utopia if one gives more weight to
Miłosz’s admission that the Wilno of his childhood is a tolerant and multiethnic city, yet
critically segregated: “The Catholic and Jewish communities . . . lived within the same
wall, yet as if on separate planets . . . . Everyone in Wilno went to his ‘own’ school. Only
at the university did we all gather at the same lecture halls and even there student
organizations were divided into Polish, Jewish, Lithuanian and Byelorussian”
(“Nationalities” 92). Yet, as I shall argue a bit later on, the significance of his narrative of
the “unofficial” Wilno which opposes nationalist categorizations of identity—and which
eventually loses out—lies less in the level of its truthfulness than in Miłosz’s designation
of this moment as full of potential for a European transformation, in terms of subverting
the increasingly popular narratives of racial purity, as well as European colonial
traditions and hierarchizations of nations and cultures. But already in the 1930s, despite
this vibrant movement toward subversion, there is also a sense of impending doom,
which will eventually be brought on by Nazi extermination of Jews and the various
Slavic “subhumans,” and later by Soviet occupation and communist dictatorship.
The tragedy of the downfall of this idealized Wilno is accentuated by Miłosz’s
excursions into its disappointing future, which haunt the descriptions of his interwar
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birthplace: “one might detect in this some sort of short-lived opening up in the whole
country, between the chaos of the economic crisis and the gathering darkness of the end
of the thirties, a soaring, along with, to be sure, a presentiment of the approaching terror”
(“Dictionary” 38). According to Miłosz, had it not been for these foreign interventions
characterized by extreme, fanatic ideological allegiances, locally grown nationalisms
would not have amounted to much. While the Polish are “excitable and anarchic,” they
“seem not to lose moral restraints,” and lack the “discipline” that would “justify cruelties
committed in cold blood” (“Nationalities” 104). More significantly, their tradition of
complex, multidirectional, contradictory political culture acts as a “filter mitigat[ing]
extremes in Poland”; perhaps, Miłosz contemplates, “it comes from habits formed during
the age of the Respublica, when adversaries were crushed by speeches laced with Latin
quotations and when lawsuits and intrigues were preferred to other, more drastic political
methods” (105).
Of course, this distinction conveniently serves to elevate locally grown nationalist
violence above Nazi ruthlessness and what is especially important for our purposes,
above Soviet fanaticism (and implicitly, its unidirectional, simplistic and unambiguous
political culture). Miłosz frequently grieves over the Soviet/communist occupation and
oppression of the once vibrant, modern (in a Western sense), European cities and in doing
so effectively promotes narratives of authentic innocence, of “noble savagery” prior to
the fall. While Wilno’s tragedy is great, it is still predictable as the city is only semiWestern and under considerable Russian influence historically. In the case of Prague,
however, which Miłosz considers to be a “Western European capital,” there is a hint of
an unnatural and bungled, almost artificial penetration of the West by the East (“Journey
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to the West,” To Begin Where I Am 59). Just as for Brodsky, civilization moves from
South to North, so for Miłosz, “the flow of ideas, like the colonization of primeval forest
lands and steppes, [is] a movement from West to East” (“Russia” 130). Seen from this
perspective, any reversal seems abnormal.
As a result, the prewar Prague of Miłosz’s 1931 travels, described as a
carnivalesque, pansexual paradise, with “couples kissing . . . hot, jostling, embracing
humanity” and “effervescent air of laughter and music, its taverns in the narrow streets
near Hradcany Castle” is contrasted with the desexualized and barren 1950 Prague, where
Miłosz sees only the “huge fellow with the face of a hoodlum, wearing the uniform of the
Czech Security Police” and a “handful of people in dark, ill-fitting suits . . . whispering
among themselves” (“Journey” 59–60). The reader is then transported to yet another
Eastern Bloc city, Warsaw, which similarly features “Colorless streets in the twilight.
Pedestrians walk[ing] quickly, with downcast eyes” (60).
In these narratives, Russia at first appears to loom as an aggressive, masculine
bully, positively raping the incomparably weaker opponents, such as Poland, Czech
Republic, or Hungary. Miłosz would thus seem to arouse sympathy for the East-Central
European damsels in distress, yet his rapid realignment of gendered attributes along the
traditional lines of the effeminate East and the masculine West betrays his investment in
the Orientalist rhetoric and the validity of the Western subject who alone can survey,
map, narrate—in short, successfully penetrate and conquer—the “world.” Unlike the
healthily, not aggressively, masculine West, Russia is given to extremes, to a pathological
need to flaunt its power and colonize, yet without the necessary tool, so to speak. Russia
is frequently castrated in Miłosz and therefore its imperialist interventions appear
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prosthetic, pitiful and superficial. Miłosz overhears Soviet commissars speaking of Baltic
and Polish territories acquired and compares them to “Alices in Wonderland” who think
of these countries not with friendliness, but with “envy and anger” (59).
On another occasion, Miłosz hints at the frustration of Soviet attempts to conquer
Europe despite its military power; simply, they lack the finesse and can only exclaim
“Europe is ours” with a “threatening tone, the revenge . . . Russian self-inebriation” (74).
In contrast, Miłosz, the emancipated Easterner (or the half-Westerner) possesses this
secret knowledge of conquest, or as he says, “I understood more of the entangled, never
straight paths of civilization” (74). While a Russian can only treat France, for instance,
with “contempt, because . . . discreet and hidden, [it] was inaccessible to him,” Miłosz
“penetrated her gradually, beginning with that summer in 1931” (74; emphasis mine).
Perhaps it is not surprising then that Miłosz somewhat provocatively casts Russia as a
woman who needs a Polish husband, employing a traditionally colonialist trope of a
country which cannot govern “herself” but must be governed—and this is also significant
in light of his earlier statement about the need for Polish “civilizers” in Russia (“Russia”
147).22
I am trying to tease out these significant gendered paradigms and their relationship
to the discursive positions of unequal power because the “official” narrative, of course, is
still the one of Poland and other countries of the Soviet Bloc as damsels in distress,
22
By and large, critical scholarship has not addressed the Orientalisms in Milosz’s portrayals of Russia.
The most comprehensive discussion of this theme so far appears in Katarzyna Owczarek’s doctoral
dissertation, “The Parallax View: Visions of Russia in the Writings of Czeslaw Milosz” (2001). While
Owczarek notes that Milosz’s view of Russia is loaded with cultural stereotypes, she argues that Milosz
probes such stereotypes by presenting Russia as complex and mutli-farious, as a land of bestiality and
excess, but also of spirituality, literary achievement and religious inspiration. Owczarek does not, however,
analyze the ideological “loadedness” of the rhetoric of Russian bestiality or spirituality; her theoretical
framework is steeped in ethical universals as she focuses on Milosz’s “metaphysics,” desire to reconcile to
the “human condition,” and musings on “the Fall” and “redemption.”
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threatened by the uncouth Russian bear. My intention is not to downplay in the least the
gravity of Soviet occupation and oppression in the Eastern bloc countries, but rather to
point to the ideological blindness to racist discourses which underlie the expressions of
outrage at this historical injustice and which, in some cases, even make it possible. This
blindness structurally echoes the aforementioned anti-Russian Orientalisms among the
Lisbon Conference participants, which were lost, nevertheless, amid their protests against
Russian imperialist interventions in “Central Europe.” In this respect, it is necessary to
consider critically the investment in the terms of such a problematic discourse of all
Western sympathies toward the dissident Miłosz, especially those that bewail Poland’s
victimized position vis-à-vis Russia and that embrace “their,” “Eastern” tragedy, as if it
were “our,” i.e., universal.
According to Clare Cavanagh, whose critical assessment of Miłosz itself
participates in the discourse of “Polishness” as “oppression,” a captivity-narrative in
Chow’s words, many Anglophone poets have come to identify with the Eastern European
plight, grouping “Warsaw, Krakow, Prague and Petersburg” into the metaphorical
“republic of conscience,” in Seamus Heaney’s phrase (339). Heaney and other such poets
are the “same as” Miłosz, Ireland the “same as” Poland, when placed under the banner of
“universal humanity,” to invoke the rhetoric that characterizes what Lacoue-Labarthe
calls “onto-typo-logy,” yet such “sympathy is inseparable from the acute awareness” that
Miłosz is “ethnic,” and thus “helps ennoble ‘our’ cause (of trying to rescue them)” (Chow
23). Miłosz is thus seen as both a transcendental “type”—a figure seemingly above
ethnic, cultural, or racial identification who expresses universal concerns of humanity—
and implicitly categorized as a Polish (Eastern European) “type,” carrying a quite
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different meaning of ethnic stereotype, of the quality of being “ethnic.” In the process,
there is little or no questioning of this position of victimization, taken to be unambiguous:
Miłosz’s Orientalization of Russia and disidentification from “Slavdom” is accepted as
unproblematic, glossed over, or virtually ignored.
A similar invocation of Western “rescuing” of the oppressed Poland in Miłosz,
which also remains unexamined in critical scholarship, arrives through his need to
introduce Western—especially Anglophone—literature to Poland in order to counter the
communist cultural “contamination” and censorship.23 Simultaneously, he feels that he
must make Polish literature visible, or significant, in metropolitan locales and proceeds to
translate it (this time literally) for Western audiences in hopes that it will become part of
the “world” cultural heritage—and help the Poles forgotten behind the Iron Curtain win
the sympathies of the “democratic” world. Cavanagh appropriately employs Cold War
rhetoric when speaking of both actions: “an unexpected Eastern European invasion of
Anglo-American poetry,” of which is Miłosz but one example, is a revenge for “their
betrayal at Yalta”; alternately, Miłosz’s “rehabilitation” of the Polish poetic discourse
through the introduction of Anglo-American poetry is a “literary version of the Marshall
Plan” (350). What is at stake here, I would argue, is a specifically political dimension of
Miłosz’s seemingly apolitical literary interventions, which is deeply embedded in the
discourses of Eastern European inferiority complex and of the Western “betrayal” of
23
Cavanagh says that “Polish poets and critics alike credit [Milosz] for single-handedly shifting the cultural
axis away from France, which had previously dominated Polish culture and towards poetry written in
English” (346). This shift interestingly coincides with America’s transformation into the politically and
economically most powerful Western nation in the post-war period and with its greater involvement in
Europe through the Marshall plan — Milosz’s act, then, uncovers the more elusive threads that have helped
weave American hegemony.
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Poland through the withdrawal of the Marshall Plan aid and of military support in
opposing the communists and the “barbaric” Soviet Union.
Miłosz frequently complains about the “abandonment” of Poland and other Eastern
European countries by “Western governments” after World War I and II and observes
that such governments “let their generosity show only when it is a question of reducing
some danger to themselves at the cost of shedding the blood of natives somewhere or
other” (“City” 61). This attitude also leads to Miłosz’s engagement in his Nobel
acceptance speech on behalf of the “Other Europe” which was “destined to descend into
‘the heart of darkness’ of the twentieth century” (Nobel Lecture 7). He counteracts this
abandonment by bringing Polish literature to English-speaking audiences through a
critical study, The History of Polish Literature and the anthology Postwar Polish Poetry.
This also allows Miłosz to include an introduction of his own poetry in the former,
“writing” himself into the Polish canon and assuming a position of literary authority
before his audiences.24
But as in the Nabokov’s scenario, I would argue, this act results in a double
“obscuration” at the same time that it makes Miłosz tentatively visible on the
metropolitan literary stage: first, he must translate himself into English to become known
and second, he must exoticize himself as a poet of an oppressed nation, where, unlike in
the West, his “true home is history” and where he speaks “in his poems of subjects of
interest to all citizens” (Witness of Poetry 111; The Captive Mind 175). In a sense,
Miłosz’s self-categorization echoes Fredric Jameson’s much criticized evaluation of
24
See the Bozena Karwowska’s article “Milosz’s Self-Presentation in English-Speaking Countries.”
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Third-World literature as necessarily political and addressing the entire community.25
Miłosz’s thesis on a particular politicization of literature in Poland, whether through
officially endorsed cultural models or through party censorship, is valid in so far as it
suggests a complex interplay between literary production and (un)official politics during
the communist period. However, what is objectionable is a somewhat facile and
monolithic differentiation of this literature from what is assumed to be “mainstream
Western literature.” Such a differentiation results in what Malini Schueller calls the
“ghettoization” of multicultural, or ethnic, literatures, precisely through their
“sacralization” as “repositories of redeeming values” imagined to be “lost” in the bland
and politically ineffectual Western literature (10). In other words, Miłosz’s cultural
politics sets up the liberal multicultural politics, where his texts can be gathered up in a
ghetto of “ethnic” literatures, meant to season, yet remain separate from and not
ultimately affect, the “mainstreamness” of mainstream Anglo-American texts.
Leaving the Ghetto: Journey to the West
In this section I will highlight and explore the potential “lines of flight” in Miłosz
from the ghetto of ethnicity-as-captivity-narrative, the discourse of victimization and the
Orientalist hierarchies that permeate much of his writing about Europe. The discursive
“lines of flight” open up through his periodical journeys to the “West,” beginning with
his youthful, 1931 trip from Wilno through Switzerland, Germany and France, through
his post-World-War-II “defection” to France while acting as a cultural attaché of the
People’s Republic of Poland, to his more or less permanent exile in the United States. At
the outset of the first of these journeys, Miłosz seemingly positions himself as a “reverse
25
See Fredric Jameson’s essay “Third-World Literature in an era of Multinational Capitalism.”
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colonialist,” or as a protagonist in a romanticized story of exploration; however, the
realization of his own marginalization in the “West” through discourses about “Eastern
subhumans” swiftly closes off this option.
Increasingly, Miłosz’s essays, while mapping the topography of cities from Paris to
San Francisco and discussing the “strange customs” of the natives living under
democratic or fascist capitalism, engender a universalist, global perspective which
nevertheless does not merely seek to “survey” and “explain” in order to epistemologically
“capture” or “conquer.” Rather, the peripatetic recognition of himself—and “East
Europeans”—as one of the targets of “Western” racism allows Miłosz to connect the
situation of this disenfranchised group to various other marginalized groups across
Europe and America and critically, to relate the similar mechanisms of exclusion to the
logic of capital and colonialism.
In other words, through his exile, Miłosz is able to articulate an internationalist
perspective in terms of defining common problems and political disadvantages,
distancing himself from the isolated discourse of Polish victimization. Also, he subverts
the discourses of Eurocentrism, according to which accusatory fingers must be pointed at
a non-European Russia in order to merit attention by the “true” Europe. Instead, he
recognizes and tackles the problematic divisions of Europe which make such antagonistic
(dis)identifications possible and Europe is called to task for “refus[ing] to acknowledge
itself as a whole” and “classif[ying] its population into two categories: members of the
family (quarrelsome but respectable) and poor relations” (“Introduction,” Native Realm
2). In “Journey to the West,” mostly an account of his 1931 travels, Miłosz articulates
this disenchantment with a divided Europe, whose colonialist fantasies he first seeks to
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appropriate as an active subject, until he realizes that, as a “Pole,” he is always-already
objectified by these very fantasies. The goal of the journey is significant in itself: Miłosz
and his friends are “lured by the Colonial Exposition in Paris,” and their “love of maps”
incites them to devise a complex exploration route (he likens himself to an imperfect
Vasco de Gama), where they gradually “penetrate into an enchanted land” of the Rhine
forests, imagining “Delaware warriors from the novels of Fenimore Cooper” to be
crouching in the tree branches (“Journey” 58, 63).
At every step, however, his attempt at casting himself as a Western subject is
frustrated: in Zurich, the “belief in this tidy country” is undermined by the unavailability
of free movement (65). “Private villas” which line the Swiss lakes make Miłosz think that
“ownership is pitiless, that it works against those that it excludes.” In this respect, Miłosz
and his group are excluded not only because they are foreign vagabonds who do not
“own” property, but because they also do not “own” the correct national identity (65).
This becomes even more painfully obvious in the increasingly Nazi Germany, where they
encounter the Deutsche Jugend bent on changing the country into “a myth of blood and
soil,” and acting “overly polite, overly quiet,” yet “contemptuous and hostile to
foreigners” (67). The culmination of racism toward the “subhumans” from the East
occurs not in Nazi Germany but in democratic France: arriving at the border of Germany
and France, Poland’s “spiritual sister,” Miłosz encounters a sign which prohibits
“Gypsies, Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians” from entering the country (67). As a result
of the recognition that Poland is but a “poor relation” of its “spiritual sister,” Miłosz’s
subsequent account of his enchantment with France and the Colonial exposition in
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particular, is tainted by the contemplation of this European—indeed global—dynamic of
racism, shaped as it is by material inequalities.
France in 1931 is for Miłosz, as it was for Walter Benjamin, a site of
phantasmagoric modernity: “France had embodied itself in capitalism or capitalism had
embodied itself in France until the two became one” (69). On the one hand, this
modernity is expressed in terms of its mythical power, in terms of its dreamlike quality:
Miłosz and his friends approach it as a “birthplace of freedom and revolution,” whose
“beauty evokes the greatest tenderness” (69). An eastern flâneur to whom Paris is
accessible only at the threat of deportation, Miłosz writes, “We inhaled Paris with our
nostrils . . . . Where the wide sidewalks changed into a marketplace, we took pleasure in
submerging ourselves in the human stream, its color, movement, gestures and glances.
We lost count of the streets, we forgot about our own existence . . . the promise was
infinite; it was the promise of life” (69–70). The “promise of life” is likewise the
mythical content of the Colonial Exposition, which panoramically projects the promise of
order and well-being within the French Empire, recreating (“mapping,” categorizing) the
colonized peoples, animals and plants in a “natural,” i.e., ghettoized environment for the
admiring European visitors of the Exposition. At this juncture the discursive ghettoization
which I discussed in relation to Miłosz can be brought into connection with the
“material” ghettoization of “ethnics” at the Colonial Exposition, which symbolically
expresses the authority of the French to categorize “others” and present them to its own
audience as a spectacle.
Significantly, at this point Miłosz’s attention switches to the conditions of
possibility of such narcissistic imperial spectacles, in which even the poorest Frenchmen
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are complicit through profiting “from all this power and wealth”: abroad, the “mow[ing]
down of the colored peoples, acquir[ing] of countries and ports,” and at home, the fact of
the “unemployed Polish vagrants in the dives near Saint-Paul, the smell of poverty in the
‘Palais du People,’ the incredible ugliness of family gravestones in Pere Lachaise
cemetery, fit for the heroes of Flaubert” (72). In lieu of the splendors of the “Western”
empire, Miłosz focuses on the “suffering humanity in France” and relates the racism
toward the then Polish “mass of workers” in search of jobs to the later racisms toward the
North African “labor force used for the heaviest jobs and getting the least pay” (68). The
French press stages a spectacle of the thieving and murderous Poles in order to enforce
their alienation from the “good” French citizens: they “were not necessarily considered
members of the white race, but rather were perceived as the sort of foreigners whom
people frighten children with, like Algerians later on” (“The Prioress,” To Begin Where I
Am 94). Throughout his essays, Miłosz frequently and symptomatically, relates the
situation of Polish emigrants in the West and of working class and peasant Poles and
Lithuanians in his caste-based homeland, to the disenfranchisement of the assorted
foreigners in Western Europe and of the “black slaves” and “redskins” in North America.
In fact, the United States comes to take the place of France as a site of evolving
modernity in the post-World War II period and of what Miłosz sees as an intensification
of capitalist brutality, de-individualization, conformism and materialism, imposed also as
a solution onto a grieving Europe, struggling to cleanse its memory of the horrors of
World War II. There is a troubling disconnect, for Miłosz, between the “European
spirit’s” hatred of itself, the “pandemonium of all the disgust, bitterness and hangovers . .
. justified with the help of fashionable discourses on la nausée, the absurd, alienation”
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and the European body’s “eating, drinking and buying [of] automobiles and refrigerators
(by the grace of America)” (“The Agony of the West,” Visions from San Francisco Bay
118–19). However, this schizophrenic dualism and an escape into materialism is not a
sign of an inevitable decline of “the Occident”—Miłosz is careful to highlight and
challenge the popular narratives predicting doomsday of the “West”—rather, instead of
precipitating Europe into a new revolution or into an oblivious consumerism “what
seemed a poison became an agent of affluent stabilization” (120).
Nevertheless, this “affluent stabilization” in itself seems to dull the intellect, to
ossify, to empty of meaningful content and the United States becomes its most extreme
embodiment. Throughout Visions from San Francisco Bay, Miłosz records his
disenchantment with the endless repetitiveness of American landscapes and its cities,
which, unlike a European city like Wilno or Paris, prevent one from developing intimate
attachments to one’s surroundings: “The abstract city and the abstract theater of nature,
something one drives past, are the American metaphor,” as highways are replacing the
“little streets where ordinary daily life once ran its course” (“A Certain Illness Difficult to
Name,” Visions 38–39). This increasingly repetitive, abstract space, the ubiquitous
“nowhere,” is for Fredric Jameson an effect of the “increasingly abstract . . . networks of
American reality . . . whose extreme form is the power network of so-called multinational
capitalism itself” (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 127).
Jameson describes the frustration, visible in Miłosz’s Visions from San Francisco Bay,
with the difficulty of cognitively mapping and representing this space. Miłosz’s
preference for Wilno or Paris, the cities in which he ca presumably find his “place”
through intimate attachment, points to an anxiety over the effect that Jameson believes
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the abstract space of multinational capitalism has on “an older kind of existential
positioning of ourselves in Being—the human body in the natural landscape, the
individual in the older village or organic community, even the citizen in a nation-state”
(127).
The alienated uniformity of the abstract space is also characteristic of what Miłosz
identifies as a particular American notion of “virtue” which makes “affluent
stabilization” possible in the first place and “compels one to join the ‘rat race,’ to accept
the given, to achieve, act, strive, to conform to the morals of one’s neighbor” (“On
Virtue” Visions 154). America signals a move toward a total appropriation and
regimentation of life as one is continually reminded that “uniqueness is an illusion,” and
that one is “reduced to a number”: the biopolitics is perfected, as Miłosz notes, “From all
sides, I am besieged by television, magazines, films, billboards with incitements to health
and happiness; how I should wash, eat and dress is an object of someone’s concern”
(“What is Mine,” Visions 70–71).
“America, Europe’s illegitimate child,” has perhaps accomplished its “calling” of
making the individual feel absolutely powerless in the face of a “social order” seemingly
predetermined and “as regular as the seasons” (“The Image of the Beast,” Visions 69).
And yet, for Miłosz, this feeling of defeat is naïve and illusory in itself: his essays carry a
revolutionary impulse through an exploration of the particular possibilities of change,
which entails the development of a critical discourse that would challenge the narrative of
capital, of work and obedience and the cultural hierarchies and material inequalities that
it establishes. Against the “sign of the Moloch” that manifests itself across America as
social uniformity and a seeming ossification of choices, Miłosz offers his reflections on
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Allen Ginsburg’s poetry, on Herbert Marcuse’s utopianism and on the student and hippie
protests that “oppose industry with idleness” and “obedience with political rebellion, stiff
dignity with poetry, music and dance” (“On Virtue” 155). In a related gesture, Miłosz
considers Marxist thought and Eastern European communist revolutions and regimes
inspired (at least nominally) by Marxism as spaces from which to challenge Western
liberal identity politics compounded by the “rat race” in work and consumption patterns
and underwritten by racism toward and exploitation of the Eastern (African, Arabic)
“others.”
Miłosz describes his technique as “telescopic,” that is, as one that encompasses not
only “different points of the globe but also different moments of time” (“Introduction” 3).
However, he does not insist on a chronological, unified historical narrative that would
impose a certain order on a jumble of events as the authoritative account, but rather
considers historical events in what Walter Benjamin calls “constellations,” in terms of
insights which, put together, such events help to illuminate. These momentary “images”
of different times are seen “in parallel, colliding with one another, overlapping,” and
indeed, Miłosz frequently considers the overlapping significance of several seemingly
disparate events in Lithuanian/Polish history: the historic Commonwealth, its various
partitionings by Germany and Russia, its colonization by Western capital pre-World War
II, its invasion by Nazis, its invasion by Soviet troops and the controversial legacy of
communism (3). In this respect, the fascist “utter contempt for the ‘subhumans’ to the
east” does not structurally differ from the “no Poles allowed” sign at the French border
(“The Prioress” 89). Miłosz critically considers not only the democratic West’s racism
toward Eastern Europeans, but also the absence of global awareness of German anti-
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Semitism toward and the Holocaust of “millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and
prisoners of other nationalities,” whose extermination is overshadowed by accounts of
Jewish suffering (Nobel Lecture 16).
In this light, Marxism becomes as a political path that could have potentially
challenged such an East-West dynamic. In the pre-World-War-II period, it is presented as
a necessarily ethical option—especially for the Jewish intelligentsia in Poland and
Lithuania—in the climate of German fascism and Polish/Lithuanian right-wing politics.
Communists, although their ideology is problematic for Miłosz, nevertheless awake him
to “Silesia’s slum districts; the Zyrardow textile factories, whose owner was a French
capitalist . . . ; Poland’s split, as an undeveloped territory, into a handful of rich . . . and
millions of poor” (“Marxism,” Native Realm 121). In the post-war period, Marxism,
although now inevitably associated with Soviet occupation, still carries potential in
Miłosz as a “chaos of new forms” and ideas, as a “shield” against Western capitalism,
against “those who spend all their time earning, spending and amusing themselves”—and
this influences his decision to stick, at least for a time, to the People’s Republic of Poland
in Paris (“Tiger,” To Begin 157). Miłosz credits communists for “exterminating the
acquisitive instinct,” with which he sympathizes out of an “inborn aversion to counting,
measuring and weighing,” and out of hatred for the exploitation of Polish/Lithuanian
peasantry and laborers, which leads him to not condemn the “destruction of private shops
and farms” (“Ancestry” 33).
This is not to downplay the importance of Miłosz’s virulent condemnation of
communism as a regime and as a philosophy, which is necessarily linked to his view of
Russia as an Asiatic backwater and which frequently relies on the Cold War jargon and
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reductive equivocation of Marxist philosophy, Stalinist regimes and any other form of
communist/leftist politics. Indeed, he has achieved fame primarily as a dissident critic of
communism and earned the title of a traitor from Eastern and Western communist parties
alike. In “Marxism,” he describes the popularity of Marxist thought and communist
politics as a result of a world that has become too difficult “to grasp either scientifically
or humanistically”; it draws “primitive” minds with a “need for faith” and a “simplified
outlook on life” (114). He equates Communism with Stalinism, portraying it as a bundle
of simplistic, yet messianic clichés, as a “cathecism or a brochure” for those who need to
believe in progress, to overcome “the feeling of powerlessness in the face of chaos” (117,
114). The messianism of communism, the perception of communism-as-religion, is
explicitly associated with Russia and its aggressive, unnatural mixture of “revolutionary
theory and the dream Russians had of themselves as a chosen nation” (123). As such,
Marxism can only appeal to the young and psychologically immature, who are searching
for comradeship and meaning of life.
In Chapter 4, we will see how Kundera and Grass downplay the legacy of Marxism
by employing a similar discourse of pathologization, with its pseudo-psychoanalytical
discussions of “herd” mentality, individual insecurity and/or frustration with personal
life. Indeed, in this essay Miłosz talks about his (and his friends’) youthful engagement
with Marxism, which already implicitly exonerates him—he could not have known any
better then—and yet, he is also at pains to show that he never fully absorbed Marxist
ideology. He feels increasingly alienated from Marxists friends; he prefers St. Augustine
to Lenin and wonders, “What could I talk about when the uninhibited exchange of
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thoughts and impressions had been replaced by the certainties of Progress and
Revolution?” (119).
While I argue that this particular critique of Marxism/communism is politically
problematic and lacks critical nuance, I also want to highlight other strands of Miłosz’s
critique which come from “within” the space opened by Marxism/communism, so to
speak, not with an aim to intellectually dismiss and pathologize, but to perform Marxism
in the sense that Derrida describes it, as “a radical critique, . . . a procedure ready to
undertake its self-critique . . . explicitly open to its own transformation, re-evaluation,
self-interpretation” (Specters 88). In “The Dance of Death and Human Inequality,” for
instance, Miłosz considers the specifically “new, more fully developed concept of
equality” that enters the world stage with Marx’s thought and socialist movements
(Visions 164). He discusses the problems of bureaucracy and “anti-democratic, hierarchic
structure” within Eastern European socialist societies which originally had this new
concept of equality in mind and wonders if these had to do with the issues of
revolutionary leadership, the split between intellectuals and workers, or the logistic
difficulties of politically mobilizing as active democratic subjects large segments of the
working population (165).
In this light it also becomes possible to read Miłosz’s difficulty with adopting
Marxism as an inquiry into the proper name of Marxism, of what it means to be a
Marxist. Any unquestioning self-categorization would lead, for Miłosz, to dangerous,
dogmatic identity politics and to societies grouped around the idea of the “proletarian” or
the “Aryan” (“Letter to Jerzy Andrzejewski,” To Begin 201). A number of his essays that
deal with Polish intellectuals who associated themselves with the communist regime,
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such as “Tiger,” “Alpha,” “Beta,” “Gamma,” or “Delta,”26 similarly focus less on the
“doctrine” of Marxism/communism or on the intellectuals “as Marxists,” and more on
these intellectuals’ attempts to negotiate it, re-evaluate it, transform it, identify its blind
spots—especially in relation to a regime that frequently discourages such blasphemous
exercises. Thus, Miłosz recognizes that there is a remainder to Marxism that the regime
does not take into account, echoing what Derrida calls a “spirit of Marxism,” which
exceeds and haunts Marxism as ontology. He says,
even in a vulgarized Marxism there is “something” that eludes the grasp of both
those who profess it and those who disparage it. It is as if a considerably greater
phenomenon were imprisoned in imperfect symbols, which distort its contents, or
as if an elephant had been reduced to the shape of its trunk. I suppose one cannot
call oneself a Marxist or an anti-Marxist with impunity because that “something”
perceived by Marx will take revenge by turning each of these positions into its
opposite. (“Marxism” 15)
It would seem that this “something” that turns Marxism into its opposite is
precisely this attempt to capture it in slogans, to establish it as a regime that must not be
questioned, to radically destroy its utopian potential for self-critique, for fluidity and
irreducibility. In this respect, Miłosz again opposes “the spirit of Marxism” to Western
liberal democracy and capitalism: it makes Eastern European “social reality . . . flexible,
not rigid, not established as it is in the West,” and this indeterminacy, he believes, helps
one “to grow” intellectually. He sticks by the People’s Republic of Poland because of its
“chaos of new forms,” a utopian free-play of ideas and social options (“Tiger” 157).
Obviously, this can also lead to a dangerous cultural essentialism, which, as we
have seen, is closely connected with the casting of Eastern Europeans as “ethnic,” albeit
26
See Madeline Levine’s “Warnings to the West: Czeslaw Milosz’s Political Prose of the 1950s” for
detailed historical and biographical information on the Polish intellectuals hiding behind Milosz’s code
names.
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through a discourse of exceptionalism. It would be possible to consider in parallel
Miłosz’s praise of Polish literature, seen as necessarily imbued with political, collective
values and importantly different from “Western,” largely de-politicized literature and his
praise of a “typical Eastern European” (like himself) who differs positively from a person
living in “modern civilization” which “creates uniform boredom and destroys
individuality” (“City” 68). The Eastern European “ethnic” type has “intellectual avidity,
fervor in discussion, a sense of irony, a freshness of feeling” which seem to be closely
related to the lack of form and certainties in his/her society: “Where I grew up, there was
no uniform gesture, no social code, no clear rules for behavior at table” (67–68). The
glorification of the “lack” of order that is typically associated with Eastern Europe and
through which it is possible to cast its people as types in the first place, seems to perform
a reverse Eurocentric gesture through a sacralization of “ethnics.” And yet, my interest in
Miłosz’s writing lies in the possibility of theorizing the “difference” opened up through
the legacy of “imperfect” modernization, economic “inferiority,” frequent political
subjugation and partitioning—and eventually, the communist critique of such interactions
between East and West—as a strategic move outside of Orientalist discourses such as
Eurocentrism, out of reverse Eurocentrism and out of multicultural discourses that
emancipate “difference” from abjection.
Unlike Brodsky, Miłosz does not easily fold back into a discourse of Eurocentrism,
or even of a reverse Eurocentrism. He is on to something and this “something” similarly
appears in the interstices of and haunts the seemingly facile categorizations of “Eastern
Europeans,” “Westerners,” “the Polish,” or “Russians,” which are the strategies of
identity politics. In other words, he resuscitates and explores this “difference” not
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solely—and always—to glorify or declaim a particular culture, East or West, but rather to
signal social and political alternatives deemed possible in this “different” place. In this
respect, he writes “Central Europe” and Wilno as places which carry this utopian
possibility through a mixture of antagonistic yet co-habiting and permeating cultures and
languages, through an opposition to nationalist and/or imperialist politics with antinationalist movements (e.g., Jewish intellectual tradition, communist movements) and
through an attempt to challenge the established class divisions, notions of private
property, or the pursuit of happiness through “earning, spending and amusing” oneself.
This is indeed akin to Miłosz’s attitude toward his native language, which, unlike
Brodsky, he uses for most of his literary production (although he also wrote a number of
pieces in English and helped translate much of his work). Although he believes, in a
Bakhtinian fashion, that any notion of a “same tongue” is an “illusion where uncountable
individual languages fill space with a jamming noise,” writing in Polish still helps him to
preserve a symbolic link with Wilno and the exigencies of Polish, Czech and Russian
political situations and finally, erects a “protective barrier between him and a civilization
in the throes of puerility” (“Notes on Exile,” To Begin 18; “After All,” To Begin 53;
“Who Was I?” To Begin 11–12). Writing in Polish has little to do with Miłosz attempting
to “reterritorialize” himself into a patriotic Polish identity, which he abhors; rather, it
serves as a link to this “different” place, conceived in political, instead of cultural or
ethnic terms and simultaneously distances him from the language of capital, aggressive
consumerism and the “virtues” of work and obedience. Similarly, his “Westernness” and
his “universality” serves “as a faithful ally in [his] revolt against Polishness” (“Who Was
I?” 11).
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This position of being “always and everywhere ill at ease,” encompassing the
discourses of liberal capitalism, party communism, or “Polishness,” also provides an
opportunity to challenge the topography of Miłosz’s writing as discussed at the beginning
of Chapter 3 (11). Miłosz here does not see “East” or “West” as monolithic,
unchangeable entities that can be evaluated, as a whole, positively or negatively; rather,
he borrows and combines ideas and practices, again signaling not only a utopian “Central
European,” but global possibility. From Central/Eastern Europe, Miłosz lauds Jewish
intellectual movements in combination with communist movements, which destroy the
notion of “private property”, as well as the “property” of nationality. These in turn are
combined with Miłosz’s insights into American society in Visions from San Francisco
Bay which, unlike European societies, is seen to be far more radical in its concept of
multiethnicity and multiculturalism—as well as in its anti-aristocratic stance and its
democratic educational opportunities for large segments of population.
And yet, Miłosz is critical of the American multicultural segregation, its racist
discrimination and its official articulation as a touchy-feely, get-along ideology. Rather,
he opts for a less whitewashed version of multiculturalism that, for him, is embodied by
Wilno: this version appears more antagonistic and therefore more sincere, yet it has
historically also been shaped by the impossibility of segregation because of the various
peoples living in such close proximity and has been imbued with the utopian impulse of
challenging basic material inequalities between ethnic and religious groups. In Chapter 4,
I will discuss Günter Grass’s critique of the disappearance of this particular possibility
with the waning of the (at least nominally) anti-nationalist communist paradigm and with
the exportation of liberal multicultural politics to Poland in the post-Wall era. In Grass,
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this version of multiculturalism is underwritten by racist identity politics, a strengthening
of old East-West hierarchies and a combined economic and social neocolonial situation
across post-communist countries.
CHAPTER 4
DEVIANT STEPCHILD OF EUROPEAN HISTORY: COMMUNIST EASTERN
EUROPE IN MILAN KUNDERA AND GÜNTER GRASS
In Chapter 4, I turn to Milan Kundera and Günter Grass in order to explore how
their promotion of the myth of civilized, democratic and enlightened European traditions
allow them to critique Eastern European communist regimes as “distortions” and
“deviations” from those traditions. While an Orientalist articulation of Eastern Europe in
Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz surfaces through seemingly naturalized geographic
discourses that delineate civilizational hierarchies between “Eastern,” “Central” and
“Western” Europe, Kundera and Grass employ historicist narratives of Europe’s
“progress” toward an Enlightened modernity and resulting fulfillment of liberaldemocratic ideals, which allows them to Orientalize communism as a non-European
aberration and a non-modern obstacle to the linear trajectory of European development.
This gesture, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have argued, in fact characterizes Eurocentric
discourses, which “project a linear historical trajectory leading from classical Greece to
imperial Rome and then to the metropolitan capitals of Europe and the US. . .attribut[ing]
to the West an inherent progress” from which Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin are mere
“aberrations” (2).
Kundera and Grass criticize Western European democracies for betraying the ideals
of the Enlightenment as well: Kundera is offended by “vulgar” consumerism and
abdication to mass media and entertainment and Grass denounces the Nazi past,
bureaucratization, capitalist inequalities. Nevertheless, the Enlightened ideals themselves
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142
bear a definite Western European stamp, becoming master-signifiers in comparison to
which any political alternative is inevitably inferior, or even not properly “historical.”
What is especially interesting is how in their texts written after 1989 the very myth of a
European civilization and its unified historical development is brought into a crisis
through a portrayal of Western Europe's less than noble comportment in the proclaimed
“rescuing” of Eastern Europeans: the emphasis shifts to renewed colonization, capitalist
exploitation and patronizing, racist attitudes towards Eastern Europeans. For this purpose,
then, I intend to analyze Kundera's brief novels Slowness and Ignorance and Grass's The
Call of the Toad, written after the downfall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, in
constellation with their earlier writings on communism and formulations of a European
ideal.
In The Call of the Toad, which discusses the post-communist rapprochement of
Germany and Poland, I explore how Grass exposes behind the seemingly “enlightened”
and reconciliatory discourse of multicultural European coexistence, potential for hostile,
racist identity politics and the collusion of this discourse with a renewed economic
subjugation of Poland by German capital. In Slowness, I am interested in Kundera's
tracing of the symbolic silencing of Eastern Europeans within a discourse of a unified
Europe, especially his critique of the efforts by Western media to police Eastern
European communist history into teleologies of democracy, capitalism and universal
human rights. Kundera not only problematizes the idealization of Europe, or the
European Union as a bearer of the most progressive traditions of European history, but
uncharacteristically affirms Czechoslovakia's communist past, trying to reconsider its
utopian promise, as well as its legacy, in a somewhat conciliatory way. This motif
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especially haunts Ignorance, where a recurring invocation of communist ideals and
experiences creates conditions for a critique of the new “foreignness” of Prague brought
on by capitalist privatization.
“The Mass Production of Martyr Virtue”: Kundera's Graphomania before 1989
Czech dissident Milan Jungmann famously accused Kundera of trivializing the
Czech communist experience to market it to the supposedly shallow Western audiences,
thus engaging in a “mass production of martyr virtue” (120). While Jungmann discredits
his own assessment of Kundera by assuming a patronizing attitude toward Western
audiences, reducing Kundera's texts to pornography and showing some bitterness over
Kundera's “fake” dissidence due to his emigration to France, his description of Kundera's
own efforts at composing a martyr image for himself and for Czechoslovakia in the West
is nevertheless right on. Alert to the Cold War climate which would inspire Westerners
(on both the Left and the Right) to categorize Kundera as a martyred anti-regime
dissident and analyze his texts in this light,1 Kundera himself has, also famously, opposed
the purely political or historical readings of his novels. Echoing Czesław Miłosz’s and
Joseph Brodsky’s approaches discussed in Chapter 3, he has insisted that he examines the
various “existential situations” of his characters, regardless of the political regime or
country (Art of the Novel 36). His preface to The Joke declares this novel a “love story”
in an attempt to complicate political readings; he has argued that reading works of socalled Eastern European authors via the “wretched political code” of their countries is
equal to the work of “Stalinist dogmatists” (“Comedy is Everywhere” 6).
1
For instance, see Michelle Woods' “A Very British Bohemian: Reception of Milan Kundera and his work
in Britain” and Jean Bessiere's “The Reception of Milan Kundera in France.”
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It is easy to support this self-assessment with numerous examples from Kundera's
texts: in The Art of the Novel, for instance, he compares Eastern communist
authoritarianism with Western media authoritarianism; in The Unbearable Lightness of
Being, “kitsch” and “conformism” are discussed as universal human conditions, in both
their Eastern communist and Western democratic manifestations. In this way, Kundera
has managed to seduce many critics into taking seriously his rejection of the title of
dissident writer and his claim to being apolitical and universally applicable. From those
who argue that Kundera is an “existential” rather than a “political” writer,2 to those who
insist that he should be more political and/or are disappointed with his seeming leveling
of democracy and communism,3 many critics have missed the political—or more
precisely, civilizational—hierarchies that his texts establish.
In the pages that follow, I argue that, contrary to what Kundera may say, he has
embraced rather than rejected the role and authority of a Czech dissident in France, his
adopted country, primarily through insisting on the destruction of “European”
Czechoslovakia at the hands of “non-European” Soviets. Much of his production, mostly
before 1989, delineates clear civilizational divisions, hierarchies and myths of historical
origin associated with his ideal of Europe, enhancing both the image of Czechoslovakia
in the West and invoking their responsibility for “abandoning” Czechoslovakia to
communist “barbarians.” Simultaneously, Kundera re-presents, “writes” himself as both a
dissident from a specific communist country and as a pan-European citizen, at once a
2
3
Fred Misurella, Martha Kuhlman and Maria Nemcova Banerjee are examples of such critics.
Roger Kimball and Norman Podhoretz are both disappointed that Kundera doesn't denounce Eastern
communism more forcefully than Western democracy. David Lodge “forces” a political reading on
Kundera even as he accepts his claim to being apolitical, arguing that Kundera's life under communism
leaves an indelible political mark on his writing.
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(temporary) outsider who can show to the inexperienced sympathizers of
communism/leftist liberalism in France the dangers of communism and an insider who
warns that Czechoslovakian destiny may prefigure the destiny of all Europe. Although
Kundera insists on a distinction between “Europe” and “non-Europe,” his parameters are
nevertheless a variation on the familiar culturally and politically charged discourses that
position “Western Europe” as civilizationally superior to “Eastern Europe.” As in
Czesław Miłosz, this type of intra-European Orientalism in Kundera is somewhat
obfuscated—and modified—by his praise of Central Europe as an “uncertain zone of
small nations” between the two poles. Additionally, he frequently disparages Western
European consumerism and postmodernity in general and employs a seemingly neutral
term Europe, defined as a “culture” rather than “territory” (“The Tragedy of Central
Europe” 221).4
Kundera defines as Europe a unified cultural development associated with “ancient
Greece and Judeo-Christian thought” (“Tragedy” 218). This, as we will see, enshrines a
historicist account of European development, which, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty,
epistemologically underlies European thought of history as historicity and depends on a
certain treatment of time: on the idea of development from “non-modern” to “modern,”
on the notion of progress from “past” to “present” (23). For Chakrabarty, historicity,
which he also terms “analytic” history because of its fundamental connection to the
Enlightenment ideal of reason, always-already contains a colonizing gesture in that it
4
Kundera's Orientalism and its justification frequently go unquestioned in Kundera criticism. Nemcova
Banerjee, for instance, argues against Kundera's “Europocentrism” by describing Europe as a “personal
metaphor for the metaphysical territory” in Kundera's novels (Terminal Paradox 9). Hana Pichova and
Ladislav Matejka accept Kundera's qualification of “Central Europe” as a given. On the other side, Michael
Cooke challenges Kundera's divisions into the “rational” West and the “irrational” East, whereas Tim
Parnell accuses Kundera of creating a glorified master-narrative of the European cultural development
which homogenizes such disparate authors as Cervantes, Rabelais and Sterne.
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insists on a “the validity of a unified, rational, historical narrative” which will tend to
exclude “other” (typically non-European) experiences as not properly historical—either
because they are not “translatable” into the language of progress and development, or
because it “translates” them as non- or pre-modern (18). Kundera does not focus on the
religious component of European cultural development; rather, he means the
development of an intellectual tradition that nurtures original thought, individual right,
skepticism, doubt, play and satire. The development of the Christian society of “feeling”
and “sentimentality” was—in the West, predictably—complemented by this intellectual
spirit of doubt and play explicitly from the Renaissance onwards: “It was then that the
West truly came into its own” (“An Introduction to a Variation” 470).
Not surprisingly, Kundera designates the European Enlightenment as the apogee in
the development of this tradition because of its allegedly libertine spirit, its satirical
irreverence and its use of reason for an exploration of “being” rather than for “the police,
the law, the world of money and crime, the army, the State” (Art 8). He traces the
manifestations of this spirit in the European novel, also imagined as a narrative of unified
development and originating with Diderot, Cervantes, Rabelais and Sterne, who “reach
heights of playfulness, or lightness, never scaled before or since” (15). Hence, reason that
is used instrumentally, first for purposes of capitalist production and regimentation
toward the end of the eighteenth century and later for similar purposes in communist
societies, is seen by Kundera as a deviation from and a corruption of the “gentle, tender
reason” of the Enlightenment—it constitutes humanity's fall from grace (Slowness 31).
When reason is used to achieve total rationality, “pure irrationality. . .seizes the world
stage” (Art 10).
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It is this “irrationality” that, to Kundera, characterizes modern societies in both
Eastern and Western Europe. Throughout his novels, irrationality is associated with
bureaucracy, social conformism and the mass production of everything, destroying
original thought—and the novel—and approximating what Theodor Adorno calls “the
culture industry.” In Western Europe, “the cultural elite” has yielded to “the elite of the
mass media apparatus”; in Eastern Europe, to “the elite of the police apparatus” (Art
127). Ideologies have consistently become watered down to a few simplistic slogans and
clichés, in the contemporary era replaced by isolated and fragmented television images
designed to brainwash the masses and announcing what Kundera calls the reign of
“imagology” (Immortality). Here we arrive at another evil of the post-Enlightenment
Europe that Kundera consistently denounces: the crowd mentality associated with any
utopia, group belief, political protest and of course, any revolutionary endeavor.
Charles Molesworth calls Kundera a “model emigre” because he denounces
Russian totalitarianism yet without the “anti-communist bile” that would alienate him
from liberal audiences (65). Indeed, his critique of Soviet communism endeared him both
to French right-wing and left-wing audiences in the 1960s and 70s: to the former, for
obvious reasons and to the latter, because it was complemented by Kundera's seemingly
equal denouncement of Western capitalism and consumerism, his own (much repressed
since) communist affiliation in Czechoslovakia and his image as an opponent of
Stalinism, supporter of the Dubcek regime, the Prague Spring and “socialism with a
human face.” However, his repeated attacks on any leftist politics as a manifestation of
crowd mentality and thus a deviation from European “reason” portrays Kundera's politics
as rather conservative, if not simplistic. In light of the earlier discussion of Kundera’s
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predilection for “analytic,” unifying historicist narratives, this attitude is also subtly
Eurocentric in the sense that it ascribes to a leftist “other” a collectivist (Asian, African,
etc.) rather than individualist (European) spirit, irrationality rather than rationality. Not
only does this downplay the singularity of each group politics and its endeavors, but it
effectively depoliticizes and patronizes those who participate in such endeavors, seeking
the roots of their political engagement in a warped psyche or a nostalgia for greatness. In
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera derides Western leftist-liberals who, in a
desire to conform and support all the right causes, participate in the “Grand March of the
European Left”; in Immortality he argues that what makes people fight in revolutions or
protest is not reason—let alone urgency—but a “hypertrophied soul” and a yearning to
“step onto the stage of history” (212). This “lyrical, neurotic expectation of some great
deed” is also responsible for French penchant for “radical ideologic postures,”
compensating for France's diminishing political and cultural power (“Afterword: A Talk
with the Author” 231).
To sum up, Kundera's notion of Europe is one of a unified master-narrative of
development with European Enlightenment as its culmination, imagined to be corrupted
West and East through the development of capitalism, technology, bureaucracy,
communism, mass media and mass production. The history of this cultural demise is also
the history of European revolutions. But while Western leftist may receive a mild slap on
the fingers from Kundera, the dissident expert on communism, for their rush to
participate in Europe's “Grand March,” Eastern leftists (especially Soviets and their
foreign lackeys) are accused of bungling the tradition altogether, their revolutions “a
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parody condensation of the European revolutionary tradition. . .the continuation and
grotesque fulfillment of the era of European revolutions” (Art 40).
This statement epitomizes Kundera's treatment of “Eastern Europeans” which most
frequently equals Russians and/or Soviets, but may also encompass other Eastern
communists. In Kundera, both Russians and communists are either entirely alien to
Europe, promoting the dangerous politics and culture against which Kundera defines his
European ideal and its (historical) borders, or else they are somewhat Europeanized by
virtue of geographic proximity—as in Brodsky and Miłosz—but even then only as
grotesque, deformed mimics of European achievements who effectively ruin even the
idea of revolution, itself not the most glorious European tradition. Thus Europe comes to
signify “Western Europe,” as Kundera associates most qualities he praises throughout his
texts as universally good and desirable—reason, satire and cynicism, individualism—
with France, England, Germany, or Spain (broadly, the tradition of the European
Enlightenment). “Eastern Europe,” usually Russia, is associated with the non-European,
essentially Orientalist opposites (feeling, blind belief, crowd mentality), never
contributing anything by itself; rather, it is judged based on how well it can adapt to the
Enlightenment traditions.
In the paradigm in which Russia is absolutely alien to Europe and simply cannot
help it, it is a “separate civilization” because its history “differs from the history of the
west precisely in its lack of a Renaissance and of the spirit that resulted”—presumably
the spirit of the Enlightenment, which Russia also “lacks” (“Introduction” 474).
Predictably, here Kundera points out the continuity between czarist absolutism and
communist authoritarianism: “totalitarian Russian civilization” is a “radical negation of
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the modern West”; it is a “singular civilization, an other civilization” (“Tragedy” 222,
218). The brilliance of Kundera's Orientalism, however, is embodied by a seemingly
paradoxical statement, that communism is both a negation and a fulfillment of Russia's
history. It negates Russia's religiosity, which portrays it as something unnatural, violent,
as a rupture in continuity, but it also presents a perfect continuity with its religious spirit
and czarism, symbolizing Russia's immutable “irrationality” and representing a
“fulfillment of its centralizing tendencies and its imperial dreams” (“Tragedy” 218). In
this respect, Russia is excluded from the narrative of European progress and effectively
othered, as a pre-modern monstrosity, incapable of experiencing development.
In the paradigm in which Russia still has the potential to become “European,”
Europe is more explicitly portrayed as a “culture” with some mobility despite geographic
barriers. Kundera praises Russia's attempts to draw closer to Europe in the nineteenth
century and at this point includes Russian novelists in the master-narrative of the
development of the European novel: “no one has escaped the impact of the great Russian
novels, which remain an integral part of the common European cultural legacy”
(“Tragedy” 218). In The Art of the Novel and elsewhere, he particularly praises Tolstoy,
Gogol and Chekhov as contributors to this legacy, while his attitude toward Dostoevsky
is divided. Dostoevsky receives some praise: for instance, The Possessed to Kundera
exemplifies a successful polyphonic novel and Dostoevsky can be a non-dogmatic, “great
thinker” in his novels (Art 78–9). But Kundera is probably better known for his vitriolic
assessment of Dostoevsky in “An Introduction to a Variation,” where Dostoevsky comes
to exemplify all that is evil about Russia: his “universe of overblown gestures, murky
depths and aggressive sentimentality” symbolizes Russia's communist ideology and
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occupation of Czechoslovakia (469). Somehow, this image of Russian literature
dominates over the “enlightened” Chekhovs and the Tolstoys. Although the history of the
European novel begins in the West, it predictably ends in the East: “About half a century
ago the history of the novel came to a halt in the empire of Russian Communism” (Art
14). The novels written during the communist regime by and large do not count; because
they promote totalitarian propaganda, they discover nothing new about “being.” They
come “after the history of the novel” and place themselves “outside that history,”
symbolizing the way in which Kundera banishes Russia from the narrative of European
history (Art 14).
While the novel—and with it, European culture—dies in the communist East, its
death is prefigured in what Kundera calls “Central European” novels, in the era of
“terminal paradoxes of the Modern Era” following World War I. Faced with the
“impersonal, uncontrollable, incalculable” monster of “History,” Kafka, Musil, Broch,
Gombrowicz and others examine how the very existential categories, such as “freedom,”
“future,” or “crime” change their meaning (Art 12). As in Miłosz, “Central Europe”
becomes an exceptional cultural terrain in Europe, both the apogee of its Enlightenment
and inheritor of the “irreverent spirit” of Sterne and others and a symbol of the
approaching death of Europe.
That Kundera, despite his stated cosmopolitan Europeanism, resorts to such a
regional-cultural construct—one which also affirms its unspoken complements,
“Western” and “Eastern” Europe—reveals several crucial concepts in his vision of
Europe.5 In grouping in “Central European” culture the literatures of Austria, Poland,
5
Molesworth also critiques the arbitrariness of Kundera's regionalism, wondering why Central Europe
would be more representative of European destiny, than, say, Western or Southeastern Europe. He argues
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Czechoslovakia and Hungary (and sometimes even Hungarian-Yugoslavs, as is the case
with Danilo Kis),6 Kundera attempts to break, but not do away with, the civilizational
boundaries between East and West, arguing that Czechoslovakia is more similar to
Austria, for instance, than to Russia. This concept is illustrated by his rejection of the
(self) identification of Czechoslovakia with Russia based on the “the ideology of the
Slavic world” (note the parallel with Miłosz’s rejection of Poland’s self-identification
with “Slavdom”) and an alternative identification with other “small” and “weak” Central
European nations that used to comprise the Habsburg empire (“Tragedy” 219). This
results in some colonial nostalgia in Kundera when he argues that Central European
countries “blew apart [the Austro-Hungarian] empire in 1918, without realizing that in
spite of its inadequacies it was irreplaceable” (“Tragedy” 219). Additionally, Kundera
invests the Czechoslovak experience with European relevance—making it an
indisputable part of Europe—when he elevates Central European history to the mirror of
future European history.
At this point it is appropriate to cite Brodsky's evaluation of Kundera's
philosophical standpoint: “Having lived for so long in Eastern Europe (Western Asia to
some), it is only natural that Mr. Kundera should want to be more European than the
Europeans themselves.” The position of an exile “also places him at a good vantage point
from which to chide the West for betraying its own values (what used to be called
European civilization) and for surrendering certain countries that have tried to persevere
that Kundera's “political and artistic vision” is rooted in a myth of the European novel and that Kundera
“flirts with the very dogmatism that it is the hallowed duty of the novelist to avoid” (68).
6
Occasionally Kundera also includes Lithuanians and Ukrainians among “Central Europeans” (Misurella,
“Milan Kundera and the Central European Style” 41).
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in that civilization against terrifying odds” (“Why Milan Kundera is Wrong about
Dostoyevsky” 482). Indeed, Kundera embellishes the image of “Bohemia,” to use his
sentimental nickname for Czechoslovakia, by showing that it is not only indisputably
European, but also more European than (Western) Europe: the Enlightenment spirit is
preserved intact here in the absence of Western-type media and consumerism (so it seems
that communists did something right!).
But lest we be seduced into thinking that Central Europe is Kundera's attempt to
distance Czechoslovakia from the decadent West, we should pay attention to the second
part of Brodsky's statement. By portraying himself and his country as more European
than Europe, Kundera can successfully invoke the guilt of Western Europe for not
“rescuing” the enlightened Central Europeans from communism and Russia. Through this
invocation of Western guilt, Kundera repeatedly implies that an association with Western
culture and politics is something to be desired, despite its alleged abdication to mass
media and vulgar consumerism. Predictably, then, Kundera is at pains to prove to his
French (or other Western hosts) that Central Europe is “the eastern border of the West,”
one of Europe's “centers of gravity” which is perishing because the West allowed
“Byzantine” Russia to establish there the “uncivilized” communist regime (“Tragedy”
217; “Afterword” 231). The martyrdom of Czechoslovakia—and Kundera himself—is
frequently emphasized by Kundera's use of sentimental, moral and seemingly politically
neutral language: “Faced with the eternity of the Russian night, I had experienced in
Prague the violent end of Western culture. . .In a small Western country I experienced the
end of the West. That was the grand farewell” (“Introduction” 216).
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History on Speed: “Imagology” and the Politics of Forgetting in Kundera’s Slowness
and Ignorance
This discourse of victimization, the sentimental, seemingly universal language of
morality and common sense, is significant because it places Kundera in alliance with
Western discourses about Eastern European communism that rely on an ethical
universalism. Chantal Mouffe argues that such discourses have, especially in recent
decades, contributed to a moralization of politics through a “human rights discourse”: the
promotion of liberal democracy (the right to non-oppression), modernization (the right to
rise above poverty) and capitalism (the right to be entrepreneurial) as universally correct
moral choices (92). What is problematic about ethical universalism, of course, is that it
marginalizes other political and cultural options through a discourse that claims to be
apolitical and to rise above any ideology.
In Kundera's novels written after the downfall of communist regimes, there is a
surprising recognition of the mechanisms of such a “regime of truth”7 and the imbalance
of power it creates. In a 1994 text Slowness, Kundera's critique of the “human rights”
discourse, paradoxically, also highlights his former complicity with the rhetoric of ethical
universalism which has helped occlude his aforementioned pathologizing of communist
politics and histories and of Eastern Europe (especially Russia). Slowness discusses ways
in which the media aid the commodification and reification of world's histories through a
speedy turnover of images emptied of problematic political content, serving the interests
of the Western “regime of truth” as much as those of capital. Focusing on the media
reduction of communist histories to images of torture, labor camps, dictatorships and
7
I am using this in Foucault's sense, as a construction of truth mediated by power, a “discourse which
[society] accepts and makes function as true” (131).
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worst of all, lack of consumer goods, Kundera points to their consequent erasure within
the teleology of globalization and capitalist development.
In this sense, it could be said that the downfall of communist regimes triggers
another age of “terminal paradoxes” that affect Kundera's own writing: faced with the
“impersonal and uncontrollable” Western media and their reductive historicism, his texts
move toward a reconsideration of such political categories as “communism,”
“democracy,” “Western Europe,” and even “Europe” (Art 12). As the formerly
communist countries, much like Kundera's dissident status, become increasingly
irrelevant to Western political and economic self-promotion, they are removed from the
historical spotlight and doomed to invisibility in the media. But this invisibility also
covers the ugly spots of economic turmoil and political marginalization euphemized as
post-communist transitions to “democracy” and “free trade,” as a historic emancipation
of “Eastern Europe” into “Western Europe” (or the “European Union,” an enterprise that
attempts to neutralize Europe's divisions).
In earlier novels, especially The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera has
been preoccupied with the preservation of individual memory as a challenge to
communist authoritarianism and its politics of forgetting. Slowness parallels this ethical
stance by challenging the authority of Western media, which hinges on the logic of speed
and watered-down but widely marketable versions of history, the type of a seemingly deideologized politics that in Immortality Kundera calls “imagology.” But unlike
Immortality, Slowness also counters this latest form of convenient political forgetting by
reclaiming the histories and memories that have been dropped from the prevailing
“regime of truth.” Kundera somewhat nostalgically returns to the hovering memories of
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the communist past. In this sense, by promoting through a widely marketable medium of
communication isolated historical images of communist Czechoslovakia, Kundera would
seem to replicate the logic of the media, exemplifying the dreaded “abdication of
culture” to the “marketplace” and the “dancing” to political and historical clichés
critiqued in Slowness and elsewhere (Art 128).
I will argue, however, that Kundera's employment of historical images does not
subscribe to the media policy of reductive historicism. Instead, Kundera highlights the
essentially discursive, precarious and protean nature of any historical memory (official or
unofficial) in order to undermine its veracity and, consequently, its reification as “true
history.” This not only pushes the limits of historical discourse, but challenges the very
Eurocentric notion of history as historicity which Chakrabarty finds fault with—and
which Kundera himself earlier embraced. Kundera, at this point, challenges the narrative
of unified European—now global—development as a “homogeneous, continuous, selfevident” entity, where past, present and future are clearly delineated in terms of capitalist
progress, achievement of modernity, increased democracy and social justice (Chakrabarty
75).
Slowness' treatment of historical memory echoes Walter Benjamin's argument that
memory cannot “illuminate” the definitive truths of the past, nor the totality of any
historical moment. Rather, it can help us to reject a causal or teleological understanding
of history by establishing “constellations” between the “what-has-been” and “the time of
the now” (The Arcades Project 462; “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 263).
Kundera establishes a constellation between the communist past and the present process
of capitalist globalization to slow down the turnover of images—and capital—and
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“arrest” the past as that which, Benjamin says, “flashes up at a moment of danger,” that
which illuminates our present discontents (“Theses” 255). This is an approach to history
which eliminates hierarchies between the modern and non-modern, as it sees the past,
present and future as fragmented and mutually permeating categories: the traces of
communism coexists with and haunt the narrative of capitalist “progress” which would
relegate communism to its superseded past.
Slowness illustrates the dangers of “dancing” to historicist clichés as it takes the
reader to an international entomology conference in France, where the various “dancers”
seek to monopolize public attention. This desire for public approval is blamed for the
promotion of imagology because the “dancers” adjust all their statements and actions to
reflect the popular clichés, the endlessly reproducible simulacra without original
substance. Kundera considers the different guises of “dancing” through the Czech
scientist Cechoripsky, who makes a fashionably maudlin speech to the conference
audience to glorify his (fake) communist martyrdom, the French politician Berck, who
ruthlessly rushes from one politically correct action to another to increase his television
ratings and Vincent, who publicly brags about his sexual prowess but ultimately only
simulates the act of love-making.
Kundera has already employed the metaphor of “dancing” in The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting to portray conformism, conviction and angelic innocence as “dancing in
the gigantic ring” of like-minded people (65). The angelic, which Kundera associates
with the poetic, sentimental and irrational, critically depends on a simplistic version of
history and on isolated political clichés (announcing the reign of imagology). In early
novels, the “dancers,” while in love with their public image, also subscribe to a
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transcendental political ideal: the poet Jaromil of Life is Elsewhere is a communistmodernist, an apologist of the “new,” while Franz of The Unbearable Lightness of Being
believes in supporting all the liberal causes, in joining “Europe's Grand March”
(Unbearable Lightness 100). It is this belief in neatly packaged utopias that Kundera
denounces as naïve and dangerous because it banishes the individual, skeptical and
cynical—“the Devil's laughter”—from its imagined harmony (Book 61). By contrast, in
Slowness there no longer seems to be even a transcendental ideal that the “dancers”
naively support. Instead, all their effort goes into a regurgitation of the fashionable ethical
universals to enhance their transcendentally important public standing and to ingratiate
themselves with an anonymous audience. Just as the media cannot dwell on any image or
event too long, so Berck cannot truly engage with historical singularities. Instead, he
superficially glides from one political event to another: in a matter of days, he meets
AIDS patients, feeds Somalian children and supports an insurrection in a (significantly
anonymous) Asian country (15–17).
Here Kundera again associates “dancing” with the “angelic”: “with his constant
exposure to the public, the dancer condemns himself to being irreproachable; he hasn't
made a pact with the Devil like Faust, he's made one with the Angel” (20). However, this
has to do with the angelic appearance of the “dancer” rather than with his/her political
idealism. Berck's indifference to politics is cynical rather than angelic, but it is difficult to
unmask this cynicism behind his image of “decency” and “irreproachability” (20). This
“moral judo” that Western politicians enter with one another is what, to Kundera, makes
any productive criticism of Western liberal democratic politics—and imagology—
exceedingly difficult (18). In another instance of the moralization of politics, powerful
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leaders capitalize on the supposedly universally desirable moral qualities like courage,
sincerity, self-sacrifice and, as we have seen recently, family values. As Slavoj Žižek
observes, achieving this image renders liberal democracy a political master-signifier,
discrediting other political options (and politicians) as fanatic or intolerant and more
importantly, making morally acceptable even a “Fascist with a human face” (Welcome to
the Desert of the Real 82).
Berck does not at first appear as a “Fascist with a human face” because Kundera
declares him to be disinterested in imposing “this or that social scheme on the world (he
couldn't care less about that).” Rather, Berck's interests are purely narcissistic: he wants
to “take over the stage so as to beam forth his self” (18). This resonates with an assertion
in Immortality that “the wheels of imagology turn without having any effect upon
history” (115). Commenting on this statement, Stephen Ross concludes that the
“ideological role of imagology has been utterly superseded by imagology's selfreferentiality” and history has become a matter of television ratings (336). But this does
not seem to bear out: in Immortality Kundera hints at ways in which Berck's empty
universals may indeed affect the treatment of world events. “Because people in the West
are not threatened by concentration camps” their promotion of “human rights” loses
concrete content and prevents them from seeking political and historical depth behind the
media images: “human rights” become a “universal stance of everyone toward
everything” (136). Also, in Slowness, Berck comes to resemble a Fascist leader when we
learn that he has no qualms about sacrificing others to the causes he superficially
promotes: he remains safe behind his media image while the anonymous people whom he
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has inspired to political action sign petitions, demonstrate in the streets and are in
consequence “treated ruthlessly” (19).
The problem with imagology, therefore, is not only that it is superficial and
indifferent to complexity as it flaunts seemingly facile, universalist moral ideals said to
transcend any ideology. Its aspiration towards universal currency, Kundera shows in
Slowness, in fact perpetrates an ideological violence over marginalized histories and
political options by declaring the Western, liberal-democratic, capitalist “regime of truth”
to be a universal “regime of truth.” To convey his argument, Kundera focuses on the
marginalization of communist histories through their reduction to interchangeable
allegories of oppression within the discourse of ethical universalism, which poses again
as a political master-signifier. We can see this mechanism at work in Kundera's portrayal
of the hapless Czech scientist Cechoripsky, who internalizes the commodified, fetishized
images of oppression in communist Czechoslovakia and continually reproduces them for
his French hosts at the entomology conference. Basking in the spotlight afforded by his
dissident status he masters the seemingly apolitical and neutral jargon of imagology: he
moves the audience emotionally as he describes how he lost his job in 1968 and was
“deprived of the very meaning of his life” (55). That these preapproved images may not
do justice to his actual experience is emphasized by the revelation that his very
communist victimization is a simulation, an adjustment of history to unambiguously
reflect this image: Cechoripsky was relegated to construction labor not because he
heroically opposed communist oppression, but because he was too scared to turn down
dissident friends who had involved him in a dangerous scheme.
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The oppressiveness of the fetishized image of communist martyrdom becomes
clear, however, when Cechoripsky realizes that this is all his audiences are prepared to
digest. As such, it obscures the singularity of Czechoslovakia's history, like the
singularity of his own experience. If he wants his voice to be heard at all outside of his
country, he must keep invoking his fake memories as his international colleagues lose
interest in what happens in “Bohemia” after the downfall of communism. Although “he
represents a new period of history, after Communism has gone off into the mists of time,”
his attempts to discuss the Czech Republic outside of the context of “Eastern Europe” and
as an emancipated democratic, “Western” country fall on deaf ears (46). Cechoripsky,
whose very name stems from Czech national folklore,8 continually tries to uphold the
Czech singularity by beginning conversations with “In our country on the other hand,“
yet he is persistently silenced in these attempts, either because he is literally interrupted
by his French colleagues or because his “tragedy” becomes interchangeable with that of
the other unwitting communist brethren (for instance, Berck repeatedly mistakes him for
a Pole or a Hungarian) (46).
Kundera suggests that the status of historical exceptionality promoted by the
“culture industry” is precarious and fleeting. Cechoripsky's elevation to “the great stage
of history” during the Prague spring of 1968—the “Planetary Historic News Event par
excellence”—becomes unexceptional when this moment is relativized as just another
world crisis, similar to all others and swiftly replaced by a new moment of crisis (53). As
8
Karen von Kunes argues that Kundera deliberately uses this name because it is overdetermined with
national mythology. The name consists of the word Cech, denoting a member of the Czech nation and
ripsky, which von Kunes believes may be an allusion to Rip, the hill where the “Czech tribe settled in
ancient times” (258).
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Cechoripsky represses the complexities of historical memory and adopts the language of
imagology, he enters the global pageant of misery parading before Western audiences:
In a sudden flash, his whole past appears to him not as a sublime adventure, rich in
dramatic and unique events, but as a minuscule segment in a jumble of events that
crossed the planet at a speed that made it impossible to see their features, so much
so that maybe Berck was right to take him for a Hungarian or a Pole, because
maybe he really is Hungarian, Polish, or maybe Turkish, Russian, or even a dying
child in Somalia. Whenthings happen too fast, nobody can be certain about
anything, about anything at all, not even about himself. (114)
What thus emerges behind the seemingly neutral discourse of ethical universalism
that endorses some and condemns other political events is the unstated power hierarchy
between “France” and “not-France,” to use as a metaphor the simplistic division said to
represent Berck's understanding of the world (17). In Cechoripsky's case, this hierarchy
can also be formulated as one between “Western Europe” and “Eastern Europe,” as he
has no power to change the terms on which Czech history is understood in Western
public forums. Rather, he must accept both these divisions and discourses that validate
them if he wants to be heard.
Indeed, Kundera’s description of Cechoripsky's predicament sounds self-reflexive:
it recalls his own complicity with the discourses of ethical universalism and the political
hierarchies that they occlude. When Cechoripsky tries to prove to his French audiences
that Czechs are civilized (Western), it almost sounds like a parody of Kundera's own
intellectual position. Despite Cechoripsky's marketing of Czech historical cultural
achievements through “Jan Hus, Luther's precursor” and “Charles University. . . the first
university to be established in the Holy Roman Empire,” Berck does not allow for the
grouping of the Czech Republic with “Western Europe”: “My dear colleague, don't be
ashamed of coming from the East” (64–5). There is a recognition at this moment that
Cechoripsky, like Kundera, cannot set the terms of this discourse—also the discourse of
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Western media—but rather only operate within it by trying to move from the
marginalized position (“Eastern Europe”) to the privileged position (“Western Europe”).
However, as Berck's statement attests, the success of this move does not depend on
Czechs alone, but also on the willingness of the French to recognize it.
By comparison, whether the “not-France” will escape its misery and be
emancipated into universal “human rights” depends on the willingness of “France” to
acknowledge this emancipation. This is aptly illustrated by an anecdote from Kundera's
own life as an exile in the West: Philip Roth edited a series of books by “Eastern
Europeans” under the title “Writers from the Other Europe,” and the title remained
despite Kundera's protests and claims that Czechoslovakia has always been part of “The
Occident” (qtd. in Misurella, “Milan Kundera and the Central European Style” 51–2). By
highlighting this hierarchical structure, as well as the discursive nature of such historical
reifications as “Eastern” and “Western” Europe, Slowness points to the need to question
the seeming neutrality of other contemporary imagological fetishes, such as “democracy”
or “human rights,” for instance.
In order to challenge the discourse of imagology, Kundera argues, one must arrest
its images before they are pushed into the media oblivion and retrieve the complex
historical and political meanings dropped from the official “regime of truth.” When
Cechoripsky realizes the dangers of having become a voluntary icon of communist
oppression exploited by the West, he asserts control over the narration of history and
articulates a memory that disturbs the reified images of communism. To Berck's praise of
him for valiantly resisting oppression in “all those cities of the East that have just
emerged from an enormous concentration camp,” Cechoripsky replies: “’Don’t say
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‘concentration camp.’ We often lost our jobs, but we weren’t in camps” (64). Shortly
after revising the portrayal of Czech communism as carceral martyrdom, Cechoripsky
thinks back to another moment that presents a contrast to his discomfort among the
Western intellectuals. Remembering his days in forced construction labor he thinks, “To
tell the truth, he was a hundred times happier than he is today in this château. The
workmen used to call him Einstein and they were fond of him” (80).
Predictably, Berck does not acknowledge this revision, in a similar way that the
media, despite attempts to feature “other” perspectives, cannot truly “hear” the
marginalized, subaltern narratives of history and thus preclude a radical intervention into
a discourse they promote. But this is not to be desired, Kundera suggests, as any
complicity with the discourse of imagology leads to the editing and reification of history
on the terms set by Western media, simultaneously turning it into a fleeting, easily
replaceable image. As someone who understands Cechoripsky's plight and may have
been a victim of a similar imagological marginalization, Slowness' narrator-author
“Milanek,” presumably referencing Kundera “himself,” thus addresses the disillusioned
scientist: “My dear countryman, companion. . .Stop torturing yourself!. . .Be happy you
are forgotten. Snuggle into the soft shawl of universal amnesia. Stop thinking about the
laughter that wounded you—it no longer exists. . .just as your years on the scaffoldings
and your glory as a victim of persecution no longer exist” (115). Cechoripsky's moment
of glory in the media has necessarily become outdated. His effort to keep the spotlight of
public attention on the official image of communist persecution is not only futile, but also
tantamount to fighting for a simulacrum, to “dancing” to the tune of historicist
reductivism. What is productive in a more radical way is retrieving memories behind the
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arrested image that resist translation into the official narrative of communist persecution
or the “human rights discourse.” Cechoripsky's alternative memories thus approximate
what Dipesh Chakrabarty terms “affective history,” one which exists parallel to the linear
narratives of capital and development (i.e., “analytic history”) but both complements and
exceeds them.9 Significantly, therefore, Cechoripsky's memories remain either unsaid or
“unheard.”
This attitude toward history seems to bear out Kundera's ideal that the novel is
essentially ambiguous and incompatible with any “Totalitarian truth,” which in this case
can be interpreted as a totalitarian, master-narrative of history (Art 14). Unlike a history
book which purports to tell “about the events that have taken place,” a novel invokes
historical events, but uses them to create “a map of existence by discovering this or that
human possibility. . .Both the character and his world must be understood as
possibilities” (Art 42). But Cechoripsky's alternate memories of the communist past do
not contain any more “truth” than the official historical narrative. They continually shift
and contradict each other as they are affected by his feeling of displacement among
Western colleagues. Kundera thus suggests that the reconstruction and interpretation of
the past is inevitably flawed, but also that this reconstruction hinges on the perspective of
the present.
For Benjamin, this re-visioning of the past in a “constellation” with the present is
positive because it prevents either from becoming ossified knowledge or a linear
narrative (“Theses” 263). On the one hand, then, Cechoripsky's memories carry potential
9
Chakrabarty defines “affective histories” as “subaltern” or “minor” histories, referencing postcolonial
discussions of the subaltern and drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a “minor literature.”
“Affective histories” are also Heideggerian ways of being-in-the-world which supplement the narrative of
capital, but also expose its limits and its inability to “translate” into its own language all human experience
(95).
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as Kundera's “possibilities”: they challenge the media's claim to “truth” by contradicting
the simplified images and by underscoring their own unstable and fragmentary nature. In
addition, Cechoripsky's surprisingly nostalgic remembrance of his days of forced labor
supplements, as well as exceeds, the official narrative of communist oppression, but more
importantly, exposes his dismissal and depoliticization in the post-communist era.
Cechoripsky's memories haunt his global invisibility and insignificance not to
“illuminate” the past but to haunt the present with its critical perspective.
While Slowness exposes the discourse of “ethical universalism” that appropriates
“Eastern Europe” and communist histories through teleologies of capitalist globalization
and insists on “affective histories” and a dynamic treatment of historical narratives,
Kundera's 2000 novel Ignorance exposes the related economic appropriation of “Eastern
Europe” by (primarily) Western capital and rethinks the legacy of communism in light of
the new situation. In this novel too, Kundera's deliberations on the status of an emigrant
communist dissident in the post-communist era sound like a self-reflexive defense against
claims, East and West, that he is not a “real” dissident because he “cowardly” escaped to
the West or else that he is not a “real” patriot because he did not “bravely” return to his
post-1989 liberated homeland. Through the characters of Czech emigres Irena and Josef,
Kundera exposes the social condemnation of their decisions to remain in France and
Denmark, respectively, even after 1989 and debunks the myths of a martyred, nostalgic,
dissident, of the homeland and of the yearning for stolen freedom—the myths that
Kundera himself exploited.
Back in the Czech Republic for a brief visit, Irena critiques the solipsism of her
Prague circle and realizes that she would have to “amputate” her life abroad, “lay it on
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the altar of the homeland and set fire to it” (45). She rejects the myth of the “Great
Return” of the dissident, arguing that it is false to assume that a homeland is necessarily
yearned for, or favored over exile (45). Josef's emigration is reinterpreted as an act of
bravery rather than, as is assumed by his Czech friends and family, cowardice: Josef
“desertion” stems from his urge to actively resist the Soviet occupation in 1968 and from
his disappointment that this urge is not shared by his compatriots. Here Kundera further
complicates the reified understanding of the political plight of an anti-communist exile:
Josef's emigration is caused by political reasons, but more importantly, by personal
reasons. He has no fond memories of his childhood and youth and thus he crosses the
border “with a brisk step and with no regrets” (76).
The myth of the “Great Return” acquires a somewhat insidious meaning in France,
where Irena is similarly expected to rush back to the Czech Republic after the Soviet
Union unexpectedly crumbles and her lament to her friends that “Dictators are perishable,
Russia is eternal” suddenly loses its tragic edge (Kundera's satiric deflation of his earlier
Orientalist statements?) (12). Irena is expected to play the part of the anti-regime
emigrant to the end. Like Cechoripsky, she feels imprisoned by the pre-fabricated images
of Eastern European communism which downplay the singularity of her experience:
“[The French] were already thoroughly informed that Stalinism was an evil and
emigration is a tragedy. They weren't interested in what we thought, they were interested
in us as a living proof of what they thought.” When she refuses to “confirm [her]
suffering by [her] joyous return to the homeland,” the French sour toward her because
she has betrayed their expectations (169).
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Like Kundera, who cannot escape criticism for not being a dissident who remains
or a patriot who returns, Irena is similarly haunted by the pressures to return to Prague
now that communism is over, if she couldn't remain there while communists were in
power. In both cases, Czech emigrants are desirable, Ignorance implies, so long as they
serve as a confirmation of Western generosity to those less lucky to be born into
Enlightened, democratic regimes. However, they are never allowed to fully forget their
homeland, i.e., to become “French,” “European,” or “cosmopolitan,” the identification
that Kundera has long sought. It is this mechanism of identity containment that unearths
the discrimination behind the myth of “cosmopolitan” Europe in Ignorance. While Irena's
husband Gustaf, a Swedish emigrant to France, is considered a “nice, very cosmopolitan
Scandinavian who's already forgotten all about the place he comes from,” she is seen as
“a young woman in pain, banished from her country” (24). Kundera implies that not all
emigrants are allowed to be equally cosmopolitan, or are equally desirable.
When the return of the banished does take place, there is no homeland to speak of,
not only in terms of Josef's and Irena's personal feelings of alienation, but also in terms of
the economic and political landscape that they encounter. The disenchantment with
Western Europe's “rescue” of Eastern Europe, with the “transitions” toward the free
market and democracy is never as overt as in Ignorance, where the transformation of
Prague exemplifies the betrayal of Kundera's belief in civilized European traditions. The
notion of Europe is deromanticized and the emphasis shifts from an adulation of
European democratic freedoms and enlightened traditions of intellectual play and
subversiveness to a critique of the far more mundane economic dependency and renewed
classism which Europe promotes in its newly liberated lands. To Irena, this new, flashy
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Prague of abundant consumer choices is the stark, demystified and desexualized
entertainment park, paralleling the desexualization of her relationship with Gustaf, who
knows and is interested in only this aspect of Prague.
Gustaf feels generous when he opens an office in Prague despite its “limited
commercial appeal”; he is portrayed as a traveler, as a child “wandering dazzled through
an amusement park,” oblivious to the desperation of its inhabitants who eagerly “await
applause on the world's proscenium” (23, 94–95). This portrayal of Prague implies its
utter dependence on and servility—“dancing”—to the Western capital arriving in the
guise of Gustaf, who loves Prague restaurants but ignores the fact that they are so
expensive that Irena's “friends can't set foot in them,” and who enjoys the spectacle of the
“belly-dancing Prague” but can't see it “writhing in the spotlight” of Western attention
(136).
It is only appropriate that Kundera names this Prague “Gustaftown. Gustafville.
Gustafstadt.” signaling a type of colonization and appropriation (136). The anxiety that
Prague is reduced to an exotic background against which the rich fulfill their fantasies of
adventurous generosity also permeates the statement that Prague is all “dressed up” in
“English signs and labels,” that everyone involved in the new businesses interacts in
English and that Czech is “no more than an impersonal murmur, a background of sound
against which only Anglo-American phonemes [stand] forth as human words” (95;
emphasis mine). This appropriation is traced throughout the city, as Josef observes the
multicultural propaganda on commercial billboards: the white hand clasping the black
hand proclaims the adoption of the “slogans of the new age: brotherhood of all races;
mingling of all cultures; unity of everything, of everybody” (73).
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Here again the imagological discourse of ethical universalism creeps in, with its
“universal stance of everyone toward everything” (Immortality 136). It is culturally
meaningless, as in the Czech Republic “people hardly knew that blacks even existed,” as
well as cynical, as it skims over the deep divisions and the lack of “brotherhood” in
Prague itself (Ignorance 73). Josef compares the multicultural slogans to the communist
slogans portraying the Czech and Russian workers holding hands, another ideal that made
light of the antagonisms of Soviet occupation. In this sense, the “liberation” from
communism does not present a qualitative alternative to the Soviets; indeed, it is only
worse in intensity. “The Soviet empire collapsed because it could no longer hold down
the nations that wanted their independence,” Josef comments, “But those nations—
they're less independent than ever now. They can’t choose their own economy or their
own foreign policy or even their own advertising slogans” (155).
As in Slowness, a turn toward the past becomes a line of flight, a critique haunting
and haunted by the present more than a yearning to write a “true” master-narrative of
Czech history. To escape the Prague that is a tourist hotspot with a set of commodified
cultural symbols for Western consumption, Kundera finds potential in several historical
periods: predictably, in the pre-1968 Prague, but also the Prague that comes into being
before the communists and at the turn of the twentieth century, culminating with the
Masaryk era before World War II. To Irena it is this Prague that is safe from Gustaf as it
has no commercial appeal: the modest, idyllic Prague of the little houses of the “Czech
lower middle class” (133). This Prague is imagined to harbor the intimacy and the
kindness that Paris lacks, despite its ideals of “fraternity” and “equality”: Irena shudders
at the “chilly geometry of [Paris] avenues; pridefulness of the Champs-Elysees” (133).
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This lack of intimacy is now also spreading in the exotic, tourist Prague, with the
arrogance of the nouveau riche and this situation colors Irena's idealization of the
erstwhile, poetic, Prague of writers and intellectuals, of Macha and Jan Neruda, of Hrabal
and Skvorecky (135–6).
It is not accidental that in Ignorance these two past eras are idealized as the ones
whose crushed potentials Kundera attempts to revive. Culturally, Kundera the modernist
frequently idealizes the “age of terminal paradoxes” and its intellectual fruits preceding
the bloodshed of World War II and sees a rebirth of this spirit in the Prague Spring (Art
12). His praise of the imagined modesty and intimacy of the old lower middle classes
and, later, of the Prague Spring belief in a socialist democracy, points to a desire for
social egalitarianism and solidarity felt to be missing from the world that the returning
Czech expats encounter in contemporary Prague. Perhaps most importantly, this desire is
linked with the need for Czech independence, as Kundera believes that both past
moments are unsullied by Nazi, Soviet, or global capital occupation. In this respect, there
is a reconsideration of communist ideals in constellation with the new situation, recalling
the one in Slowness, even as the characters are careful to renounce the label “communist”
or to portray the former communist regime as an uncontested evil, facilitator of Soviet
occupation. Ignorance points to a possibility of repeating and revising these ideals,
extricating them from the history of Soviet occupation and using them to critique the new
economic dependency on Western capital; at the same time, they provide a way to oppose
the re-establishment of classism and privatization and to renew the relevance of those left
behind in the chaos of the “transitions.”
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As we have seen earlier, Kundera has frequently pathologized communism as just
another radical ideology, embraced by egomaniacs East and West and signaling a
grotesque decline of Europe. In Ignorance Josef symptomatically states that communism
had “nothing to do with Marx or his theories; it was simply a way to fulfill the most
diverse psychological needs” (154). But Josef also uncharacteristically wonders whether
communism has had some social value after all: some people hated communists not
because they were dictatorial and negated the right to free expression (the stock evil
denounced in Kundera's earlier novels), but because they “disputed the sacred right to
property” (142). That “the sacred right to property” should have been challenged
particularly becomes apparent when Josef witnesses the “very swift, harsh
reestablishment of capitalism,” “the rebirth of a class society with a bourgeoisie that was
rich, entrepreneurial and positioned to set the national economy going” despite their
fraudulent recuperation of former properties (153, 58).
In a similar gesture of rejecting the title “communist” yet employing communist
rhetoric, Irena's friend Milada wonders if the demise of the communist regime, as flawed
as it was, also signals the demise of the possibility of any politics of social egalitarianism.
Milada switched from a communist supporter to the party critic and member of the
dissident movement, but she is bitter that “after forty years of Communism, the
bourgeoisie landed on its feet again in just a few days” (164). The communist regime
betrayed many of the ideals it proclaimed; however, it still created the potential for
thinking beyond the politics of private property and class divisions. For Milada, the real
disenchantment comes with its downfall, when, “as if waking from a dream, she turns
back into what she was when she started: an aging girl from a poor family” (165).
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Ignorance presents the reader with the following problem: “. . .how can a person
with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not
know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present
is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?”
(144). This quandary illustrates the understanding of time in both Slowness and
Ignorance: every historic moment remains dynamic and is considered from the
perspective of what follows it, in constellation with a future moment. In this way, the
present-future process of the “EU”ropeanization of so-called Eastern Europe “is not a
transition” but slows down, coming to a “stop,” arrested in Kundera's gesture of
contemplation. This is what Benjamin terms the “Messianic” time, which redeems the
past and “blasts open the continuum of history,” severing the linear progression between
the past and the future and making both unstable and open-ended (“Theses” 262).
In Slowness, by establishing “constellations” between the present era and a
“definite earlier one” of the communist Czechoslovakia, Kundera subverts the notion of
historical causality, linearity, or teleology, the tools used, as Benjamin notes, to fill the
“homogeneous, empty time” of history—the historicist narratives promoted by the media
and containing, as Chakrabarty has argued, a decidedly Eurocentric colonial impulse to
“translate” global experiences into its own terminology (“Theses” 263). Cechoripsky's
fond memories of communist “martyrdom” help redeem this past moment under erasure
in the teleological narratives of globalization and discourses of ethical universalism.
Ignorance goes a step further: it does not merely extricate the memory of a communist
regime from the discourse that would pathologize it as a deviation from modern,
democratic, Enlightened European traditions, it also calls for a critical reflection on the
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value of a communist impulse in relation to the occupation first by Soviets and then by
Western capital in the process of “Europeanization.”
In reconsidering the past, however, Kundera, undermines any facile idealization of
a past moment or a nostalgic yearning for its imagined plenitudes. To use Svetlana
Boym's distinction between “reflective” and “restorative” nostalgia, Kundera engages in
a “reflective” nostalgia which is “ironic and humorous,” appreciates the “shattered
fragments” of the past and accommodates “compassion, judgment, or critical reflection”
(Future of Nostalgia 50). “Restorative” nostalgia, by contrast, is devoid of humor—“it
takes itself dead seriously”—and insists on piecing together the “shattered fragments” of
history in order to “conquer and spatialize” time (49).
In Slowness, Kundera's nostalgia retrieves a past potential that he believes
humanity has lost through a playful, devilish rather than angelic, “reflection” on the
possibility of reclaiming “being” from the uncontrollable forces of history, from the
media control over history. Cechoripsky's shifty, fragmented memories fruitfully
undermine the notion that it is possible to access genuine social content or recreate
historical plenitudes. In Ignorance, the legacy of communism is portrayed as complex
and contradictory and the emphasis is on examining this legacy and asking questions
about it from the perspective of the present, rather than on accepting easy answers (on
one end of the spectrum, systematically rejecting it to become “global,” and on the other
end, seeking to restore the past “as it really was”). Thus avoiding the restorative impulse,
Kundera also avoids the totalitarian gesture of “conquering and spatializing” the future
through either the myth of shattered communist glory or the myth of European prosperity
and security.
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Europe's “Fanatical Moderate”: Günter Grass and Liberal Discourse in Crisis
In his incisive study of Günter Grass's works and ideas, Michael Hollington
describes Grass as a “fanatical moderate” when it comes to politics (131). Although
Grass frequently identifies himself with the values of the Enlightenment—tolerance,
respect for the other, rational consideration of all sides of an argument—he often,
Hollington asserts, “reveals himself as surprisingly intolerant” (131). Indeed, Grass has
habitually equated communism with Nazism in terms of ideological extremism and
capitalist with communist regimes in terms of imperialist pretensions and lack of social
democracy and tolerance. Claiming to steer clear of all of these “extreme” choices yet
remaining politically somewhere in between, Grass places himself in the category of
socialist democrats, allegedly opting for tolerance and solidarity in lieu of exploitation
and/or dictatorship. This exemplifies his ideal of a politically engaged author: while he
has meticulously developed the image of himself as mouthpiece for public conscience in
post-World-War II Germany, he has also underscored the responsibility of writers to
openly critique any extremist politics. He equally blames Weimar writers for “failing to
stand up” to National Socialism and German Democratic Republic (GDR) writers for
failing to stand up to the communist regime (The Citizen and His Voice 136–7).
It is this unabashed adoption of the role of social commentator that inspires
Elisabeth Finne and Wes Blomster to consider whether Grass is a “representative”
German author.10 While Hollington believes that Grass's adherence to the “outdated”
10
The title “German,” disregarding the markers “East” and “West” is quite appropriate: Grass frequently
speaks to all Germans in the two states, as well as to those who exist at its borders, by their physical
location or their personal background (he is from Danzig/Gdansk , a contested German-Polish city and of a
mixed German-Kashubian origin). Also, he made numerous visits to GDR to give public speeches and
maintained contact with its authors; for Grass's complex and changing reception by the GDR regime and
literary critics see Jochen Wittmann's “The GDR and Gunter Grass: East German Reception of the Literary
Works and Public Persona.”
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liberal humanist tradition makes him somewhat old-fashioned from the seventies onward,
Finne and Blomster see precisely this political allegiance as relevant—and
representative—for modern day Germany, torn by conflicts between the Left and the
Right and largely lacking a “moderate,” liberal perspective from which to consider the
Nazi past (299). This assessment seems to coincide with the self-image that Grass has
promoted: a common denominator of German contradictions, content to appear as a
leftist to the Right and as an establishment liberal to the Left, but guilty of no “extremist”
crime (except for a much lamented spell in Hitler Youth; unlike Kundera who represses
his “extremist” past altogether, Grass solicits sympathy through untiring self-reflection).
But the crime that Grass is guilty of, I will attempt to show in this section, is the
fanatical moderation, in Hollington's words, which importantly establishes the “tolerant”
cohabitation of democracy and capitalism as a European ideal and political mastersignifier. Like Kundera, Grass enshrines a unified narrative of European historical
development and, similarly engaging in a nostalgia for the European Enlightenment,
traces the excesses of both capitalism and communism as distortions of this ideal. Yet, his
texts subtly imply that Western European capitalist democracies contain potential for
renewing this historical-cultural ideal more than Eastern European communist states.
Grass's fascination with the intellectual fruits of the Enlightenment is comparable to
Kundera's and throughout his oeuvre he develops a veritable myth of origins, establishing
the Enlightenment as a source of all the positive cultural and historical values in Europe.
A fellow admirer of Voltaire, Montaigne and Diderot, Grass laments over the corruption
of what he sees as the original spirit of the Enlightenment: “human capacity for comedy
and therefore, victory” in spite of the “horrifying social conditions” (“A Literature from
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Below” 26). The noble ideals of the Enlightenment—reason, tolerance, individual
rights—have been lost with the development of both communism and capitalism, “the
two charmingly spoiled children of the Enlightenment” (26). Thus, although the
Enlightenment introduced light into scholastic dogmatism, “When the light finally did
brighten things up, it turned out to be the light of cold reason, limited to the technically
doable, to economic and social progress” (“To Be Continued”). The aforementioned
children that embody this cold reason, to Grass, are little more than siblings, which
becomes particularly evident in the Cold War era where the Western and Eastern blocs
share an imperialist agenda (US interventions in Nicaragua and Vietnam are often
compared to Soviet interventions in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan), an essentially
capitalist economy (private versus state capitalism) and similar abuses of human rights
(Grass frequently writes about the persecution of Jews and Kashubians as the obscene
underside of both capitalist and communist states, both “Western” Germany and
“Eastern” Poland).
The insistence on tolerance of otherness and full democracy leads Grass to
conclude that both sides in the Cold War have betrayed democracy justifying it by
boosting security measures against each other. While the communist regimes never fail to
earn Grass's criticism for destroying democracy, the democratic regimes are occasionally
also called to task on similar grounds. Notable here is Grass's denunciation of American
establishment of a military dictatorship in Greece, all the more outrageous to Grass since
“Greece is Europe,” a “birthplace” of democracy to which he turns as a grateful student
(On Writing and Politics 119; emphasis mine). This seeming leveling of capitalist and
communist regimes in the Cold War era resulted in a notorious comment at the 1986 PEN
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Congress panel on the disappearance of utopia, “Is capitalism better than Gulag
communism? I don't think so” (qtd. in Daniel Fuchs 57). The remark followed a rejoinder
to Saul Bellow's praise of the freedoms of American democracy, that millions of
Americans have no access to democratic freedoms, primarily the impoverished AfricanAmerican labor and the unemployed (qtd. in Fuchs 51).
Indeed, Grass's concern with labor rights and unions both East and West has earned
him the title of a dangerously antagonistic leftist while he himself has never advocated
anything beyond liberal reformism within the already existing structures.11 He has
criticized the increasing bureaucratization and regimentation of labor, the world of the
“conveyor belt,” and the utopia of “absolute busyness” in modern industrialized societies,
calling for melancholy and skepticism in the face of state-orchestrated propaganda of
worker/consumer happiness in both the Soviet Union and the United States (From the
Diary of a Snail 300). For the Western part, he observes how the conveyor belt mentality
leads to a “lack of human contact,” and concludes, “We have communication problems,
suffer from egocentrism and narcissism, are frustrated by information glut and loss of
environment; we stagnate despite the rising G.N.P.” (From the Diary 297). Furthermore,
Western industrialized countries are charged with irresponsibility towards the
environment and towards impoverishment and overpopulation in the Third World
(exemplary here is Show Your Tongue, Grass's account of travels through Calcutta). In
collusion with power circles in Third World countries, West German, American and
11
See especially his speech/essay “Writers and Trade Unions”; in “Literature and Revolution or The
Rhapsodist's Snorting Hobbyhorse” (in On Writing and Politics) he implies that the isolated radical leftist
writers are delusional in their belief that the majority of workers desire a revolution rather than “mediumrange reformist goals” (97).
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Japanese corporations engage in bribery and destroy the environment “thinking of
quicker profits” (On Writing 58).
But even though Grass advocates the reform of capitalism, its “humanization” so to
speak, he never advocates its abolition, or tries to think beyond the trappings of a
capitalist economy. In this sense, communist experiments are in a “no win” situation in
his writings. On the one hand, when capitalism is portrayed in a negative light and in
need of reform, communist systems turn out to be but a bad, inferior, imitation of
capitalism, “state capitalism” versus “private capitalism.” In this paradigm, communist
regimes are accused of being an insufficiently radical departure from capitalism,
primarily in terms of the production process and distribution of property. As a result,
“Neither the American dream nor the ideology of the Eastern Bloc offers any perspective
for the future. In the Soviet Union no one believes it any longer. Both are just systems of
authority” (qtd. in Heinz Osterle 132). Grass reduces the singularity of both capitalist and
communist regimes as he upholds an abstract common denominator; he employs a
discriminatory discourse in which the manifestations of communism are “the same as”
capitalism, the main point of comparison, but yet “not quite” like capitalism in that they
lack consumer choices, the level of productivity and most importantly—democracy.
On the other hand, rather than being an insufficient departure from the rational,
utilitarian logic of capitalism, communist regimes become manifestations of an irrational,
radical, vulgar politics, alien to both capitalism and liberal reformism that Grass favors.
Thus they are even further removed from the legacies of the European Enlightenment:
excluded from the narrative of a unified European development, they are othered as nonEuropean (with implicit Orientalist attributes) and decidedly non-modern. In this
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paradigm Grass considers mostly the political and ideological characteristics of extant
communist regimes, but at the same time denounces any communist strategy or theory,
which he equates with violence, idealism and revolution. Here capitalism is seen as
negative, but necessary—anyone who dreams about a world without capitalism is simply
unrealistic and promoting dangerous utopias. Although Grass believes in increased
worker participation in all spheres of life as alternatives to the flaws of “state capitalism”
and “private capitalism,”12 capitalism and socialism must exist side by side as they
“influence and condition each other” (The Citizen 78). Predictably, then, Grass dismisses
any initiative to think outside the logic of capitalism as impossible and any attempt to
think beyond the logic of liberal democracy as simply sinful.
The communist regimes, particularly the existence of Stalinist gulags and several
key events in East Germany (for instance, the suppression of the workers' uprising in East
Berlin in 1953 and the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961) have provided Grass with
abundant material for dismissing the validity of such regimes for their isolationism,
encroachment upon citizens' rights and intolerance of dissent. He equally despises any
communist politics in its Western manifestations, implying that it bears the same violent,
dictatorial impulse which gave birth to the regimes in the East. While Grass, to an extent,
participated in student protests in 1968 and supported the students' demands for reform
and opposition to the war in Vietnam, he was repulsed by those protesters who believed
that “revolution may break up tomorrow”, as well as by the subsequent radical strategies
of the Meinhoff-Baader group (qtd. in Osterle 128; Blomster and Finne 562). Grass
describes such strategies as irresponsible, immature and at best, romantic: symptomatic
12
See especially “Erfurt 1970 and 1891” in On Writing and Politics.
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here is his criticism of the fetishized images of Che Guevara during the protests of 1968
(Speak Out 137). The cult of guerrilla warfare, to Grass, only distracts people from
dealing with “reality,” that is, the promotion of liberal democracy in the German Federal
Republic (Siegfried Mews 7). The New Left, from which Grass distances himself, is seen
as similarly immature in their persistence in communist politics—the Prague Spring
demands for reform and democracy “had taught these people nothing”; in contrast, the
Social Democratic Party (SPD), for which Grass campaigned arduously, understands the
necessity of combining socialism with democracy (On Writing 44–5).
In effect, Grass reduces communist politics to a romantic and immature dabbling in
revolution, characteristic of histrionic would-be bohemians; he thus furthers hierarchies
between European rationality, maturity, realism, on the one hand and non-European
irrationality, childlike immaturity and romanticism, on the other. Like Kundera, he
ascribes such politics to a personal pathology: in his writings, communists are inevitably
the youthful offspring of bored bourgeoisie, “sons of too-good family who go into
ecstasies about the proletariat; soured pedagogues who stretch their idealistic soup with a
shot of Marxism; daughters of the upper classes on the lookout for an exclusive left-wing
tennis club” (From the Diary 43). They “prestidigitate subjective wrong into objective
right” and the fight for freedom, for them, is a romantic escape from the drudgery of
everyday family and work life (From the Diary 78; Speak Out 27).
Significantly, Grass rarely historicizes, rarely specifies; he never explicitly applies
his theories to Russia, Cuba, or China, for instance, to show how and why the communist
takeover happened in those locales or test out his “radical chic” hypothesis. But he
assumes a patronizing attitude towards supporters of leftist politics not only in presenting
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them simplistically as demented revolutionaries and immature politicians, but also in
arguing that the fruits of any revolution will become reified through state institutions and
any attempt at communism will lead back to capitalism. After all, revolution degenerates
into bureaucracy and even the Prague Spring was crushed by Soviet tanks which affirmed
the “dictatorship of the party bureaucracy” (On Writing 44). In this sense, it is useless to
dream beyond what is “possible”: in From a Diary of a Snail, for instance, Grass
promotes slow, snail-like progress, careful reformism and prides himself on the
“greyness” of his politics. Appropriately, then, he presents himself as a sober shopkeeper,
taking account of what progress has been achieved (The Citizen 39).
The other way in which Grass portrays communist politics as dangerously irrational
and as a departure from the legacies of the Enlightenment, is by aligning it with the
idealistic tradition in German philosophy, especially Hegel. While Hegel has undoubtedly
been crucial to the Marxist tradition and much can be made of the ways in which the
communist regimes have looked to Hegel for notions of historical necessity or teleology,
Grass employs Hegel to show that transcendentalism is immanent to every communist
politics and more significantly, to imply that communism is “the same as” Nazism,
another German offspring of idealistic philosophy. Thus, Grass implies, both Nazi and
communist ideology are set on a remote ideal, on the paradise-to-come, used to justify the
immanent violations of human rights. In this way, communism, as we have seen, appears
worse than capitalism because it is economically inferior to it and fares even worse than
Nazism: in his favorite gesture of creating analogies, Grass suggests that more liberty
exists in fascist Spain or Portugal than in the communist states of Eastern Europe. The
communists' crime is that “they had additionally been guilty of betraying the hopes of
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humanity, hopes which had never been placed in the author of Mein Kampf”” (“Herr
Grass Upsets the Marxists” 80).
While West Germany saw a resurgence of idealistic, Nazi-type politics in the
Chancellor Adenauer years, it has the potential to reform, especially when Grass's hero,
the SPD Chancellor Willy Brandt takes over in 1969. In contrast, East Germany
experiences only a continuation of idealistic politics when communism replaces Nazism:
“The situation in the other German state is far more troublesome, because it is far more
rigid. The GDR had to undergo a rapid, almost seamless transition from National
Socialism to Stalinism without the slightest opportunity for establishing a democratic
image of itself” (Germany—Two States, One Nation? 58). Predictably, Grass's fiction and
political writings contain numerous examples of this seamless conversion from the
National Socialist to the Communist party.
Finally, if analogies with National Socialism are not enough to scare one away
from communist politics, Grass resorts to parallels with religious dogmatism and again
his writing is rife with metaphors of seamless conversion: someone who has had a “strict
Catholic upbringing” turns communist and “As a parallel, someone converted from
Communism to Catholicism: nothing simpler” (From the Diary 177). Faithful to his
claim to moderation, Grass dislikes both “bigoted Catholics [and] orthodox atheists,” the
first extreme implicitly marking the Bavarian, Christian Democratic vote that Grass
associates with Nazism and the second, the GDR communist regime. Marxism satisfies
the psychological need to believe, much like blind religious faith; Grass's descriptions of
the “naive” utopianism and unwavering faith in communist theories in fact echo
Kundera's discussions of the “angelic,” and the “irrational.” Communists could not
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possibly resemble believers of some modernized, “Enlightened” religion; rather, they are
aligned with Catholicism, Puritanical asceticism, or medieval, scholastic dogmatism13. In
Grass's narrative of European history, in which the Enlightenment effects such a radical
break from earlier intellectual traditions, all the aforementioned analogies help demonize
communism as a markedly pre-modern and superseded tradition. In this respect,
communist Eastern Europe becomes refracted through an Orientalized lens as Europe’s
frozen past. Grass himself thus espouses a teleological view of history-as-progress, a
discursive tool that plays in the favor of modern, democratized Europe and dismisses
other political options as mere recapitulations of earlier stages of development.
After the downfall of the Berlin Wall, this paradigm somewhat expectedly leads to
Grass's employment of a discourse of moral responsibility of West Germany toward East
Germany, of the “rescuing” of the East from the burdens of Stalinist oppression and
economic impoverishment. Because of his socialist leanings and his sensitivity to the
political and economic turmoil in East Germany post-1989 (as well as his investment in
the historically tense relationship between Germany and Poland), Grass, from the West
German side, advocates a politics of solidarity, charity and “payback” for past wrongs
instead of the politics of offering conditional aid, or of treating the formerly communist
countries like a capital investment opportunity.
Along the same lines, Grass has been a vociferous critic of German unification
(what he preferred was a “cultural union” rather than national, economic, or military)
because of the looming threat of a renewed German nationalism which would scare
Poland and create an imbalance of power within the unifying Europe. But for all the self13
See Holligton's excellent discussion of Grass's strategies in the chapter “The Politician” in Gunter Grass:
The Writer in a Pluralist Society.
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flagellation and assumption of West German guilt this discourse is more subtly
patronizing in its attitude toward East Germany: it starts with the assumption that West
Germany has been overall more privileged and mature than East Germany in the post-war
era and that, accordingly, the West should extend its political and economic benefits to
the victimized East, with, of course, the Social Democratic Party as an “architect” and
“pacesetter” of this reconciliation-oriented policy (Two States 13). Grass recommends,
“Let us learn. . .from our fellow countrymen in the GDR, who, unlike the citizens the
Federal Republic, did not have freedom handed to them, but rather had to wrest it from an
all-encompassing system—an accomplishment that makes us, rolling in wealth, look poor
by comparison” (Two States 10).
The GDR does not have much to contribute to this reconciliation process in Grass's
writing, however, except for an example of what happens when one does not have
freedom handed to them. To do Grass justice, he offers valid arguments when he claims
that socialism in GDR didn't have a chance (but could have had under different
conditions) because the GDR had to rebuild under a centralized bureaucracy, the “burden
of Stalinism and without the Marshall Plan and with far more reparations to pay” (23).
But Grass effectively erases the complexity, or any tangible benefits that the communist
legacy in GDR might have produced, when he implies that the GDR should adapt to West
German economic and political structures and that this exchange is unidirectional. “You
can adapt capitalism to the GDR in a way that won't result in total deformation and
rejection of its culture and that won't give rise to new social unrest,” he observes (20).
East Germany, in turn, can only provide the West with much needed spiritual and
emotional nourishment: Grass praises the GDR's “new, nonviolent, revolutionary
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idealism” (note: not the old, communist, violent idealism) which can provide West
Germans with a “higher purpose,” and also wishes to preserve its “slower pace of life and
therefore more time to talk with people” (21, 20). In this light, East Germany appears as
an exotic, relaxed, idealistic land serving as a mirror for West German flaws and as a
charitable cause for it to champion, but without an identity of its own. This, of course,
recalls the old Orientalist-type fantasies which establish Eastern Europe, Africa or Asia
as charitable causes, or civilizing projects; in turn, the civilizing Westerners, while
bringing “progress”—and identity—can find in the others’ “noble savage” ways the
spirituality and community that the modern world has lost.
This discourse of benevolent administration and intervention is not a by-product of
post-Berlin Wall upheavals. I consider it significant because it symptomatically surfaces
in Grass's discussion of other topics—and countries—especially of the problems in the
so-called Third World. Grass is a critic of the destructive forces of globalization,
especially of capitalist exploitation, lack of social security worldwide, overpopulation and
neglect of the environment. In an attempt to examine West German participation in these
processes, he is frequently self-reflective and undermines his own authority as a
European subject. However, he reinforces the Eurocentric discourse when he implies that
the rest of the world only serves to reiterate—and globalize—the trends in Europe. In an
essay “Kafka and His Executors” (in On Writing and Politics), he predicts that the
European mastering of bureaucracy will infect other continents: “What else can the rest
of the world—whether East or West-oriented—do but learn and emulate” as they will
“feel the need to catch up with the more advanced countries by developing a total
bureaucracy” (47). In “Racing with the Utopias” (in On Writing and Politics) he predicts
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a bleak totalitarian future for Asia and Africa, where, despite learning about the noble
values of the Enlightenment, the local dictators choose to “emulate” Soviet and Nazi
dictatorships.14
This philosophical outlook, I would argue, is analogous to Grass's need to
streamline East Germany—as well as the rest of so-called Eastern Europe—into the
single narrative of development that bears the positive markers of the Enlightenment.
That this narrative has its unstated boundaries is belied by his use of the term “Europe” to
mark the potential for cultural and political belonging to this seemingly benevolent and
accepting enterprise. When he protests against the division into Western and Eastern
Europe, for instance, he is more generous than Kundera in that he includes not only
Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in “Europe,” but also the Soviet Union: “That's
Europe too and belongs” (Two States 50). But this term nevertheless presumes his own
authority, as a European subject, to decide what does or does not belong in “Europe,”
which extends to the authority of intervention, of imparting one's expertise in political
and economic matters to the bearers of an unstated stigma: “communism,” “Eastern
Europe,” etc. Perhaps it is not surprising then, that Grass, the socialist democrat, the
opponent of globalization, supported the NATO bombing of Serbia and Montenegro in
1999, on the authority of humanitarian intervention.
The Predicament of “Europe” in The Call of the Toad
Grass's optimistic assessment in 1989 that, “now that communist dogma has gone
bankrupt. . .democratic socialism has a future all over the world” proved a bit too
14
For more discussion of Grass's Eurocentrism, see Daniel Reynolds' “Blinded by the Enlightenment:
Gunter Grass in Calcutta.” Reynolds objects to Grass's colonial gesture in Show Your Tongue of
recommending the Enlightenment achievements as a recipe for overcoming the misery he documents in
India.
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optimistic in light of the neoliberal spirit of reforms implemented in the formerly
communist countries (Two States 13). Dieter Stolz has characterized Grass's persistent
belief in the possibility of “socialism with a human face” as “dreamy” and “utopian”
when compared to everyone else's disillusionment with the fruits of German unification
and German treatment of post-communist Europe in general (214). It seems that the
possibility of “democratic socialism” or “socialism with a human face” might have
existed if Western capitalist democracies had been open to compromise and change, to
dialogic rapprochement with the former communist regimes in terms of promoting and/or
preserving policies aimed at social equality and security.15 Of course, nothing of the sort
happened: while in the West itself capitalist neoliberalism spelled an end to many
social(ist) welfare policies, it was still more merciful there than in the East (as well as the
rest of the world) where it could present its conditions without the possibility of
challenge. In this respect, Grass's fears of an economic subjugation of the former
communist countries by Western capital proved more realistic than his ideal of global
democratic socialism: “No sooner does one ideology loosen its grip than another swoops
down and seizes the prey. The new instrument of torture will be the market economy. If
you don't toe the line, you won't get anything. Not even bananas” (Two States 3).
In the final section of Chapter 4, I will examine how this economic and political
conditioning of the formerly communist countries is facilitated and enabled by the
15
For an overview of the different socio-economic programs for a united Europe post-1989, see Peter
Gowan’s “The Euro-Atlantic Origins of NATO’s Attack on Yugoslavia” in Masters of the Universe?
NATO’s Balkan Crusade. In addition to the EU model that we know today, Gowan identifies two other
significant models that were in play, one of which would have implied a gradual transition from the old
economic cooperation structures among former communist countries toward a “social-democratic-style
development” for both East and West. This option, Gowan argues, failed as it “clashed with the whole
American paradigm of neo-liberalism and globalization, a paradigm which was attracting great support
amongst the leaders of big capital in Western Europe” (33).
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aforementioned discourses that establish a single “progressive” option for European (and
by extension, global) development: one that idealizes private ownership, “free” economic
competition, multicultural tolerance and parliamentary democracy. Grass accuses
primarily conservative German politicians of promoting the “western ideology of
capitalism, which aims to wipe out every other kind of ideological ism” and announces
itself “as if holding a gun to the East Germans' head: A market economy or else” (Two
States 7). But while this is the most overt and unapologetic type of conditioning from
which Grass distances himself (despite his flirtation with “humanized” capitalism), I will
argue that his “softer,” democratic-humanist version of denouncing Stalinist regimes for
their infraction upon “human rights” similarly sets the stage for conditioning and
unidirectional flow of demands from the democratically “mature” to the “immature”
regimes, perpetuating the Orientalist hierarchies established in Grass’s narrative of a
unified European history.
To explore this point I turn to Grass's complex and in many ways contradictory
1992 novel, The Call of the Toad. In this novel he satirizes the post-Berlin Wall
rapprochement of Germany and Poland in the guise of a fictional enterprise of the
“cemetery of reconciliation” for Germans exiled from Poland, to be built in their former
homeland. The enterprise proves to foster more fear than reconciliation between Germans
and the Polish, as it becomes a metaphor for the land-grabbing and profit making in postcommunist Poland, benefiting the wealthy and entrepreneurial classes in both countries.
Unlike Kundera, Grass does not turn to a reconsideration of the communist legacy in the
face of new developments. In other contemporary writings, the events in the wake of
1989 do prompt Grass to, for the first time, wonder whether the existence of communist
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regimes presented some kind of alternative to the capitalist regimes, thus allowing for a
revision of the earlier discourse which claims unfailing homology between the two. In his
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Grass still resorts to old metaphors, claiming that
capitalism is “megalomaniacally replaying the errors” of its “brother” by turning “the free
market into dogma,” but also argues that now that communism/socialism is proclaimed to
be dead, capitalism can “rage unimpeded” (“To Be Continued”). In a 2000 interview with
Pierre Bourdieu, Grass explains that Marxism-inspired policies (East and West) managed
to keep capitalism in check and force it to give some concessions, but since “Communist
hierarchies fell apart, capitalism has come to believe that it can do anything, that it has
escaped all control” (“A Literature” 26).
The Call of the Toad does not explore what happens to Marxist thought following
the fall of “communist hierarchies,” except for offering the usual liberal democratic
perspective. However, it does offer a critique of the implications of “rescuing” the
formerly communist countries into democracy, undermining the image of enlightened
Europe and the very political principles that Grass espouses. As we have seen earlier,
Kundera subverts the colonizing impulse contained in Eurocentric narratives of “proper”
history which trace the progress from Ancient Greek democracy to Western European
Enlightenment by playing with the very notion of time as development, as a linear
movement from past to future. Grass, on the other hand, subverts this narrative by the
very reconception of the content of “proper” European development as liberal
democracy, from which Nazism and communism are jointly excluded as the “other” of
democratic moderation, as its mere deviations. In The Call of the Toad, Western
democratic “rescuing” of Eastern Europe is not wholly distinguishable from the
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strengthening of Nazi-type racism and identity politics; the liberal-democratic
multiculturalism which this “rescuing” aims to instill is not necessarily opposed to
ruthless capitalist restructuring which Grass so abhors.
The project that brings the “Polish-German Cemetery Association” into existence
in The Call of the Toad begins with an amorous affair between a West German art history
professor, Alexander Reschke and a Polish restorer of statues, Alexandra Piatkowska,
appropriately consummated in Danzig, Grass's “no-man's land.” Their union itself points
to the possibility of German-Polish reconciliation if necessary conditions are met: if
people on both sides are open-minded, ready to recognize each other's “human rights,”
and a shared history of suffering despite the antagonism. As both are exiles—he from
Danzig that became Polish, she from Wilno that became Lithuanian—they advocate the
idea of repatriation to symbolically put an end, in Reschke's words, the “Century of
Expulsions” (27). The idea for a Polish cemetery in Wilno is also in the works, but is
eventually thwarted by Lithuanian nationalists after they gain independence from the
Soviet Union. Throughout the novel, only German corpses are repatriated to Poland in an
attempt to override the politics of racism and hatred, marking the territory where, in
Piatkowska's words “politics must stop and human rights must begin” (28). The attempt
to foster multicultural, democratic coexistence between the Polish and Germans,
announcing a new Europe, is enhanced by the arrival of Chatterjee, a Bengali immigrant
who develops a successful rickshaw business and whose presence allegedly spells the
future irrelevance of the traditionally Eurocentric Europe.
The Call of the Toad offers a political perspective that is announced by many of
Grass's earlier works, as it imagines the Reschke-Piatkowska “reconciliation” through
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confronting ethnic stereotypes each has of the other and through criticizing their
respective regimes: “And if she calls it disgraceful that she stayed in the Communist
party as long as she did, yet holds Communism responsible for all subsequent disasters—
she even blames Communist iconoclasm for the persistence of Catholic dogma—he
believes capitalism is responsible for all failings, including his own” (75). The leveling of
capitalism and communism is accompanied by the harsh satire of capital's alleged
triumph in the post-communist era, or what Grass sees as its unrestrained greed and a
patronizing attitude toward the Polish. While Piatkowska's anxiety about the rising prices,
the economic instability and the impoverishment in the wake of the communist downfall
persistently puncture the plot, haunting the narrative that ostensibly proclaims the
possibility of reconciliation and solidarity, the profiteering surrounding the very project
of a German cemetery in Poland symbolizes the bankruptcy of the multicultural ideal in
the face of economic domination.
The language of conditioning and re-education that Grass has criticized on the eve
of German unification permeates the sections of the novel where Reschke's “venture
capitalist” friends, in a demonstration of capital's tendency to find ever original ways to
multiply, bring up ideas of “time-share” or “retirement” facilities in Poland for Germans
waiting to be repatriated in the former “homeland.” The Polish are criticized for lacking a
sober, decisive, masculine, business sense: “on the one hand they say they want
capitalism and on the other hand they behave like innocent maidens” and do not
understand that such enterprises are crucial to boosting a “healthy middle class” (46,
146). But if they refuse to “toe the line,” the “venture capitalists” will go “to the Czechs
and Hungarians. They're more open” (46).
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Reschke's attitude toward such enterprises is overtly negative, as he proclaims
himself to be a leftist-liberal and is continually portrayed as someone whose idealistic
project has been corrupted through the greed of others. When the whole business gets out
of hand, with “what was lost in the war. . .being taken by economic power” and
“adorning everything with the wordplay of reconciliation, as though golf courses were
nothing more than enhanced cemeteries,” both Piatkowska and Reschke resign from their
own Board of Directors in disgust (204). In fact, Reschke's own politics reflect Grass's in
that he too is critical of capitalism but in a “moderately radical,” “left-liberal” way
sprinkled with “ecological convictions” (84). He embodies Grass's ideal of a snail-like,
skeptical politician as he is a “procrastinator,” “melancholy,” “profoundly split and
without perspective” and weighs all the pros and cons of every situation: thus, German
unification scares him, but he is also sympathetic toward the millions of Germans who
were driven from their Polish homeland (85–6). In this respect, the moderate Reschke
would seem to represent the “correct” political path in the novel, when contrasted with
the radical capitalist Germans but also with “the poor” who “are only good for resistance
and lack democratic maturity,” i.e., the Polish (141). Reschke and Piatkowska's affair
appears somewhat imbalanced, though, as they replay Grass's implications that the East
needs to be “helped out” in the matters of implementing democracy.
In another typical instance of political leveling, Reschke attempts to assuage
Piatkowska's guilt over her communist past by his own admission that he was in the
Hitler Youth (of course, this problematically exonerates Reschke, as it did Grass
himself): “You see how it is, my dear? Our generation ran with the hounds” (237).16 But
16
This political leveling has serious implications for European East-West relations. Commenting on a
parallel 1997 “reconciliation” of Germany and the Czech Republic over the Nazi occupation and a
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he has been able to overcome this youthful aberration when he developed a modern,
democratic, tolerant outlook, which distinguishes him from the racist Germans who not
only do not seek any kind of “reconciliation” with the Polish, but also betray Polish hopes
of becoming accepted in Western Europe as they greet “Polish border crossers” with
“xenophobia” (90). In contrast, Piatkowska does not become fully “emancipated” after
her disillusionment with communism—and her political perspective seems to be shared
by most Polish characters depicted in the novel.
Reschke is pleased with her gesture toward the Germans, but disturbed by her lack
of tolerance towards Russians. Her attitude toward Chatterjee, whom she calls a “Turk,”
demeans her both in terms of xenophobia and ignorance (according to the paradigm that
all Asians are “Turks” to Slavs). Her attitude, that Germans are bringing their “Turks” in
order to turn the Polish into political “coolies” is analogous to the Polish national pride
which, at first, prevents them from taking rickshaw-driver jobs from Chatterjee (99).
Piatkowska also seems to fit the Polish Catholic stereotype as Reschke complains that she
is willing to visit many churches on their trip to Italy, “where she would light asparagusthin candles wherever possible” (246). Reschke would therefore seem to have a
benevolent influence on Piatkowska, their union also representing a convenient
opportunity for him to educate her in matters of democratic tolerance and
multiculturalism. This idea becomes explicit when Reschke comments on her racist
retaliatory postwar expulsion of Sudeten Germans, respectively, Adam Burgess finds the establishment of
equivalence between the two experiences problematic. “The German dismemberment of Czechoslovakia”
is not only relativized as “just one unfortunate incident, no better or worse than post-war population
displacement,” but more broadly, “the historical domination of the East” becomes equal to “the East’s own
rare and feeble attempts to ‘get its own back’” (188). The very political imbalance — indeed, blackmail —
under which this occurs is also problematic: by extending its apology to Germany, the Czech Republic gets
a prime spot in the queue for EU membership.
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outbursts, “our idea does not permit blanket statements. For my sake at least she should
dispense with them” (98).
But although it may seem that liberal Westerners are bearers of positive trends, or
that Reschke is the Enlightened specimen whom Grass favors, what he promotes
becomes highly suspect and keeps undermining itself throughout the novel. It is not so
much that Reschke's “good” ideas which promote a pan-European culture and peaceful
coexistence in the wake of communism become corrupted by conservatives and/or
capitalists; rather, his own democratic ideals, primarily those of liberal identity politics,
expose potential for a resurgence of fascism and segregation. What Reschke promotes is
not a mixed cemetery for the Polish and Germans, but an ethnic-based cemetery which
affirms the right of each to “difference” under the banner of “human rights” to a shared
“homeland.”
This parallels the promotion of minority rights in the formerly communist
countries, where on the one hand this policy is aimed at respecting rights to cultural
difference that may have been suppressed under the communist regimes, but on the other
fosters the affirmation of a separate identity, what Étienne Balibar describes as “internal
exclusion, that is hostility and discrimination among populations which are not really
separated, but belong to the same society and are culturally mixed with one another”
(Politics and the Other Scene 154). The microcosm of this politics is the politically
correct, multicultural Board of Directors that Reschke and Piatkowska appoint,
appropriately containing a balance of Poles and Germans and Erna Brakup of the
remaining ethnic German minority in Danzig, which until recently “had been reduced to
speechlessness; minorities had not been allowed” (105).
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But when minorities are allowed, Grass questions whether their discourse is
necessarily revolutionary, or progressive, or anti-hegemonic. Reschke is fond of Brakup
as a representative of a dwindling minority—and cultural tradition—even though this
attachment is somewhat problematic when Brakup turns out to be a flaming racist, with
her hatred of “Polacks” and her adage “Speak well of what's foreign, but don't go where
you are foreign” (121). While Reschke's and Piatkowska's hope is that the German
cemetery will bring about the mutual recognition and respect of rights between Poles and
Germans, in Brakup's understanding this turns into its seeming opposite, which is
nevertheless facilitated by the initial idea: that “Germans got to lie with Germans and
Polacks with Polacks” (190). Her resignation from the project because she, too, becomes
disgusted with the money-making schemes does not take care of this racism which
prompts some anxiety in The Call of the Toad about the validity of the project in a
different sense. In this respect, that the general public protests against the fence
eventually built around the cemetery, comparing it to barbed wire in concentration
camps, seems at first like an exaggeration of their fear of the “other,” but significantly
points to the unstated borders of identity politics that underlies such a project.
Whether this liberal notion of multicultural coexistence actually does anything to
challenge the capitalism to which Reschke is so averse is the other problem. Although the
Board of Directors includes all the right nationalities, arranged in a delicate balance, most
nevertheless agree that measures of extreme economic liberalism are to be employed if
the enterprise is to take off. This critique also extends to the much praised Asian future of
Europe in the guise of Chatterjee, who hopes that the “international amalgamation
process would ultimately lead to an exchange of cultures” (37). There is optimism about
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nobody being spared this internationalization, as “Even the Poles, who just want to be
Poles, always Poles and never anything else, will learn that next to the Black Madonna of
Czestochowa there is room for another black divinity, because of course we will bring
our beloved and feared Mother Kali with us—she has already taken up residence in
London” (37). There is no discussion of the questions of unequal power or social
antagonism resulting from “extreme economic liberalism,” however. Rather, the
cemetery, like an internationalized Poland, becomes a celebration of cultural differences
assumed as horizontal, interchangeable qualities—much like the horizontal racial
harmony promoted in Benneton or Disney advertising imagery which Henry Giroux
argues occludes the racial, social and economic privilege of being able to afford their
products.17
It is not quite clear, therefore, what is this “different” culture that Chatterjee brings
to Europe: he believes in the rickshaw business as an ecological solution to the carclogged European cities, but he is primarily a self-interested businessman. Grass
describes Chatterjee in the language of finance, investment and calculation; he rejoices
when the oil prices go up in the poor countries like Poland so that people are forced to
take rickshaws, helping his business to grow (133). He prides himself on not being
European—he identifies most not with his Bengali, but with his Marwari background,
primarily its “business ethics”—but he assimilates quite nicely to the new privatization
laws in Poland (137).
Chatterjee is already a common-sense capitalist—his participation in the global
market does not threaten capitalist structures but is rather facilitated by what David Rieff
17
See Henry Giroux’s Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture.
198
calls a corporate cooptation of the multicultural ideology through stock phrases such as
“’product diversification,’ ‘the global marketplace,’ and ‘the boundary-less company’”
(“Multiculturalism’s Silent Partner”). His purchase of the former Lenin Shipyards, site of
the famous democratic-socialist opposition movement Solidarnosc, in order to develop a
rickshaw assembly line, is thus highly symbolic of the defeat of the socialist option, even
as it could be hailed as a sign of “progress” and “multiculturalism” (perhaps it is not
accidental that Grass has Chatterjee recite Kipling) (38).18
In teasing out these contradictions in The Call of the Toad, I want to suggest a
complication of Grass's earlier optimism about the potential of democratic politics,
especially the politics of “human rights” that underlies contemporary insistence on
multiculturalism, to “enlighten” the formerly communist countries, or to represent a
progressive option for the future of Europe for that matter. In many of his earlier works
he promotes the vision of a racially and culturally mixed West Germany where everyone
lives in the same community but respects the other's difference. For instance, in The
Citizen and His Voice Grass climbs a hill from which he observes a multicultural Berlin
with quarters and neighborhoods for each nationality, a minaret for the Turks and a
campanille for the Italians (210–12). In The Call of the Toad this vision is still present,
but viewed with some anxiety as it reveals potential for internal exclusions and a renewed
xenophobia precisely because of the prescribed respect for differences rather than an
attempt to deconstruct the meaning of “difference” or make alliances across “identity
18
In Requiem for Communism, Charity Scribner comments on the irony of the successful outcome of
Solidanosc’s 1980s struggle for an autonomous trade union at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk: “Solidarity’s
victory ushered Poland into a postindustrialist era, where the chances for . . . the autonomous organization
of workers . . . seem to diminish. The greatest event in Europe’s postwar labor history contributed to the
erasure of the movement’s condition of possibility . . . the Lenin Shipyards have gone bankrupt” (16).
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politics,” rather than an exploration of political models outside of liberal democracies of
the Western type.
In this respect, I also suggest a complication of the critical readings that position
this novel alongside Grass's usual musings on multicultural, democratic, ecologically
healthy utopias in Europe (and elsewhere). Such readings problematically replicate the
mainstream ideology of multiculturalism by expressing a desire for compatibility in spite
of the uncomfortable questions of unequal power and racism which prevents us from
“getting along,” and which frequently comes out of the very multiculturalism understood
as a politics of fixed identity. Representative of these is Mark Cory's qualification of the
“trendy necropolis” of Poland into which Reschke's and Piatkowska's project degrades as
a corruption of an originally “good and simple idea”; along the same lines is his
statement that the German-Polish love affair, as well as the unrelenting presence of
Chatterjee, is symbolic of a utopia of “pluralistic Europe” for which traditional “Europe
at the close of the twentieth century is still not ready” (183–5). What is at stake, instead, I
suggest, is the implication of the love affair between the process of democratization and
the process of economic conditioning of the poor countries, of the “tolerant” cohabitation
between multicultural politics of human rights and Nazi-type xenophobia.
CHAPTER 5
PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION AND NEANDERTHAL LIBERALISM:VICTOR
PELEVIN, GARY SHTEYNGART AND CRIMINAL EASTERN EUROPE
Criminal Lands behind the Schengen Curtain
Arguably, post-1989 transitions in post-communist Eastern Europe have been
articulated through discourses of Western management and conditioning, usually
reflecting collaboration with local “democratic” political and business elites, or
conversely, opposition to recalcitrant, “Soviet-mentality” governments. As we have seen,
the trajectories of this conditioning—necessary in order to preserve the “standards” of
such premier clubs as the EU, NATO, or the World Bank—have been presented as a
mixture of economic exploitation and problematic multiculturalist identity politics in
Grass’s and Kundera’s novels.
At this point, I turn to other aspects of this discourse of conditioning, which
simultaneously—and paradoxically—benignly offers the promise of inclusion into the
club of the powerful (and thus encourages their imitation) and implicitly enforces
exclusion, justified through the vulnerability inherent in the club’s own proclivity to
“tolerance” and “democracy.” Intriguingly, this echoes American laments in the wake of
9/11 over its tradition of “freedom” and “openness” to foreigners who infiltrate the
country only to turn out to be “terrorists” who hate “freedom” and “openness” (a circular
argument par excellence). In turn, the European Union countries have a long tradition of
fanning racist fears toward typically non-European nationalities, employing images of
dangerous Moroccan drug-dealers, Indian shopkeepers, or Turkish gastarbeiters. In the
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past decade, these older fears have been compounded by the new fears of semi-European
Easterners infiltrating Western Europe with their problems, poverty, or crime.
In this sense, the popular Cold War narratives which have castigated Eastern
European regimes for imprisoning their citizens within national borders appear
hypocritical in light of an even stricter policing of Western borders against the
problematic Easterners post-1989. The images of criminal Eastern Europe that will infect
and destroy the healthy Western body from within abound in political discourse, popular
and academic press. Under contemporary conditions, the intellectual, educated, if effete
and blood-drinking Count Dracula has been transformed into the dirty, ignorant, poor and
violent pimp, drug-dealer, or beggar. For all the “humanitarianism” of the Western
intervention in Kosovo, EU countries have been anxious to ship back its lot of the
displaced Kosovo Albanians and Italy especially has been notorious for turning back
ships full of fleeing Albanians.
Recently, Western presses have tackled the problem of Eastern European
prostitutes who not only compete with and bring down the prices of local “businesses,”
but also introduce various diseases among the “customers.” Crucial to the recent French
non to the proposed EU constitution was a right-wing campaign against the mythical
“Polish plumber,” symbol of cheap Eastern labor sure to destabilize French economy if
the constitution’s free-market provisions are ratified. This is indeed a double curse: the
EU is afraid of cheap Eastern labor and therefore withdraws avenues for legal work, only
to then declare that Easterners are “mafia,” incapable of legal work. To quote the famous
Austrian right-winger Jorg Haider addressing a meeting of local police forces: “Poles are
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the car thieves, Yugoslavs the burglars and the Russians specialize in blackmail and
mugging” (qtd. in Adam Burgess 59).
Such a discourse, premised on the fear of congenitally criminal Eastern Europeans,
can justifiably be ascribed to right-wing sympathizers—and indeed, post-communist
societies themselves are not “clean” of this discourse of criminalizing “otherness” as they
too contribute to the general rise in right-wing politics. Thus, they analogously fear
Romanian prostitutes, gypsy beggars, Jewish “power circles,” or Chinese flea-market
merchants. Arguably, conservative right-wing parties across Europe generally treat
Eastern European crime as an implicit racial/cultural characteristic, or as a contagion to
be feared and excluded at all costs; this also explains their allegiance to the nonenlargement policy for the EU. Liberal/leftist parties generally support EU enlargement,
arguing that Eastern European crime is a temporary phenomenon, caused by—and
perpetuating—the chaos of transitions and sure to be overcome at an unspecified future
date through a necessary economic reform (which is seen as market-capitalist or socialist,
depending on one’s political affiliation).
To complicate this binary, I argue that even the so-called liberal discourse of
“tolerance” and “faith” in Eastern Europe is accompanied by unstated fears of the unruly
Eastern “others.” Hence the prevailing Schengen-treaty visa regime, attempts to control
and manage Eastern European crime within “their” borders so that it would not spill over
“ours,” and patronizing statements about the white West’s burden of civilizing postcommunist Easterners, immersed in “superseded” nationalist-chauvinist passions and/or a
Soviet mentality of passivity and reliance on the state to provide for its citizens (how dare
they count on the state to exist for the sake of citizens).
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Thus, we end up with examples of two seemingly opposite, but related liberal
viewpoints, here both coming from respectable academics. Commending “Central
Europe” (the noble part of Eastern Europe, as we have seen in Chapters 3 and 4) on
maintaining its “entrepreneurial spirit” and “remaining faithful to European traditions of
religion and culture” while ”even [sic] being able to enrich them,” Adam Zwass
expresses confidence that this communistically severed part of Europe will be able to
“return where [it] belong[s]” (108). G. M. Tamás is less optimistic about Eastern
European transitions, fearing the restoration of “rural, static, deferential and backward
Eastern Europe.” He is disappointed that these countries “regard capitalism and liberal
democracy only as . . . the best method for improving standards and fostering social
peace. Genuine believers in the superiority of a free society are far and few between”
(64–65). In other words, the improvement is seemingly always possible, yet always
followed by the danger of slipping into the pernicious habits of the past, especially if
Easterners are left to their own devices: state-controlled economy, crime, violence, or
ethnic passions.
While the downfall of the Berlin wall firmly lodges fearful images of an
unexpected invasion by marauding, half-starved Easterners in the Western imaginary, it
also provides an opportunity for Western excursions into the newly accessible—indeed,
rediscovered—Eastern European locales.1 Such interactions have given rise to a number
of cultural narratives that attempt to come to grips with the fetishized yet feared opening
of the Eastern Bloc countries; for instance, Michael Hanneke’s film Code Inconnu and
1
In Chapter 3, we have seen how Kundera vehemently criticizes the Western “discovery” of Prague post1989, especially its tourist fetishes that do not balk at rewriting history, i.e., Prague as Kafka’s city, despite
Kafka’s own repudiation of the city as his “home.”
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Theo Angelopoulos’ film Eternity and a Day comment on Western fears of the disturbing
presence of illegal post-communist “others” in the increasingly “unhomed” Western
countries. In parallel, a number of travelogues, novels and short stories explore the
imaginative opportunities afforded by the untapped post-communist locales as well
implications of the new Western management of and above all (legal) presence in, the
rediscovered Eastern Europe.
Indeed, many of these texts blatantly reinforce the image of Eastern European,
especially Balkan locales, as disorganized, violent, mendacious, or lawless, using the
little-disguised racialist narratives of inferiority—and thus approximating the
aforementioned right-wing discourses that advocate a sealing off of the “free world’s”
borders against these “degenerates.”2 Although by no means insignificant, these are
nevertheless easy critical targets. Instead, I will dwell in more detail, again, on the
ostensibly liberal-minded narratives, whose sympathetic viewpoint on Eastern Europe
makes their participation in the discourses of imperial governance and hierarchical
categorization more difficult to discern.
Indeed, many of these texts have as protagonists (typically) American expats who
arrive in Eastern Europe only to become the authors’ ethical limit cases for American
engagement with political and economic trends post-1989. At times, as in Tom Bissell’s
“The Ambassador’s Son,” Arthur Phillips’ Prague, or Jonathan Franzen’s The
Corrections, such protagonists are dishonourably disengaged from the turmoil of their
surroundings and hedonistically self-absorbed in a spate of adolescent, drunken
debauchery and cheaply bought sexual encounters, revelling in the Wild East
2
For an overview and analysis of these texts see especially Andrew Hammond’s “’The Danger Zone of
Europe’: Balkanism between the Cold War and 9/11” in European Journal of Cultural Studies.
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lawlessness. Other texts, such as Wendell Steavenson’s “Gika” or Thomas de Waal’s
“The English House: A Story of Chechnya,” feature American protagonists whose
presence is unquestioned if it is ethical, if it tries to engage with and alleviate the
suffering of impoverished, abandoned Georgian children (Steavenson) or tell audiences at
home the “real” story of Chechnya—meaning its oppression by Russians—implicitly
addressing US government policy too (de Waal).
Still other texts, like John Beckman’s The Winter Zoo, for instance, criticize
Western venture capitalists for ruining the already impoverished countries through
suspicious business deals with former communist elites and/or mafia upstarts. Arguably,
many of these texts expose the problematic spots in the Western narratives of
management and conditioning, implying that the “civilizing” of post-communist Europe
is itself unpleasantly violent and uncivilized. And yet, many do not question the very
condition of possibility of such narratives, both in terms of the “real” possibility of travel
to post-communist locales (frequently no visa and lots of hard currency) and of the
narrative privilege of imaginatively presenting their exotic peoples and sufferings to
American—or Western European—audiences.
Just as the “improvement” of Eastern Europe is possible in liberal imaginings, so is
an ethical Western engagement with the post-communist economic and political chaos
possible and even encouraged in such texts—but of course, the problem is the extent to
which this “ethical” engagement belies the authors’ ideological investment in “good”
capitalism, benevolence of NGOs, or benefits of developing a “civil society.”3 In turn, the
3
It is interesting that some of these expat writers arrived in Eastern Europe precisely to help develop “civil
society” and “democracy.” For instance, Tom Bissell volunteered with the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan,
whereas Paul Greenberg, another expat author, taught seminars on management skills in Tajikistan and
produced programs on conflict resolution in the Caucasus and the former Yugoslavia (Boris Fishman xiii).
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expats’ oblivious, arrogantly self-absorbed, or consciously criminal behaviour seems to
bear witness to much colonizers’ guilt over betraying “over there” the ideals of economic
fair play and democracy supposedly cherished at home. Perhaps appropriately, then,
Boris Fishman’s introduction to a collection of such short stories and travel accounts,
outrageously titled Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier, casts these texts as literary
responses to and even a type of conscience of, the US foreign policy: “the liberation
experience of [Eastern Europe] offers invaluable lessons, not only for Afghanistan and
Iraq, but also for the United States, as it casts its net over an increasingly recalcitrant
world” (xii; emphasis mine). The fiction collected in the book “has created a felicitous
opportunity for the men and women who conduct this nation’s affairs and they would do
well to take stock of the contents here” (xii). Combined with his opinion that this is the
“literature of obligation” which is both an “essentially Eastern tradition” and inescapable
for Westerners writing about the East and with his statement that Eastern Europe offers
historical insights to Westerners “sheltered” from conflicts at home, Fishman’s position
echoes Fredric Jameson’s controversial thesis about the necessary politicization of Third
World literature (xiv, xvi).
The portrayal of Eastern Europe as a locale that can “instruct” naïve Westerners
unseasoned in human misery, or as a backdrop of temptations against which a Westerner
plays out a “Pilgrim’s Progress” from vice to virtue or vice-versa, enforces the
discrimination between a political, crime-ridden and exotically dangerous East and an
apolitical, ordered, or boring West that I have discussed in respect to Miłosz and
Brodsky. The “East” thus becomes interesting not for its own sake but for an examination
of American conscience and political attitude, which leads to demands for a “soft”
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imperial management in the best-case scenario and rarely challenges the position of the
West as a political subject in control. This is analogous to what Ella Shohat terms
“inverted European narcissism,” a situation in which even the evils occurring in the nonEuropean East are blamed on the West (understood as North America and powerful
European countries), on the premise that the East cannot produce either its successes or
its failures, but becomes instead a perpetual Western symptom (3). I do not deny that an
examination of American—and other countries’—policies in post-communist Eastern
Europe is in order, but rather that it problematically erases the significance of Eastern
European countries themselves and reduces the multiplicity of local narratives that exist
both outside of and in spite of Western presence or interference.
In other words, if the post-communist era is punctured by narratives of Western
management and conditioning of Eastern Europe, I am interested not so much—and not
only—in cultural texts that condemn Western interference, or argue for a more ethical
political attitude, but also in those texts that map the vibrancy and multiplicity of Eastern
European responses to the new situation. The narratives—such as the ones discussed thus
far—which discursively privilege the West by establishing binaries between the orderly
West and the criminal East, cosmopolitan Western nationalism and chauvinist Eastern
nationalism, modern West and traditional, Soviet-mentality East, offer a reductive
interpretation of the East that obscures ways in which complex issues of its economic
restructuring, national and territorial integrity and national identity have been
antagonized precisely by Western racist, managerial attitudes. Specifically, in Chapter 5,
I ask how responses that would radically de-fetishize the West as a point of reference not
only “react” to the newly introduced market reforms based on the Western model, but
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how they also open up an original critique of the narrative of capital, expose the terms of
management and conditioning and tackle the Orientalist discourses about criminal
Eastern Europe that, paradoxically, justify the continuation of reforms.
With the goal of countering specifically this elusive imperialist impulse in liberal,
sympathetic accounts of post-communist Europe—which nevertheless portray opposition
to market reforms as a “Soviet mentality” hangover, claims to Western-type territorial
integrity as fascist chauvinism—I will look at two recent texts, Victor Pelevin’s Homo
Zapiens (Generation P in the Russian original) and Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian
Debutante’s Handbook. The turn to a Russian author and a Russian-American author
does not spring from a desire to sacralize “ethnic” points of view, but rather from their
narrative investment in the particular histories of (post-)communist societies and a
thematization of the Orientalist discourses which prompt such societies to market
themselves as “postmodern,” or “global” rather than “criminal.”
These narratives consider the developments of post-1989 transitions to democracy
and market reform against a palimpsest of the communist past and critical discourses,
practices and habits that the old regime produced. Lodged within the debris of
communism which introduces a sense of heterotemporality,4 the narrative point of view,
like the protagonists, is estranged from its surroundings, unhomed in its “own” country.
In this sense, displacement comes not through anti-communist dissidence and exile to the
West, but through internal exile from an unfamiliar and continuously changing “home,”
4
I use heterotemporality in Homi Bhabha’s sense, as an active memory, or presence of a past which “poses
the future as an open question” through “history's intermediacy” (The Location of Culture 231).
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where even the once-feared and persecuted dissident intellectuals have lost their power
and prestige.5
From this estrangement emerges Shteyngart's and Pelevin's focus on the alienating
violence of the transitions to capitalism, especially their innovative commentary on the
growing mafia circles, a phenomenon which would typically only help intensify
stereotypes of “barbarous” and “crime-ridden” Eastern Europe which must be placed
under control and “civilized.” Central to their texts is a suggestion that mafia business
practices are not a reprehensible aberration from legal capitalist business ethics, or even
its complete opposite—a dualism promoted by Western conservative and liberal
discourses alike, as well as by local politicians bent on introducing protective legislation
to achieve European standards. For instance, this viewpoint underlies historian Philip
Longworth’s statement in The Making of Eastern Europe that, in the post-1989 period,
“legal structures proved inadequate for the new commercial circumstances,” for one
could not “tell an investor from an asset-stripper or a criminal entrepreneur” (30–31).
For Pelevin and Shteyngart, maintaining such a dualism is impossible even with
adequate “legal structures,” and one would here do better to consider Derrida’s argument
in Specters of Marx that the new mafia circles across Eastern Europe are veritable
“capitalist phantom-States” which cannot be disassociated from processes of
democratization (83). Like Derrida, Shteyngart and Pelevin critically collapse the binary
5
In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism, Slavoj Zizek refers to Vaclav Havel as an example of the decline
of dissident intellectual power: ironically, the return of capitalism deprives the once powerful dissidents of
the space of critique opened up and sustained by the “Communist breakthrough” (130–31). In Common
Places, Svetlana Boym comments on the waning in post-communism of the importance of Soviet high
culture — “kul’turnost” — and its collapse into the new (Western) commercial, consumer culture from
which it used to maintain its distance. The result is that “‘Culture’ in an old Russian and official Soviet and
underground dissident sense is in big trouble. It has blended into everyday life and it is the ‘twilight of
Russian intelligentsia’” (224).
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between “good” capitalism and mafia practices, arguing that mafia lawlessness exposes
and embodies the violent nature of the very institutionalization of capitalism, which has
acquired a respectable appearance in Western Europe and North America through a long
process of legalization. Pelevin parodies this violence as a “primitive accumulation of
capital,” accompanied by an ideology of “Neanderthal liberalism,” phrases which
inspired the title of this chapter (9, 160).
This seemingly exaggerated qualification of what took place across Eastern Europe
in the 1990s may be dead-on if considered in the context of neoliberal economic policies,
unrestrained asset grabbing and labor exploitation that made the “Wild East” resemble
American “Wild West” frontier practices, long since completed. In other words, if
neoliberal capitalism reached a peak in wreaking havoc across Western societies with the
Reagan-Thatcher duo in the 1980s, its full impact, enhanced by the background of stateorchestrated socialism, was not felt in post-communist countries until the 1990s.
Commenting on this situation, Pelevin's Homo Zapiens satirizes the nouveau riche mafiabusinessmen ethos as a combination of the falseness of capitalist—and European—
emancipation of Russia and the ineffectiveness of Russian nationalism as a challenge to
globalization.
The mafia violence that continually interrupts the narrative parallels the violence of
the incursion of the discourses of capitalist marketing and advertising into Russian.
Portraying attempts to add an “ethnic” Russian flair to Western-type marketing
campaigns in order to appeal to the natives, Pelevin signals a collusion of the language of
nationalism and the language of corporate advertising. Both domesticate identity within a
set of consumable commodities, allowing Russians to seemingly overcome their
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inferiority complex, believing that they are both truly “Russian” and “European” or
“global” citizens. Through a persistent, albeit playful, resuscitation of communist
memorabilia and Marxist terminology, Pelevin also stages a critique of the exploitation of
a post-communist economy, with mafia circles as major actors in this “primitive
accumulation” of capital—as the new propertied elites of a peripheral, neocolonial
economy.
Unlike Pelevin, Shteyngart empowers and, to an extent, glorifies, the figure of a
mafia-businessman in order to test the limits of multiculturalism and corporate ethics.
The mafia not only exemplify an intensification of the usual violence of capitalism, but
are also reclaimed as trickster figures who can ridicule the “serious” discourses of
capitalism, an act that can be read as resistance to “serious” neocolonial discourses of
Western management of the East. Their carnivalesque treatment of “legal” business
practices, refusal to subject their time to the rhythm of the corporate workplace and
extreme, “irrational” hedonism resist appropriation by the narrative of capital. These
figures importantly reject the position of Eastern European victims waiting to be
emancipated into a global, multicultural brotherhood by Western capital, although the
narrative perspective changes toward the end, casting the mafia as Orientalized “proofs”
of Eastern European inability to overcome its criminal nature. On the other hand, the
mafiosi are also persistent reminders of the communist times by whose downfall they
were disenfranchised and impoverished. My reading will look at how the traces of this
past which Shteyngart, like Pelevin, continually inserts into the narrative, haunt the
desired image of a “global,” “postmodern” Eastern Europe
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Homo Zapiens: The Path to Your (Ethnic) Self Is a Shop
Homo Zapiens opens up by placing two historical events in a constellation which
helps to illuminate the ensuing complexities and tragedies of the Soviet post-communist
chaos as imagined by Pelevin: Leonid Brezhnev’s endorsement of Pepsi, marking an
official acceptance of Western consumer products in the USSR and Mikhail Gorbachev’s
“renovation and improvement” of the USSR, during which the country “improved so
much that it ceased to exist” (3). Pelevin’s protagonist, Babylen Tatarsky, comes across
as a creature whose life is suspended between the two events and as a result, inevitably
shaped by them. He is born into the so-called “Generation P” which drank the oncereviled Pepsi-Cola, dreaming “that some day the distant forbidden world on the far side
of the sea would be part of their lives”; he reaches adulthood roughly when the USSR
improves into disappearance and the “distant forbidden world” becomes part of his life
(1).
In this way, Pelevin sets the stage for a discussion of consumerism as a play on and
manifestation of ubiquitous desire, not limited solely to the “corrupt” Western world and,
contrary to specifically Russian xenophobic arguments post-1989, not neatly representing
a “rape” of innocent, cultured Russia by an intrusive, materialist West.6 But while
consumer desire is not new to old Soviets, manipulated as it was by Brezhnev and others
through a controlled production and a calculated allotment of commodities, the rampant
6
This fear of Western influences is reflected in the unfavorable reviews that Homo Zapiens received from
major Russian critics, despite his overwhelming popularity with readers (also, American critics have
embraced Pelevin, comparing him to Joseph Heller, Sergei Dovlatov and Mikhail Bulgakov). As Aleksandr
Genis explains, Pelevin was accused of writing best-selling, pulp fiction because of his “excessive” talk
about consumerism and advertising (“The Phenomenon of Pelevin”). That the “purity” of literature must be
preserved is also implied by Genis’s own remark that the mythological-Buddhist layer in Homo Zapiens
remains “too thin” — as if a profound discussion of Buddhism is somehow to be expected in “great
literature.”
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consumerism enshrined by market capitalism and aided by advertising nevertheless
performs a radical rupture in Soviet society as portrayed in Pelevin’s text. When the
“distant forbidden world” finally arrives, Tatarsky loses the comfortably lacklustre
existence which characterizes his study at the Moscow Literary Institute and is thwarted
in his plans for an equally comfortable double life as a translator of poetry “from the
languages of the peoples of the USSR” by day and as a reclusive poet producing
“creative labours for eternity” by night (3).
Pelevin describes Babylen Tatarsky deliberately as a perfect Soviet specimen—his
knowledge of Uzbek and Kirghiz, as well as his name which evokes Tatar, or more
mysteriously, Babylonian roots, make him a conglomerate of the various peoples of the
USSR, an official idealization of Soviet multiculturalism at work. But the name Babylen,
Pelevin explains, also combines Tatarsky’s father’s love for Lenin and for the semidissident poet Evgenii Yevtushenko, referencing his controversial poem “Baby Yar.”7
Thus, Tatarsky’s background evokes the cohabitation of official ideology and
ideologically endorsed literature, as well as the antagonistic interaction between the
proponents of politically correct literature and dissident intellectuals. His poetic idol,
Boris Pasternak, exemplifies the double existence of a recalcitrant author who both
challenges and negotiates with the regime, paralleling Tatarsky’s own future plans for a
double life of publicly circulated, commissioned translations and privately cherished,
“real” literature.
7
“Baby Yar” denounces a massacre of Jews by Nazis in 1941 Kiev and also suggests that the USSR has
forgotten the messages of the “Internationale” by promoting anti-Semitism itself. This is significant in light
of Pelevin’s treatment of Russian nationalism and xenophobia in the novel, which is only matched by
similar sentiments among the other former “peoples of the USSR.”
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But with the passing of the USSR, not only does Tatarsky’s official job lose its
significance, but his poetic calling too becomes meaningless and unnecessary: Tatarsky
“knew the new era had no use for him” (5). The society that replaces the USSR does
away with regime authors by withdrawing state stipends and pensions, as well as with
dissident authors whose power is simply rendered irrelevant. The anti-intellectual climate
of the post-Soviet desert in Homo Zapiens, then, also signals the passing of the fetishized
role of a dissident intellectual. The new system of values drops the promotion of
literature, popular education, or intellectual debate and redirects all creative energy into
composing advertising jingles and sales slogans to create perfect consumer-citizens.
From Pelevin’s perspective, then, it becomes impossible to imagine the clout of a
Brodsky, for example, in the post-1989 period and becomes possible to understand the
alienation of dissident authors like Kundera in their home countries, as discussed in
Chapter 4. Instead of an expected victory of democracy and freedom of expression and
flourishing of literary and artistic movements, Pelevin suggests an apocalyptic reduction
of all human interaction to commodity marketing and purchase, through which “identity”
is similarly advertised, televised and commodified. Predictably, Tatarsky has no other
choice but to redirect his creative energies toward advertising and yet this member of the
disempowered and impoverished intelligentsia becomes Pelevin’s vehicle for infiltrating
the new circuits of capital only to subject its mechanisms of identity formation and
enslavement to critique.
In Homo Zapiens, Pelevin specifically tackles the seeming clash between Russian
nationalist narratives—ranging from a negotiation of national identity in the global
context to a patriotic-chauvinist advocacy of “pure” Russian identity—and multifarious
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integrationist narratives of cosmopolitan or European identity. Pelevin here fortuitously
draws on the centuries-long debates between Russian “Slavophiles” and “Westernizers”
which acquire a new meaning and a host of original articulations in the post-1989 period
when Russia again has to redefine its relationship vis-à-vis the West—as Sergei Prozorov
has argued, frequently by way of an antagonized reaction to Western discourses that
exclude Russia from the EU, NATO, or “Europe.”8 But the text argues that both sides of
the debate are missing the point and indeed, collapsing into each other in the world of
market-driven forces which domesticate and promote “national identity” as an advertising
tool for the “Westernized” vendors, as well as consumers.
The debates about preserving or developing a specific Russian culture, whether in
its chauvinist or tolerant, isolationist or integrationist articulations, no longer apply if one
attempts to combine them with a free market reform because, Homo Zapiens suggests,
they can always be rearticulated as consumer commodities, as watered-down quandaries
that have to do less with questions of Russia’s place in world civilization and more with
the “vulgar” concerns of market functioning. Illustrating this situation is a posteradvertisement for GAP that Tatarsky encounters, featuring Anton Chekhov—who was
engaged with issues of Russian social modernization and cultural development—and
reading: “Russia was always notorious for the gap between culture and civilization. Now
there is no more culture. No more civilization. The only thing that remains is the gap. The
way they see you” (63).
8
For an overview of the multiple political discourses and revisions of Russia’s relationship with the West,
see especially Sergei Prozorov’s “The Structure of the EU-Russian Conflict Discourse: Issue and Identity
Conflicts in the Narratives of Exclusion and Self-Exclusion,” Working Paper Series in EU Border Conflicts
Studies.
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This Russian cultural gap that has been filled by the Western brand-name GAP
suggests Pelevin’s vision of the post-communist devaluation of “unprofitable”
intellectual activity, including the “empty” debates about Russia’s identity: bankruptcy of
an aesthetic, cultural ideal of national unity poised against the seemingly chaotic and
disintegrationist effects of the market. After all, Tatarsky abandons the writing of poetry
and loses his fascination with “great” Russian poets, when he realizes that it is no longer
possible to “waste entire kilowatts of mental energy in dead-end circuits of his brain that
never paid back the investment” (102). Pelevin satirically incorporates Russian writers
and critics into commercials and advertisements ostensibly to give the latter a cultured,
elegant Russian flair, but this gesture also highlights an absurdist incongruity between the
elaborate debates over the direction Russia should take and the reality of simple, effective
advertising slogans taking over the social landscape.
Tatarsky’s scenario for a Gucci commercial, for instance, pictures critic Pavel
Bisinsky falling into a cesspit in a dirty country lavatory as he ponders historic arguments
over the “Europeanness” of Russia, referring also to Peter Chadaev’s and Ivan Krylov’s
contributions to this argument. The caption reads: “Gucci for men. Be a European: smell
better” (160). Bisinsky is possibly a parody of Pavel Basinsky, a contemporary Russian
critic who, among other things, argues that “tradition” must be preserved, that women
can’t write as well as men and that the West should not teach Russia lessons on human
rights. Chadaev and Krylov, like Basinsky, are portrayed as deeply invested in questions
of Russia’s relationship to the West, Orientalizing Russia as non-Europe, as a cultural
vacuum which contributed nothing to humanity.
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If the insertion of venerated critics and canonical writers parodically alleviates the
impact of the Western market model by making Gucci commercials more sophisticated
and therefore more “Russian,” it also commits blasphemy against highbrow, “pure” art by
tarnishing such figures in the texts of mass consumer culture.9 In this respect, Pelevin’s
text seems irreverent particularly of the proponents of preserving the “purity” of Russian
literary, artistic, or religious culture in the face of a deluge of foreign mass culture
(frequently on charges of secularism, promotion of homosexuality and general laxness in
morals and standards). Indeed, Pelevin takes the market and all its manifestations
seriously, suggesting that one should look at it critically instead of dismissing it as
intellectually vulgar or pernicious, or pretending that it isn’t there. In this sense, Pelevin’s
frequent employment of exaggerated, apocalyptic images of Russia’s post-communist
anti-intellectualism is both serious and parodic: it expresses a certain nostalgia for the
past importance of cultural and artistic sophistication while it also pokes fun at the
complaints by xenophobic Russian purists, themselves apocalyptic, about the
contamination of Russian “kul’turnost” with inferior mass-market imports.
Although the medium and the content of the message may be radically different,
contemporary advertising in Pelevin appeals to the same anxieties about Russian
“Europeanness” which characterize the old and new debates between Slavophiles and
Westernizers. At the same time, then, ads may sell commodities as a path to a European,
cosmopolitan identity, or they may market the Russian national identity, invoking
9
Pelevin also commits this blasphemy when Navna, the feminine “soul of Russia,” a concept developed in
Daniil Andreiev’s popular text in the tradition of Russian mysticism Rosa Mundi, is imagined as raped by a
black man, presumably a character from a Harold Robbins novel. This is less Pelevin’s endorsement of
Robbins — the text pokes fun at the anti-intellectualism of mass cultural products too — than commentary
on Russian fears of contagion and mixing, fears that American mass culture will tarnish the Russian “soul
of a nation.”
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everything from Orientalist discourses on the non-European “backwardness” of Russia to
nationalist narratives that extol Russian exceptionalism. Pelevin thus hints at a collusion,
rather than antagonism, between the narratives of global corporate advertising and of
Russian nationalism or cultural specificity. As an appropriate illustration of this point,
Tatarsky’s employer Khanin has two copywriters whom he treats interchangeably:
Seryozha, a Westernizer and admirer of America and Malyuta, a Russian nationalist and
anti-Semite. Malyuta wears a Turkish-made Russian folk shirt, which signals an
impossibility of “pure” patriotism and is all the more outrageous as anti-Turkish
advertisements and news reports feature prominently in the novel (200).
But Malyuta also caters to the so-called “new Russians” who surface in the modern
world of “primitive capitalism,” with enough money to participate in the promotion of
consumer culture and enough power to determine the content of Russian national identity
that is to be sold through advertisements. These “new Russians” comprise the new
bourgeoisie emerging in the chaos of transitions, the entrepreneurial-mafia class that
Pelevin chastises for its anti-intellectualism and bad taste, standing in for the vanishing
“middle class” of the Soviet times to whose memory the novel is in fact dedicated. In
Pelevin, mafia circles become veritable “administrators” of the “capitalist PhantomState,” in Derrida’s words, which becomes indistinguishable from the “real” state: as
such, this powerful conglomerate of mafia-politicians-businessmen takes control over the
mediatized articulation of Russia’s attitude to the West.
Tatarsky thus updates the Gucci poster to appeal to the “real clientele”: he loses the
literary references that “new Russians” won’t understand and instead covers “the wall of
the lavatory with pink silk,” and rewrites Bisinsky’s monologue so “the speaker is
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recalling a fight in a restaurant on the Cote d’Azur” (160). The “real clientele” is
immersed in violence, anti-Semitism and aggressive nationalism, making up the militant
ideology of new Russia’s power circles which Tatarsky observes in his attempt to adapt
American advertising concepts to “Soviet mentality.” Although the ultimate goal is to sell
a Harley Davidson, for instance and help an “other” economy, the advertisement must
nevertheless sell Russian “cultural references” (20). The narrative continually derides
this simulation of nationalist pride in the service of a Western market: Malyuta’s Harley
Davidson ad features a successful Hassidic Jew riding a shiny motorcycle past two
Russians who recall their unfortunate friend Harley, commenting, “Just how long can the
Davidsons keep riding the Harleys? Russia, awake!” (94).
Not only does “Russiannness,” then, for all its alleged insistence on the legacy of
power and greatness, carry little or no opposition to global free market mechanisms, but
also becomes defined and articulated precisely in the process of Russia’s entry into world
capitalist circuits, for “outside” observers so to speak. Arguably, Tatarsky and others
must add a Russian flavour to Western-type ads to make them more palatable for the
domestic audience, whose “Soviet mentality” is assumed to be antagonized by the
transitions to capitalism and Russia’s “rape” by foreign interventions. More significantly,
however, Pelevin suggests that post-communist nationalism loses its potential for being
an oppositional practice when it becomes a requirement for competitiveness in the world
market of “cultural diversity.”
It becomes articulated not as political or economic resistance, but as cultural
“difference” encouraged by and subsumed within the multicultural discourse of
globalization, in a televised public forum—here exemplified by advertising—where
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“ethnics” can perform their “difference.” In this respect, R. Radhakrishnan’s observation
that in the “context of the techno-capital driven world of deideologized and depoliticized
[tele]visuality,” cultural hybridity has become “so eminently stagable [sic] as spectacle
and as pure formal surface effect that it resists and trivializes historical explanation” can
also extend to the phenomenon of the televisually stageable national culture, seemingly
“different” and “exceptional” but always-already (superficially) hybrid as it employs
global media of representation and communication (“Adjudicating Hybridity”).
Tatarsky’s friend Morkovin, who initiates him into the world of advertising,
explains that mafia-businessmen order expensive advertising clips as result of “totally
boundless megalomania,” which seems to stem out of an inferiority complex and need to
prove their merit in the world market by playing the game as successfully as others and
sporting an interesting, original cultural identity, safe for international consumption (9).
This is arguably a “soft,” non-threatening version of nationalism which is what the
powerful Western countries will allow on condition that their political and economic
mandates are not questioned. In fact, one can surmise here a distinction between “hard”
nationalist politics and this “soft” politics of ethnicity, where the only way for Russia—or
non-Western others—to articulate its nationalism in an acceptable way is through its
“ethnic” specificity (mirroring the multicultural politics of “ethnic” diversity in the
United States), which includes language, culture, customs, folk heritage, but not any of
the institutional or symbolic practices that affirm a confident, independent nation-state.
Describing Russia’s position of (self)exclusion regarding the EU, Sergei Prozorov argues
that Russia can only seek national and territorial integrity, revival of the armed forces,
i.e., everything that characterizes a modern European nation-state by articulating it as a
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“discourse of self-exclusion,” because Europe will not allow other states what it allows
itself (32).
Accordingly, Mafioso Wee Vova commissions Tatarsky to develop a
straightforward “Russian idea” which can be laid out “clear and simple for any bastard
from any of their Harvards” because the people from these “Harvards” treat the upwardly
mobile Russians as “nig-nogs out in Africa . . . Like we was animals with money. Pigs
maybe, or bulls” (137). Pelevin signals that a simple “national identity” is important in
the global market to enable what Rey Chow terms “coercive mimeticism,” or “the level at
which the ethnic person is expected to resemble what is recognizably ethnic” (107). As
Boris Groys argues, post-communist Eastern Europeans’ desire to be “as nationalistic, as
traditional, as culturally identified, etc., as all the others” is a “hysterical reaction to the
requirements of the international cultural markets.” This “apparent” nationalism is
“primarily a reflection of and an accommodation to the quest for otherness that is
characteristic of the cultural taste of the contemporary West”: the Russians, Ukrainians,
Chechens, etc. have to “rediscover, to redefine and to manifest their alleged cultural
identity” (312).
In Pelevin’s absurdist illustration of this point, Chechen Mafioso Hussein shows a
Russian movie stereotyping Chechens as brutal savages to a Russian “client” that he aims
to intimidate. This is a “promotional video: information technology had influenced
Hussein too and now he was using an image sequence to position himself in the
consciousness of a client” (131). Similarly, in the process of establishing themselves as
the national elite, the Russian nouveau riche seek an ideological justification and an
image of respectability that would be lodged in the consciousness of world clients and
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alleviate the fact that they are also neocolonial elites: “it’s all because we are living on
their handouts. We watch their films, ride their wheels, even eat their fodder. And we
don’t produce nothing, if you think about it, ‘cept for mazuma . . . Which is still only
their dollars . . . which makes it a mystery how come we can be producing ‘em” (136).
The “Russian idea” becomes a fantasy of power within the structures of economic
exchange over which the Mafiosi both do and do not have control.
This protest against one’s humiliation using the mediatized, globally accessible,
world of advertising recalls Chow’s argument that claiming one’s belonging to the
“normal” world “increasingly take[s] on the significance of a commodity, a commodified
spectacle.” In this context, the respectable Russian national idea “counts less for actual
emancipation of any kind than for the benefits of worldwide visibility, currency and
circulation. Ethnic struggles have become, in this manner, an indisputable symptom of
the thoroughly and irrevocably mediatized relations of capitalism and its biopolitics”
(Chow 48). In Pelevin, there is hardly any actual emancipation or even fantasy of power
behind a national idea for those Russians who are not business or advertising elites: for
instance, when Tatarsky goes to the “ordinary Russians” on the Moscow streets eliciting
brainstorming material for the “Russian idea,” they all tell him to bugger off and crash his
flashy Mercedes (181).
As we shall see later, the narrative continually highlights this disconnect between
the nouveau riche beneficiaries of the transitions and the angry, impoverished multitudes,
a “gap” which opens up the possibility of recognizing the simulacrum and utter
meaninglessness of the “Russian idea.” Not only does meaning dissipate in the fact that
Tatarsky cannot quite think of a stereotype that would briefly and effectively express the
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“essence” of Russia,10 but it also becomes absurd to think of Russia though the former
grand narratives of imperial might, technological and scientific progress, or cultural
sophistication in the face of widespread impoverishment, as well as its subordinate
position in the mediatized world of cultural and economic exchange.
While Brodsky, as we have seen in Chapter 3, upholds Russia as the “Third Rome”
which belongs to a “world civilization,” Pelevin treats the concept with sarcasm, as
Brodsky’s cultural-ethical ideal of “world civilization,” conceived in terms of human
rights, freedom of expression and artistic achievement, has been displaced by the market.
Tatarsky’s friend Sasha Blo can only articulate the idea that Russia is “the third Rome”
with a “total historical self-sufficiency and profound national dignity” as an advertising
slogan which bears witness precisely to the undignified impossibility of national selfsufficiency (215). But in turn, the market can be justified by its ethnic democracy, its
tolerance of “difference”—Tatarsky’s services are alternately commissioned by
Chechens, Jews (who, dissatisfied by his services, call him a “schlemazl”) and “old time
[Russian] hoods” (who are homophobic and request good, clean heterosexual material)
(67). This gesture again has a double target in Pelevin: a continual discussion of
Chechens and other minorities haunts the debate of preserving the “purity” of Russian
culture, while the very multiculturalism of the advertising market and the phantomcapitalism in which these minorities become “visible” appears hollow, to say the least.
10
Also, the narrative exposes the absurdity of cultural stereotyping in the global multicultural forum in
general. For instance, Seryozha the Westernizer asks a Pakistani who used to be a cab driver in New York
what constitutes an “American idea”; this appeal to an “authority” clearly outside of the American
mainstream highlights those non-citizens who haunt the idea of “neat” nationalisms, “national ideas” and
stereotypes.
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Inside the Language of the Market
So what is to be done? If, according to this scenario, the domination of the market
and economic self-insufficiency neutralizes any significance of Russia’s negotiation of
national identity vis-à-vis the West, then it seems more fruitful to target market
mechanisms and narratives themselves than cling on to the (superseded) ideal of Russian
national dignity. The Russian “national idea” attracts Pelevin’s criticism not only because
he sees it as an ineffective weapon in a struggle against consumer economy, but more
importantly, because it participates in an idealist discourse of transcendence, enshrining
ideal national “types,” the ethics of unity, overarching narratives of history and/or
aesthetic canonicity.
Pelevin’s blasphemous, anti-“national idea” text can therefore be approached via
David Lloyd’s intriguing elaboration of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor
literature” as a literature that remains in an “oppositional relation to the canon and the
state from which it has been excluded” (21). It thus subverts the “narrative paradigm” of
“major literature,” which requires both a “production of an autonomous ethical identity”
that is supposedly a national “essence” and the autonomy, self-containment and
originality of the literature itself, “where the latter term implies the re-creation at a higher
level of the original identity of the race” (19). Perhaps it is only appropriate then that
Homo Zapiens, which has been denied the tribute of aesthetic canonicity or narrative
originality by most Russian literary critics (including Pavel Basinsky), itself acts as
“minor” literature that “deterritorializes” the aesthetic ideal by immersing itself in the
language of the market and mass culture and the ethnic ideal by exposing Russian racism
toward Chechens, Turks and Tatars.
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In this sense, Homo Zapiens also furnishes a critique of intellectual endeavours in
the service of articulating and promoting a “national idea”—including the ones by
fashionable literary critics—but it doesn’t constitute a blanket condemnation of
intellectualism. Pelevin conceives of Tatarsky as an intellectual whose critical
interventions subject to ridicule both Russian cultural purists and nouveau riche mafia
who float between the simple slogans of nationalist chauvinism and consumer fascination
with Western goods without critically engaging with either option. What Pelevin
accomplishes through the figure of Tatarsky and a number of similar characters in the
novel is an immanent critique of Western narratives of capital, consumerism and
marketing slowly enveloping Russia—a critical option closed off to those who view these
narratives from the “outside” so to speak, as an organic contradiction to “Russian
mentality” (with purists, for purposes of glorifying the noble Russian mentality; with
Westernizers, for purposes of glorifying the market to which this mentality must adapt).
Tatarsky is thus also symbolically implicated in the market as at once its employee,
beneficiary and critic, rather than being on the “outside.”
Pelevin’s text distances itself from praises or condemnations of Russian—or
Soviet—“mentality,” which like the discussion of “identity” entails much introspective
and enclosed inquiry and leads only to the abstractions of a Russian “idea” or “essence”
of which Pelevin is suspicious. Instead, Homo Zapiens suggests a paradigm shift in terms
of finding fault, rather, with the system of values within which this “identity” must find
its new articulation and whose contradictions it is asked to internalize as personal
failures. Describing the introduction of free market reforms, the narrator explains how
“Lenin’s statues” were replaced by “a frightening murky greyness in which the Soviet
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soul simply continued rotting until it collapsed inwardly on itself” (19). The text resists
the reformists’ attempts at legitimizing the changes as something “inevitable” and views
with sarcasm newspaper claims that “the whole world had been living in this grey murk
for absolutely ages, which was why it was so full of things and money and the only
reason people couldn’t understand this was their ‘Soviet mentality’” (19).
Pelevin further identifies the legitimation of the free market and corporate
capitalism through its near-religious discursive glorification—indeed, mythification—and
parodies the self-congratulatory language of Western corporate advertising, which
Tatarsky calls the “mantra” of capitalism. Tatarsky’s continual reading of American
books on advertising as he tries to adapt Western concepts to Russian “mentality” signals
a unidirectional dissemination of metropolitan ideas among the natives who cannot set
the terms of this discourse. Its alien, incongruous quality is suggested by its
inapplicability to the particular Russian sociocultural milieu: while the book speaks of a
competition among trademarks in an advanced consumer society, “there was no battle
being waged by trademarks for niches in befuddled Russian brains; the situation was
more reminiscent of a smoking landscape after a nuclear explosion” (17).
And yet, Tatarsky’s adoption of “stylish expressions” from such texts—“line
extension” or “freelance writer”—that he can use in front of clients effects a simulation
of advanced consumer practices, arguing that Russia’s corporate culture is “the same as”
American. But Pelevin targets these concepts not only because they help simulate
Western advertising in Russia’s “smoking landscape,” but because they codify the nature
of capitalist exchanges everywhere, using lofty, awe-inspiring, romanticized rhetoric.
After reading a book appropriately written by two “highly advanced American shamans,”
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Tatarsky calls it his little “Bible” which contains “echoes of religious views that had an
especially powerful impact on his chaste and unsullied soul: ‘The romantic copywriters
of the fifties, gone on ahead of us to that great advertising agency in the sky’” (18).
In addition to commenting on this discursive sacralization of business, Pelevin also
hints at its seductive, yet deceptive quality: when Ogilvy, another advertising guru, is
mentioned, Tatarsky thinks that Ogilvy is a character in Orwell’s 1984 (45). In this
respect, corporate discourses acquire the power of a religious cult which can intoxicate
both their promoters and target customers with a “doublespeak” that invents its own
system of values. Indeed, Tatarsky writes a pretend-scientific analysis of modern
advertising invoking popular concepts of psychoanalytic theory: advertising works on the
consumers’ “unconscious” desire to appear powerful, in control, respectable. Thus, a
typical advertisement contains a “black Mercedes, a suitcase stuffed full of dollars and
other archetypes of the collective unconscious” (16). This appears as “irrational” to
Tatarsky as the “inflation of happiness” that he observes in post-communist Russia: the
amount of happiness from obtaining a new pair of sneakers in Soviet times is now
matched by buying “at least a jeep, maybe even a house” (70). Of course, what the text
attempts to work through is this new process of class differentiation through collecting
appropriate consumer commodities, but it refuses to take an innocent, unsullied position
“on the outside” of consumer desire, which would exempt those who can supposedly
resist the temptation.
Thus, Tatarsky too becomes a consumer—he too rides around in an expensive
Mercedes. But the text establishes an ethical difference between him and the mafiabusinessmen: while their “unconscious” is fully taken with the success of acquiring a
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Mercedes, especially as most of their compatriots do not have one, Tatarsky actively
attempts to deconstruct the “fetish of the commodity.” Being both, so to speak, inside and
outside of the market, Tatarsky remains inseparable from the losers in the struggle for
prestige, who lack not so much the know-how and self-assertiveness, to use fashionable
corporate lingo, but rather the aggressive greed of the “successful.” Unlike Tatarsky, a
mafia-businessman driving around in a stolen Mercedes is imagined to remain
obliviously separated from his surroundings:
It happens so often: you’re riding along in your white Mercedes and you go past a
bus stop. You see people who’ve been standing there, waiting in frustration for
their bus for God knows how long and suddenly you notice one of them gazing at
you with a dull kind of expression that just might be envy. A warm shiver runs up
and down your spine, you proudly turn your face away from the people standing at
the bus stop and in your very heart of hearts you know that all your trials were not
in vain: you’ve really made it. (179)
In contrast, Tatarsky “failed to experience [the] sweet titillation,” and although the
text, in its characteristically parodic fashion, “pretends” that this is due to the “serious”
problems such as Tatarsky’s upcoming review at work—after all, he is one of the
unsentimental “new Russians”—there is a hint that he cannot look away from “some
specific after-the-rain apathy of the punters standing at their bus stops” (179).
In that sense, the narrative continually subverts itself—the pseudo-scientific
discourse of the “collective unconscious” breaks down as some are shown to be more
collectively unconscious than others and the rhetoric of capital loses its mystical,
religious substance. Consequently, the text parodies, on the one hand, the corporate
business culture’s attempt at self-sacralization, portraying it as at best an imaginatively
depleted religion and on the other, spiritual and religious traditions which argue they can
remain on the “outside,” pure from degradation by “vulgar” consumerism. For instance,
towards the end of his climb up the corporate ladder of advertising, Tatarsky reaches the
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top of the “ziggurat” as he is initiated into a religious conspiracy: the media are
uncovered as a supreme power that controls politics, economy and the market through a
“written,” digitized series of supposedly real characters. Tatarsky is chosen as a false god
of advertising, as husband to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar who has been reduced to a
pure concept of “gold,” signaling human desire for the idea of gold rather than for gold
literally. But as Tatarsky, who references Babylonian and Buddhist religious concepts
throughout the novel, tries to find out more about this strange combination of advertising
and ancient Babylonian rituals, he receives mostly disappointing answers that betray the
ritual’s superficiality and indifference to religious symbolism among the experienced
advertising gurus. Although in charge of explaining to Tatarsky his calling as a “god” of
advertising, Tatarsky’s initiators do not know the names or function of key divinities in
the legends they try to recount and Tatarsky is consequently told to not “go looking for
symbolic significance in everything” (244).
As with this false religion of corporate business, Homo Zapiens parodies the other
religious options and paths toward spiritual self-improvement mentioned in the novel,
especially their capacity to offer salvation from consumerism. Indeed, even the question
of whether god exists or not is no longer applicable: one should doubt his/her existence as
“everything in the world is a matter of interpretation” (75). Tatarsky’s friend Gireev
applies the Buddhist solution of turning a television upside down so as not to be
brainwashed by ads; and yet, the only “parallel universe” he can really offer to desperate
Tatarsky running away from the world of phantom-capitalism comes through the
hallucinatory benefits of fly-agaric mushrooms. Significantly, Russian Orthodoxy is
satirized in the same way, perhaps again targeting the proponents of Russia’s religious
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morality for their claims of superiority over the secular, immorally materialist West.
When Tatarsky encounters Grigory, immersed in the tradition of Russian religious
mysticism and expounding on Daniil Andreev’s Rosa Mundi, his authority becomes
swiftly eroded as he turns out to be another drug-dealer. At the same time, both Gireev
and Grigory are humiliatingly poor, which severs them from any circuits of cultural
influence. Pelevin’s world in Homo Zapiens is ultimately a disenchanted one: even
Tatarsky’s attempt at romanticizing Baghdad as a city near the mythical Babylon, with
streets where Haroun el-Raschid walks disguised, is countered by his mafia-employer
Azadovsky’s, “You wouldn’t do too much strolling around Baghdad these days. It’s just
like here, only you have to take three jeeps full of bodyguards” (214).
Let Us Drown the Russian Bourgeoisie in a Flood of Images
Although Baghdad may be “the same as” Moscow in terms of their shared
dismantling at the hands of global economy, they are both the same and yet not the same
as the metropolises of the mythically developed, industrially advanced countries.
Pelevin’s narrative establishes explicit links between the (supposedly) developed and the
(supposedly) developing, which implies that what is taking place in Russia cannot be
considered in isolation from what is taking place in London or New York. Therefore,
while it persistently couches the developments in Russia in the same language of
corporate trade and marketing as would be used in Western locales, it focuses on the
crucial difference of a higher level of social disenfranchisement and pauperization in the
peripheral sites of global capitalism such as Russia (or Iraq).
Commenting on Russia’s current status of a service economy, Tatarsky wonders
“why it was worth exchanging an evil empire for an evil banana republic that imported its
bananas from Finland” (7). The inequality of power between the peripheral and
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metropolitan sites of global economic and political exchange is humoristically portrayed
through the Russian advertising “gods’” frustration with their dependency on the United
States, which controls their divine right to broadcast frequency. But they are also in
collusion with the US media as they attempt to counter any attempts by the Russian “socalled middle class” to think for themselves and resist the effects of
“teleschizomanipulation”: they employ a program devised by the CIA for “neutralizing
remnants of an intellectually independent national intelligentsia in Third World
Countries” (208).
It would be tempting to read this as Pelevin’s deliberate, parodic elaboration of a
conspiracy theory that would serve as a convenient domestic explanation of all of
Russia’s ills; however, the “conspiracy” may in fact not be one at all if considered in the
light of IMF/World Bank policies which discourage developing countries from producing
college-educated cadres and recommend a redirection of educational funds. Similarly,
while it would also be tempting to read Pelevin’s use of “serious” corporate jargon in the
context of mafia practices as a parody that stems from the apparent incongruity between
the two, I propose a reading that considers the Eastern European mafia as the new
propertied elites of peripheral economies, immersed in the rhetoric of violence and of
capitalism and in the violence of capitalism. As the new capitalists whose insistence on a
strong Russia, as well as a global Russia betrays, in either case, their indebtedness to the
“West” as a point of reference, they become the primary target of Pelevin’s narrative
which uses Tatarsky’s point of view as an (ironic) philosophical lens. As one who can
intellectually evaluate the new values and economic developments in which the mafia
participate, Tatarsky, a disenfranchised child of Soviet communism who is nevertheless
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not quite communist, playfully employs the staples of Marxist terminology to articulate
his critique.
In this way Pelevin’s text returns, albeit parodically and vicariously, to the legacy
of communist rhetoric whose memory and revival appears quite appropriate for the
project of staging an immanent critique of capital. This choice seems all the more radical
and innovative in a post-communist social climate which largely discredits and silences
communist political discourse and historical legacy and either accepts, to varying
degrees, transitions to private capitalism or dwells on questions of Russia’s national
integrity. The narrative collapses binaries between allegedly law-abiding State
mechanisms and renegade mafia practices when it implies that both have as their ultimate
goal the “primitive accumulation of capital”; not only do the mafia entrepreneurs avail
themselves of the State Bank, for instance, for “illegal” bankruptcies, but “the State
Bank’s got its own mafia, so the situation’s a bit more complicated, but the basic picture
is still the same” (9).
Pelevin signals that even if the situation changes to a full-blown corporate
economy, sporting a respectable image and higher stakes, the “basic principle of . . . work
will never change”: “In a year or two, everything’s going to look entirely different.
Instead of all these pot-bellied nobodies taking loans for their petty little businesses,
there’ll be guys borrowing millions of bucks at a time. Instead of jeeps for crashing into
lamp-posts there’ll be castles in France and islands in the Pacific” (10). Here the old
Dostoevskyan (literary, Russian, Slavophilic) dilemma, “Am I a timid cowering creature
or have I got moral rights?” is replaced by the language of American (Western, massmedia) democracy: “I’m a timid cowering creature with inalienable rights” (11). The
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process of “primitive accumulation” becomes justified by and engenders, the discourse of
“human rights” for everyone, even for “timid cowering creatures”: the inalienable rights
to profit and private property.
Faced with this realization, Tatarsky philosophically deduces the “basic economic
law of post-socialist society: initial accumulation of capital is also final,” which enshrines
the existing class differentiations and undermines the discourse of democratic, inalienable
rights for everyone (18). But post-communist terminology itself attempts to neutralize the
process of class differentiation: without focusing on the far more numerous “losers” of
the transition, it upholds the ideal of an entrepreneurial, modern “middle class” in Russia
that can join the global economy. Not only does Homo Zapiens expose this “middle
class” as the only moneyed class, but also dwells on their problematic “upward mobility”:
a representative of this class is portrayed as a “typical red-necked, red-faced hitman from
some gang . . . wearing a black leather jacket, a heavy gold chain and tracksuit trousers”
(133).
He—and it is inevitably a “he” in Pelevin, as this supposed “middle class” counts
almost no women, unless they are the businessmen’s secretaries and/or mistresses—
“represented that rare instance when a private gets himself promoted to the rank of
general” (133). The vanishing “middle class” to whom the novel is dedicated is clearly
distinct from the gangster types in leather jackets: it seems to comprise that large,
amorphous portion of Soviet society characterized by comparable, though not high,
income levels, urban living and at least some degree of education and professionalization.
Unlike the new “middle class,” the old one is not the ostensibly moneyed class (there was
the privileged party nomenklatura after all), it does not constitute a profit-driven minority
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living at the expense of the impoverished majority, nor can it be used as a poster-child for
the successes of “privatization.”
Of course, Pelevin’s narrative refuses to bury the old: along with re-validating the
not wholly superseded Marxist terminology, it empowers the representatives of the
vanishing middle classes, such as Tatarsky and his friend Sasha Blo, through the use of
their intellectual capital to take revenge on the new capitalists. Tatarsky articulates
another difference between “the era of decaying imperialism and the era of primitive
capital accumulation”: in the West, “both the client who ordered advertising and the
copywriter tried to brainwash the consumer, but in Russia the copywriter’s job was to
screw with the client’s brains” (18). In this respect, the era of “primitive accumulation”
seems to carry some potential for early critique and resistance over the era of “decaying
imperialism.” At stake for Pelevin is at once a rejection of the role of a “consumer” who
can be brainwashed, as well as of the collusion with a corporate client, i.e., profit-driven
mafia, in the fostering of a consumer-based exchange: the “copywriter,” instead of
desiring upward mobility under the wing of corporate capital, politically sides with the
projected “consumer” in feeling disgust with the corporate mafia, in not believing in the
rhetoric of advertising.
Tatarsky’s participation in the business world is less an enthusiastic enchantment
with the possibility of profit and more a tongue-in-cheek pose, a survival technique and
an opening for critique of his “disgusting” association with “bankers and other scum who
want advertising” in favor of the “parallel universe,” traces of a “lost world” which still
exists with his old, now impoverished, friends from Soviet times—notably, Gireiev the
Buddhist, a projected “consumer” (226, 32). Through another mock resurgence of
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communist rhetoric, Tatarsky declares, “Comrades! Let us drown the Russian bourgeoisie
in a flood of images!” (107).
The drowning of the Russian bourgeoisie and corporate logic in Pelevin takes place
through a Situationist-type detournement of “serious” advertising clips. This is especially
significant in terms of the apocalyptic approximation in Pelevin’s Russia of what Guy
Debord’s calls the “society of the spectacle” and what the Situationists set out to
challenge: post-Soviet Russia reduces all human interaction to “anal” and “oral” “wow”
impulses, corresponding to the consumption or ingestion of money with the purpose of
acquiring a desirable, advertised image and “wow-ing” another human being, whom
Debord calls “Homo Spectator” and Pelevin “Homo Zapiens.”11 In the reduction of
human beings to widely circulating signs, images, or television programs, the “Man is
wolf to man” saying is replaced by “Man is wow to man,” or a television program
watching another television program (Pelevin 90). A similar social internalization of the
effects of a technological phenomenon occurs in Debord who describes the “spectacle”
not as a mere collection, production, or dissemination of images but rather as a “social
relationship . . . mediated by images,” a “weltanschauung . . . translated into the material
realm” (The Society of the Spectacle 13).
In exposing the spectacularization social relationships, then, Situationists opt for
detournement, or a re-writing of existing artistic elements in a new assemblage, in order
to “conceive of a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements,
11
“Zapping” is defined as the “switching to and fro of the [television] viewer that is controlled by the
producer and cameraman,” whereby the television is converted into a remote control for the viewer, turning
him into a Homo Zapiens. Enslaved by the “coercive zapping,” Homo Zapiens is at the mercy of television
producers and advertisers, rather than being a subject in (remote) control who independently performs the
“zapping” through channels (81).
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far from aiming at arousing indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work,
will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original” (Debord,
“Detournement as Negation and Prelude” 56). Pelevin’s intervention into the language
and images of advertising carries a similar potential; while the novel discusses other
visual advertising media, such as posters and billboards, it importantly targets primarily
television advertising because “the main reason for the existence of television is its
advertising function, which is indissolubly linked with the circulation of money,” i.e.,
capital (82). The detourned ads, “underwritten” by Tatarsky and other super copywriters,
are at that parodic-serious stage where they both ridicule the safeness of “appropriate”
advertising symbols and make the products advertised ultimately meaningless and
undesirable by shifting the viewers’ attention to the violent subtext of their supposed
promotion.
The proposed ad for “Parliament” cigarettes which invokes Yeltsin’s 1993 shelling
of the Russian Parliament, followed up with a line from Aleksandr Griboedov’s Woe
from Wit, “Sweet and dear/Is the smoke of our Motherland” exposes the violent origins of
the imposition of this and other US products on the Russian market (42). Ironically, the
ad for “Parliament” cigarettes is made possible precisely by this suppressed history of
Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Parliament for their opposition to his neoliberal market
reforms, for which Yeltsin received (democratic) America’s backing. But the violence in
other ads is not necessarily related to the product itself, nor does it aim at arousing
indignation at the realization of the history behind the promotion of a product. For
instance, a Nike commercial scenario features the dead members of the San Diego
Heaven’s Gate cult uniformly sporting Nike sneakers and the usual “Just Do It” slogan
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(96). A proposed campaign for Nescafe envisions a fake terrorist alert about planted
bombs, whereby the police, authorities and the media would uncover Nescafe packets
instead of bombs at various city sites—and all this would be followed up by a “basic
slogan: ‘Nescafe Gold! The Taste Explosion!” (46). What takes place in such mock ads is
the subversion of the very structure of Western advertising, whereby the focus falls
precisely on the morbid side-effects of Nike popularity that Nike’s advertising team
would likely suppress, or to the uncomfortable reference to the “real” fear of terrorism
which prompts an alienation from Nescafe products—an unholy betrayal of “serious”
expectations by giving them “pleasant,” “trivial” content.
Pelevin’s narrative use of the parodic-serious detournement seems to express, as it
did for the Situationists, “the contradictions of an era in which we find ourselves
confronted with both the urgent necessity and the near impossibility of bringing together
and carrying out a totally innovative collective action” (Debord, “Detournement as
Negation” 56). How can collective action be staged and how can the “wow” humanity
possibly be able to read the mock ads if it has been completely spectacularized, if its
“identities” have been fully shaped by advertising slogans? It seems that the novel’s ideal
audience that would understand the inside jokes and the subversive gesture of the mock
ads nevertheless exists in the margins of the “wowerized” society. In opposition to what
Tatarsky, again employing Marxist clichés, terms “lumpen intelligentsia”—presumably
the Mafia businessmen and assorted Russian patriots who believe in the viability of the
“Russian idea” in the global market—there is another group who could realize that the
“planetary triumph of the Russian idea” is a marketing technique to boost sales. But,
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“only the least materially well-off section of the target group is capable of drawing such
analytical conclusions,” and therefore sales cannot be adversely affected (161).
The “least materially well-off” whose identity has not fully collapsed into an
advertised spectacle exist in the interstices of Tatarsky’s climb up the corporate
advertising ladder, as the grumpy Russians waiting at bus stops, Afghan war veterans,
“ordinary Russians” who tell him to bugger off and crash his Mercedes—including the
“vanishing middle class” with Gireiev and Sasha Blo as its representatives. Homo
Zapiens asks, then, how can the disenfranchised, the poor and the homeless become
political actors, how can they be made to rebel once their illusions have been shattered
and once they are again made “invisible” in the dominant narratives of capitalist
globalization—or what Debord in 1991 calls “spectacular modernization” which has led
to a “complete disintegration of Russia” (10)?
Che and the Impossibility of Revolution
This question becomes even more difficult to answer if one dwells on Che
Guevara’s tract on the disappearance of the subject of history as the effect of mass media,
arguably the novel’s centerpiece. In a characteristically phantasmagoric fashion, Tatarsky
obtains a ouija board and conjures the spirit of Che hoping that this internationally
renowned comrade will initiate him in the secrets of advertising unknown to even
American “shamans.” Relying, incredibly, on a Buddhist condemnation of the ideology
of dualism between subject (human individual) and object (material world), Che
prophesies that humanity is now entering the “dark age” which maintains a dualism
between an individual and a “material world as it is shown on television,” although the
individual is now more than ever unreal, a “virtual viewer” whose consciousness is
practically indistinguishable from a “television broadcast” (80–85).
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While the “subject of history” was unreal to begin with—predicated as he/she was
on an invented dualism between subject and object—he/she was still capable of analyzing
events, of observing “the chaotic movement of his or her thoughts and moods” (81). In
contrast, the spirit of Che contends, the “dark age” has made this “subject of the second
type” absolutely unreal, participating in the “experience of collective non-existence” as a
mere “effect created by the collective efforts of editors” (80). Che thus makes a reappearance on the stage of strengthening global capitalism only to deny the possibility of
revolution: “the individual for whose freedom it was once possible to fight disappears
completely from the field of view . . . . The end of the world will simply be a television
program” (91).
Writing about Che’s posthumous cameo in Pelevin, Stephen Hutchings observes
that Che’s “nonsensical dictums ridicul[e] Soviet predictions of the end of capitalism,” as
his “Marxism is couched in the vocabulary of an absurd version of bourgeois idealism”
(183). Hutchings implies that Pelevin’s selection of Che has to do with his overwhelming
popularity with communists in the USSR and elsewhere, which has led to Che himself
becoming a spectacular sign, a brand-name of communist movements. Also, Hutchings’
interpretation locates a sense of capitulation, or even indifference to, market capitalism in
Che’s “nonsensical dictums”—and consequently, it is no wonder that the famous (brandname) image of Che sporting a beret with a Nike logo appears on the original cover of
Pelevin’s novel.
I wish to complicate Hutchings’ reading, however, as despite Che’s apocalyptic
predictions of the end of humanity—and freedom—his very resurgence at this stage of
progressing capitalism and his abandonment of traditional Marxist conceptualization of
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social problems in favor of an updated analysis of contemporary phenomena points to the
similar interstitial opportunities for critique as the ones discussed in the previous section.
Che’s use of, as Hutchings’ describes it, “bourgeois” terminology of mass media and
advertising can be said to stage an immanent critique of contemporary capitalist
mechanisms, as a symbolic re-articulation of the problems of social inequality and
oppression as they arise in the age of mediatized, advanced capitalism. Here, Che the
Marxist benefits from cultural and media studies and no longer believes in an idealized,
emancipated subject of history but rather recognizes how this subject is also “written”
into history by various ideologies: “bourgeois science,” Marxism, nationalism and what
Che calls contemporary “telecracy” (90).
In this respect, Che is both a spectacularized logo and, with this recognition,
something beyond a logo, what this logo points to by analogy—a possibility of
deconstructing the narratives that enable propaganda, exploitation and inequality, as well
as a possibility of understanding how one figures as a “subject” in these narratives. In this
respect, the conjured specter of Che becomes Jacques Derrida’s “specter of Marxism,” no
longer equal or reduced to “himself” as a famous revolutionary icon, a spectacular sign,
but an opening toward an emancipatory promise, toward Marxism as a radical and
continual “self-critique,” a rewriting in the context of changing social conditions
(Specters 88).
This does not entail a facile endorsement of Soviet communism, however. Just as
Pelevin’s text acknowledges Che’s own implication in the Soviet version of the “society
of the spectacle,” where Che the eternal symbol of revolution is exploited to embellish
Soviet social and political problems, so it implies that Soviet ideologues were as
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postmodern as market economy ideologues in using television to simulate and advertise a
favored image of “reality.” Homo Zapiens confirms Mikhail Epstein’s argument in After
the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture that
postmodernism arrived early in the East with Soviet communists who substituted
ideological “phantasms” for “reality” (97).12 Hence, many “bourgeois” copywriters in
Homo Zapiens are unmasked as former Soviet speech-writers; mafia businessmen and
staunchest advocates of neoliberal reforms are shown to be former party bosses, giving
credence to Slavoj Žižek’s statement that post-communism is a combination of the worst
of socialism and the worst of capitalism (The Fragile Absolute 62).
Homo Zapiens, then, does not resuscitate Marxist rhetoric, international heroes
such as Che, or the vanishing middle class out of a nostalgia for an “official” Soviet
Union or for its televised predictions of a bright Soviet future. And yet there is a nostalgia
throughout Pelevin’s novel that complicates Mikhail Epstein’s argument that the USSR
was held together solely through propaganda, i.e., postmodernist simulation, which itself
maintains an incontestable dualism between idealistic representation and oppressive
reality. Tatarsky’s incessant wandering throughout post-communist Moscow’s
apocalyptic landscape supplies the narrative with persistent traces of the formerly
communist country. He goes to such spectacular sites as former Soviet military
compounds whose decrepit condition exposes the propaganda of Soviet power and claim
12
Although Epstein’s argument importantly prompts a reconsideration of Russian postmodernism outside
of the Western narratives that see postmodernism as a “cultural logic” of global capitalism, effect of the
“schizophrenia” of postindustrial society, or product of modern teletechnologies, it is problematically
invested in Orientalist narratives that castigate Russia for being a poor mimic of the West, for historically
relying on “labels, surfaces, simulation” (191–92). A sophisticated analysis of the issue of colonial
“mimicry” would undoubtedly help Epstein’s case and so would a less black-and-white portrayal of a
binary between communist “ideology” and “reality.”
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to eternity as fake, as the compound itself functions as a “sign,” an “image” of this
supposed eternity.
But when Tatarsky encounters a pair of “unmistakably Soviet-made shoes” in a
post-communist shop window, he is touched by the spectacle (they bring tears to his
eyes), although they are “in bad taste . . . vulgar,” and moreover also function as a
recognizable “sign” of Soviet life: “the clear embodiment of what a certain drunken
teacher of Soviet literature from the Literary Institute used to call ‘our gestalt’” (4). Here,
the nostalgia is not for the “gestalt” that the shoes immediately signify, but rather for
what they give rise to, what they bring to mind by analogy, in the same way that the
“official” Soviet Union gives rise to a parallel existence that does not neatly fall into the
clichéd category of unrelenting oppression. Finally, what has been lost with the passing
of the Soviet Union is not only the optimistic belief in eternity, Marxist clichés, or the
dream of Russian power. Lost is also
some other world that had existed in parallel with the Soviet Union, even in
contradiction of it and had perished together with it. Tatarsky felt regret at its
passing, because a great deal of what he had liked and been moved by had come
from that parallel universe, which everyone had been certain could never come to
any harm; but it had been overtaken by the same fate as the Soviet eternity and just
as imperceptibly. (30)
Beta Immigrants and Mafia Thugs: Capitalism’s “Others” in The Russian
Debutante’s Handbook
When asked why he wrote The Russian Debutante’s Handbook in English instead
of Russian, Gary Shteyngart said: “No one reads Russian . . . I can feed myself in
English” (qtd. in David Bowman 38). But although the book is ostensibly in English and
rife with American, specifically urban East Coast references, its medley of Slavic
languages—including Russian, as well as invented Stolovan, an Esperanto-type Slavic—
and Soviet Bloc communist references is intended for all those Eastern Europeans who
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have straddled the West-East divide in the wake of the communist downfall. Indeed, the
Handbook’s hero Vladimir Girshkin is an undetermined, “Postmodern man,”13 par
excellence: born in Soviet Russia, living in the United States, performing the role of a
“Jew,” a “Russian Jew,” a “victim of communist terror,” and/or “an exotic immigrant,”
but not feeling at home with any of these categories. In an effort to make sense of all
these spatial disjunctions, all the fragmentations and dispersions of identity, Shteyngart’s
Handbook performs what Fredric Jameson calls “cognitive mapping”: an attempt to arrest
and comprehend an individual subject’s position within the vast multinational space of
postmodern, “late capitalism” (“Cognitive Mapping” 280).
The Handbook specifically tries to come to terms with the most recent expansion of
capitalist space into the former countries of the Soviet Bloc and Eastern Europe in
general. As Girshkin ponders the relationship between his two semi-homelands, seeing
every detail in double exposure, the novel focuses on the two faces of global capitalism
as inscribed onto and being inscribed, by New York City and Prava, a fictional city in the
imaginary Eastern European Republic of Stolovaya. Urban space, in terms of its
architecture and inhabitants, both performs and disturbs the narrative of supposedly
uniform “global capitalism,” pointing to the distinctions between capital’s center and
periphery. New York’s rhythmic yuppie orderliness and cleanliness overshadows
disorderly refugee “masses” that Girshkin works with in darker, more neglected
Manhattan corners. Conversely, Prava’s (exoticized) mafia rowdiness, violence and
transgression mocks the acceptable image of American-type capitalism that the Eastern
13
This is how Frantisek, another character in the Handbook, characterizes Girshkin (Shteyngart, Handbook
375).
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European mafia-businessmen apparently strive to “learn” from Western teachers, only to
satirize it in the process.
The novel opens up in New York City where Girshkin, twenty-five and university
educated, works at a dead-end, hourly-wage job at the “Emma Lazarus Society” for the
accommodation of refugees and immigrants. Although he feels somewhat at home with
his job and identifies with the impoverished multitudes he “welcomes” to America, he is
marked as an outsider in New York and by extension, in the United States. He passes his
dreary existence immersed in insecurities and a feeling of not-belonging, of not being
able to either find American friends or an appropriate immigrant “social unit” for whose
rights he could fight (he is both Jewish and Russian, “units” which seem to clash with
each other). Eventually, when Rybakov, a Russian exile-poseur offers him a profitable
gig with his Mafioso son in Prava, Girshkin initially refuses, but is eventually forced to
flee New York for Prava after rejecting sexual advances by Jordi, another shady
businessman, in Miami.
Shteyngart’s New York City, or more specifically, Manhattan, builds around the
conflicts and paradoxes of postmodern capitalism and one of its accompanying processes
and side effects, multiculturalism. Initially Girshkin does not fit neatly into any of these
dominant narratives that paint New York: although his background and education
qualifies him for a “yuppie” lifestyle, he is not upwardly mobile either through his job
prospects or his consumer power. Although he is a Russian exile, he does not try to
“make it” in his adopted land, does not believe in the American dream and remains what
he calls throughout the book a “beta immigrant.” Accordingly, Girshkin’s apprehension
of New York flashes through sardonic remarks of an outsider, a subaltern who views the
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order and the predictability of capital’s center with interminable ennui: suspending
temporality, Girhskin’s view of New York testifies to what Slavoj Žižek terms the
“absence of an Event” in “the basic sameness of global capitalism” (Welcome to the
Desert of the Real! 7).
The boredom of the same—articulated as an endless repetition of the
work/consumption rhythm—pervades the financial district of Manhattan “awash with
rationalism and dull commercial hope” as “suburban secretaries [explore] bargains on
cosmetics and hose; Ivy Leaguers [swallow] entire pieces of yellowtail in one satisfied
gulp” (8). New York could be said to operate through what Guy Debord’s terms the
“consumable pseudo-cyclical time” of capital, which is the time of “alienated labor” and
“modern economic survival”: for Shteyngart, New York exists only in the timeless
present (Society 110–12). This alienation also holds captive Girshkin’s immigrant family,
as his grandmother, a one-time brutal but colorful communist, is reduced to living
“imprisoned in one of the world’s most expensive backyards,” in the midst of the
predictable, pseudo-cyclical time of suburban work versus rest: with “the rustle of stealth
station wagons sliding into adjacent driveways, meat burning everywhere, her grandson a
grown man with dark circles under his eyes who came to visit his family seasonally
[emphasis mine]” (38).
This endlessly repetitive world of order and a conspicuous world of rampant and
privileged consumption of the spectacle that is New York includes corporate yuppies and
allegedly rebellious liberals alike. Cruising into the world of liberal New Yorkers through
his acquaintance with the attractive Francesca and her family, the Ruoccos, Girshkin
gains insight into the flip side of the rich New York, a hipster one. The Ruoccos’
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apartment overlooks Washington Square Park in Manhattan, which simulates “a
venerable plaza of a European capital”—a liberal American fetish of sophistication, a
statement against the yuppie concrete jungle (85). Looking for a stable identity, Girshkin
wants to become Francesca, so to speak, wants to be symbolically adopted by the
university-professor-progressive Ruoccos. But the articulation of this identity requires
fitting into both narratives that Girshkin persistently evades: for all its rebelliousness, this
identity requires him to become, ultimately, both an upwardly mobile worker/consumer
and a mascot of multiculturalism. It entails filling a specified role or carrying out an
acceptable performance through a repetitive consumption of politically correct
commodities and images. “The post Reagan/Bush Manhattan” is crowded by a youth
deeply immersed in spectacular consumption, “pierced, restless, weaned on flashing
image and verbally disinclined” (54). Thus, Girshkin’s observation that “mocking the
mainstream had become the mainstream” applies both to the downtown youth and to
Francesca’s hipster TriBeCa friends with their carefully assembled Glam Nerd image (52,
69).
Because the hipster-liberal, like the corporate-capitalist identity is essentially
commodified—it involves performing “oneself” as a commodified spectacle—Girshkin
can participate in it as long as he plays by the rules, that is, regularly spends large
amounts of money in quaint restaurants, organic food stores and second-hand shops. In
an East Village store Francesca persuades Girshkin to buy a trendy outfit, after which he
feels a sense of belonging on the Manhattan streets: “his hand in hers, two fashionable,
modern people, their conversation by turns warm and breezy, by turns analytic and
severe” (80). Through such careful collection of commodities Girshkin temporarily
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becomes an insider in Manhattan and the city transforms into a Mecca of relaxed
pleasure, for which his and Francesca’s sexual escapade in Central Park is highly
metonymic. But this intoxicated relationship both with Francesca and Manhattan can
continue only so long as Girshkin has money. The sense of repetitive, vicious-cycle type
consumption is aptly illustrated by the tab that Girshkin keeps for his and Francesca’s
relationship, itemizing “bar tabs,” “trade paperbacks & academic journals,” “wardrobe
overhaul,” “retro lunches, ethnic brunches,” and “taxi tariffs” (100). In the end, it is hard
to tell the difference between a human being and a commodity, between Manhattan in all
its complexity and Manhattan the phantasmagoria of consumer pleasure. To Girshkin,
Francesca’s “American sweat, sweat denatured by deodorant,” smells “purely metallic,”
while the Ruocco’s cat, Kropotkin, is jokingly described as having “hypoallergenic
designer fur” (93, 92). Even a pseudo-radical idealization of anarchism, conveyed by the
cat’s name, must come in an acceptably domesticated form.
This echoes Pelevin’s articulation of human identity in terms of a television
advertisement in Homo Zapiens. The spirit of Che takes a jab at consumer trends
overtaking the globe, noting that “the only possible answer to the question ‘What am I?’
is: ‘I am the individual who drives such-and-such a car, lives in such-and-such a house,
wears such-and-such a type of clothes.’ Identification of the self is only possible through
the compilation of a list of goods consumed and transformation is only possible by means
of a change in the list” (86). In Shteyngart, the American version of multiculturalism adds
a commodified “ethnic” image to a list of goods to be consumed in order to achieve this
“identification of the self.” The grotesque description of Manhattan Glam Nerds and their
trends is compounded by an equally grotesque enumeration of Russian/Eastern European
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stereotypes Girshkin is expected to live up to. While Frank the Slavophile dismisses
Grishkin’s concern over money, claiming that “Vladimir has an expansive Russian soul”
and his primary concerns are “camaraderie and salvation,” Francesca exoticizes him as
another appendage to her supposedly progressive identity, as her “signifier” who is “wellread, educated, from a different country” (77).
Girshkin can assimilate to the liberal New York crowds, but only to an extent.
Because of his background, he is stuck in Orientalist fantasies about “the other,” which in
case of his liberal friends alternate between images of a “soulful” Russian, noble savage
untainted by American corporate culture, member of exiled Russian intelligentsia, or a
badly-dressed Warsaw pact immigrant. Both Manhattan exteriors, with its trendy shops
and restaurants and its interiors, such as the Ruocco’s apartment, become spaces devoted
to the identity overhaul of this patronized Russian Jew, without, nevertheless, allowing
him to become completely de-exoticized. Fran’s mausoleum-like room—“the temple to
Fran’s strange ambitions, the dessication of early-twentieth-century literature”—is
dedicated to “the education and repackaging of one Warsaw Pact immigrant” (89).
In contrast to the privileged New York that is both physically clean, safe, welldressed and orderly to the point of being denatured, Shteyngart portrays a different New
York of “a million opened steam vents and cars backfiring into the night” and zeroes in
on the less profitable Manhattan where Girshkin is alone with “the poor huddled masses
yearning to breathe free” (85, 88). Girshkin feels more at home with this underprivileged,
immigrant New York which both unearths the underside of capitalist glory and disturbs
the neat categories accepted in the dominant narrative of multiculturalism. His decision to
stick to a dead-end job in the society for the accommodation of immigrants reflects his
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indifference to corporate culture and to the dream about multi-ethnic America working
together towards capitalist prosperity.
In fact, the job gives him a warped sense of superiority he lacks as an outsider in
the privileged New York: “The only enjoyment Vladimir derived from his job was
encountering foreigners even more flummoxed by American society than he was” (11).
His disillusionment is compounded by that of his boss, the “Acculturation Czar, a
homesick, suicidal Pole,” whose introductory note to immigrants sums up America as
“Selfish People, Selfish Land” (12). The positive attitude of the American “melting pot”
ideology and staples of multiculturalist politics, such as respect for otherness, absence of
racism and equal opportunity for all, continually collapse in the Emma Lazarus Society.
Simultaneously, Shteyngart challenges the myth of New York as a safe haven for the
world’s disenfranchised multitudes. Although “Vladimir was taught to foster
multiculturalism,” he draws a blank before the “sneering faces of his countrymen” (65).
Miscommunication and racism characterize interactions between different ethnic groups
at the office; throughout the narrative, the disturbing effect of such interactions is
enhanced by frequent, unapologetically racist statements made by Rybakov and
Girshkin’s mother. Here is the fear of civilized America, the people whose behavior
cannot be securely categorized and commodified—that is, contained.
In Shteyngart, this constant threat of urban violence and disorder becomes a means
of resistance to, as well as the truth of, the system that places high stakes on qualities
such as education, ambition and tolerance for “otherness” in order to harness them into a
smoothly functioning and well-protected corporate culture. Most immigrants that
Girshkin “welcomes” lack many of these desirable qualities and as such can only become
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badly-paid and unprotected underpinnings of such a culture, its exploited mascots of
multiculturalism. But Shteyngart’s opposition to corporate culture comes in the guise of a
different kind of immigrant—not the one who believes in all the commodified trappings
of the American dream, but one who inserts him/herself into the system of multicultural
corporatism only to turn it upside down. Rybakov’s surreally fantastic success in fleecing
the Social Security system and becoming a penthouse owner is a statement against the
ideology of reward through hard work in America; like Girshkin, he is a beta immigrant
in that he lacks what counts as real ambition. In a similar way, Girshkin’s parents,
although deeply immersed in the corporate culture, make their money through corporate
fraud, default on the rules the system sets for making “legal” profit.
Shteyngart’s America is confused and disturbed by people like Rybakov, its
multicultural mythology accommodating him only with a certain dose of discomfort. This
is nicely illustrated in the scene in which Rybakov publicly embarrasses the New York
City mayor who refers to him as one of the “newest New Yorkers” (397). Rybakov is a
flaming racist whose conservative mindset cannot be re-educated, while at the same time
he claims that he loves America and upholds the American dream. He is a postmodern
“mimic man,” to invoke Homi Bhabha’s term, performing an acceptable immigrant
identity to a certain point, seemingly assimilated, yet potentially dangerous to the host
country, challenging the dominant metropolitan imaginings of “good immigrants.”
The subversive potential of colonial mimicry which Bhabha discusses in The
Location of Culture lures in Girshkin as well, as a method of resistance to the sterile
cycle of work and consumption in New York City. Living the high life without investing
nine-to-five workdays and “real” ambition becomes possible only through activities
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branded as illegal. First, Girshkin engages in a profitable, though unsuccessful, scheme of
posing as a college applicant in Florida and then decides to join Rybakov’s son
Groundhog in Prava where he would pose as a “serious,” yet liberal and open-minded
American businessman. When Girshkin meets members of the Eastern European mafia in
New York, he realizes that “they likely committed all sorts of unfortunate violence in
their off hours,” but nevertheless “they seemed so much more cultured and polite than the
work-obsessed Americans who crowded Vladimir’s city” (117). The appeal of Rybakov’s
posse lies precisely in the fact that they are not work-obsessed in the corporate sense of
the word. Their intermittent violence, relaxed cruising on The Brezhnev while New York
City does “real” work and enjoyment of choice commodities figures as a “line of flight”
from corporate culture. In a radical, disturbing way, their activities approximate what
Michel De Certau describes as a “tactic,” a mode of everyday resistance to the
institutionalized commandeering of individual time: a “tactic” is “a clever utilization of
time, of the opportunities it presents and also of the play that it introduces into the
foundations of power” (38–9). Rybakov and his crew draw in Girshkin, struck with the
ennui of New York, because they actively appropriate and transform the notion of “work”
time instead of succumbing to the collective order of “consumable pseudo-cyclical time.”
The Crime of Refusing to Work: Reclaiming the Time of Capital
In Prava, Girshkin’s feeling of not belonging and the elusive (dis)comfort of New
York is replaced by a dangerous, carnivalesque, yet strangely cozy world, signaling the
surreal Eastern Europe of post-communist transitions. Poking fun at the fetishized,
emotive content afforded by multicultural narratives to categories such as “exile,”
“expatriation,” or “homecoming,” Shteyngart here describes the American-Eastern
European Girshkin as both “Vladimir the Expatriate, a title that signified luxury, choice,
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decadence, frou-frou colonialism” and “Vladimir the Repatriate, . . . signifying a
homecoming, a foreknowledge, a making of amends with history” (170). Girshkin feels
at home in the “criminal” yet “transitioning” post-communist Prava, reveling in pyramid
schemes concocted to fleece naïve American expats and indulging in excessive hedonism
with his Russian mafia employers. At the same time, he registers the less cheerful Prava
which seems to have been relegated to history yet stubbornly refuses to die. Girshkin’s
observations insert into the narrative the physical traces of communist Prava, as well as
the undead pockets of communist supporters, projecting the past into the present and
complicating the narrative of a hedonistically “postmodern” or “global” Prava.
Shteyngart’s Prava comes across a fictional city modeled after the post-communist
Prague—ostensibly because Shteyngart endows it with a large American expat
population, numerous references to Kafka and ubiquitous medieval/baroque buildings.
But Prava both is and is not Prague, in the sense that it could also be any city in postcommunist Eastern Europe, embodying the common turmoil of “transitions” experienced
most painfully in the urban centers of this part of the world. Indeed, not only is
Rybakov’s son, the Groundhog, surrounded by a veritable Eastern European
“multicultural” team, but Stolovan seems comprehensible to a speaker of any Slavic
language and Girshkin sees Stolovaya as his “home” because Stolovans and Russians are
“the same proto-Soviet model” (382). The fictional name also marks Prava as an exotic,
slightly unreal locale: it emerges as both a utopian spectacle for privileged consumption
and as an Orientalized dystopia of Eastern European violence and economic chaos. While
New York exists through an unremitting cycle of repetition in the timeless present, Prava
surreally operates on many temporal levels that contend with each other, its ghostly
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communist past challenging the seemingly smooth present of global capital’s periphery.
In this pan-Eastern-European space the traces of history flash through a displaced
present, as even the “pseudo-cyclical,” consumable present is appropriated and warped
(156).
Prava figures as a historical European theme park for consumption by the
ubiquitous American expats. Like Francesca and other New York liberals, the expats do
not fundamentally challenge the narrative of global capitalism and its corporate work/rest
cycle: Girshkin contemptuously says of the expats that here they are on the “five-yearplan of alcoholic self-discovery” before they go back to their country and find respectable
corporate jobs (200). Deriding Morgan, one of those politically engaged expats who
grace much literature on post-communist Eastern Europe discussed in the introduction to
this chapter, Girshkin criticizes her fight against the fetishized Stalinist oppression as a
politically correct rebellion preceding grad school: Morgan is on “vacation,” rocking to
“the cultural beat of a failed empire” (301).
American expats are essentialized as privileged Western consumers in collusion
with multinationals which are obscenely encroaching on the city, transforming it into a
neocolonial paradise. Although they are drawn primarily by Prava’s fairy-tale historical
charm, the incessant enumeration of the unromantic loci of spectacular consumption—
Kmart, an Austrian family entertainment complex, Brookline Gardens mall—render their
adventure a rather safe, homey experience, a EuroDisney of sorts. From this perspective,
Girshkin’s indifference to the historic Prava is understandable: fetishizing it would align
him with American expats from whom he feels alienated. Thus, while he overall finds
Prava more interesting than New York, Girshkin considers its old city flair a bit shabby
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and melancholic: observing the city while safely ensconced in the Groundhog’s car,
Girshkin sees a “street lined with stately Baroque dwellings in various stages of disrepair
yet still wearing their ornamentation, their gables and coats of arms standing out like the
flounces on a worn Hapsburg gown” (195).
Indeed, Girshkin’s apprehension of Prava is sad and nostalgic in another sense as
well: his nostalgia conjures up the traces of Prava’s communist history that Westerners
find exotic but nevertheless want to relegate to the past. The grotesque discrepancies
between Prava’s communist past and its present transitions to market capitalism come
through Girshkin’s incessant double-exposure notes on the city architecture and people.
The Great Hall of People’s Friendship, built during communism, is overshadowed by the
most expensive restaurant in Prava that its natives can barely afford (329). Western
tourists at an outdoor café are juxtaposed to scornful Stolovan babushkas whose “city is
no longer their own” (195). The “two-story, deluxe” buses from Western Europe bring
“clean, young backpackers” who are oblivious to the “terminally ill” IKARUS buses
conveying “tired families” from Eastern Europe for whom “Golden Prava was getting
expensive” (288). Although Girshkin parodies Eastern European communism and its
various symbols throughout the book, he feels an uncanny solidarity with leftover
communist supporters in the same way that he feels a sense of belonging among the gray
and ugly communist buildings: he has “the undeniable feeling that he was home, that
these ingredients—panelak, tire factory, the corrupted flames of industry—were, for
Vladimir, primordial, essential, revelatory” (384).
In a sense, the traces of communism recall a failed and ugly dream, but one that
was also the dream of social empowerment and equality. They introduce a memory—
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indeed, a sense of heterotemporality, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s meaning—of a different
way of being, of a space not yet swamped with multinational corporations buying off the
country, a populace not yet widely impoverished and a time before commodity
consumption becomes a pastime for the select few. Girshkin’s tongue-in-cheek statement
that “state-sponsored socialism had been a good thing” because of “empty wallets, empty
stores, hearts filled with overflowing” deserves serious merit in face of his criticism of
New York’s (and, increasingly, Prava’s) “crude avarice” of spectacular consumption
(107).
Prava becomes the peripheral site of global capitalism, constructed through the
replacement of the “hearts filled with overflowing” with mostly “empty wallets” and a
few filled ones. Ridiculing the “hideously sterile human mass,” the “international middle
class” that promotes in Shteyngart’s Stolovaya, as in Pelevin’s Russia, the well-trained
and brutal rhythm of capitalist work/play, Girshkin instead associates himself with the
various Stolovan babushkas who unfailingly recall his own—the staunch, albeit
ineffective and ridiculous, supporters of the grand narrative of communism. In
Shteyngart’s Prava, the ubiquitous babushkas represent the losers of post-communist
transitions, the ultimate subaltern, pointing to all the globally disenfranchised multitudes
of neoliberal capitalism. They will not experience the bright capitalist future since they
are not the primary concern of the chaotic but “cool,” postmodern Eastern Europe; rather,
they are leftovers of the defunct welfare state, as both its builders and the symbolic
recipients of welfare.
Paradoxically, babushkas and the similarly ubiquitous mafia people are the
necessarily linked, twin consequences of post-communist chaos, the side effects of
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capitalist transitions. This interrelatedness is illustrated by the fact that Kostya, one of the
Groundhog’s men, participates in all the dubious business deals in order to send half of
his paycheck to his aging mother whose “pension comes out to thirteen dollars a month”
(198). In Prava, the “other” of a “developed” capitalist city, rampant crime and violence
become justified as a result of limited employment options. In that sense, Morgan’s
attempt to bring “democracy” to Stolovaya by blowing up the Foot, an old communist
monument and her criticism of the “immoral” Mafiosi signals, to Girshkin, a Western
misunderstanding—and mismanagement—of the situation. Morgan’s attitude exemplifies
a liberal mindset discussed earlier in this chapter: she believes in the “improvement” of
Eastern Europe, seeing the development of a democratic, civil society as a cure for all the
“immoral” business deals rather than as a process inseparable from transitions to market
capitalism and resulting social inequalities and violence. In contrast, Girshkin calls both
the babushkas and the Mafiosi “his people,” lamenting that “everything they grew up
with is gone” and now they “can either shoot their way through the gray economy or
make twenty dollars a month driving a bus in Dnepropetrovsk” (386–7).
On the other hand, the Mafiosi’s situation is more privileged than that of the
babushkas: while they are adversely affected by the changes and thus opt to “shoot their
way through the gray economy,” they are also the ones who enjoy its benefits, the
minority with “filled wallets” who make life for the rest of Prava’s population dangerous.
Like the scorned “international middle class,” the Eastern European mafia help to create a
world that rests on “the wages of sin and the minimum wage,” only these class
discrepancies of globalizing capitalism are much more conspicuous in its periphery (255).
Like the New York youth weaned on visual images and spectacular consumption and
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similar to Pelevin’s Moscow “businessmen-patriots,” the Prava Mafiosi, also inhabit the
hyperreal world of excessive consumption as they sport a disenchanted, cynical attitude
to the misery that surrounds them and show disrespect for old boundaries. Indeed, the
comical scene in which a babushka tries to contain a mafia conflict in the small hours of
the night by threatening to call the police aptly illustrates the point: her belief in the
viability of old structures contrasts with their absolute breakdown and ineffectiveness. In
parallel, as belief in the grand narrative of communism contrasts with post-communist
questioning of grand narratives, it is little surprising to hear the babushkas protesting in
the Prava square chant, “Death to the poststructuralists!” and “Epicures, go home!” (316).
Shteyngart emphasizes the mafia-businessmen’s oblivious immersion in a parallel
world of luxury, power and glamour. On his picaresque adventures, Girshkin joins the
Groundhog and his men in largely ignoring the impoverished Stolovans. This divide is
enhanced by the style of the mafia’s movement around Prava: they cruise almost
exclusively through the privatized spaces such as casinos, malls with expensive shops,
restaurants and bars for the nouveau riche, safely conveyed to their destination in a
luxurious car and only registering public spaces and multitudes in the streets from these
privileged interiors. Since Shteyngart’s narrative treats the post-communist mafia circles
as both victims and as the privileged classes in the transition, its position could be said to,
paradoxically, approximate that of the expat narratives discussed earlier which condemn
the “immorality” of mafia’s disengagement from widespread social problems.
Conversely, Girshkin’s enchantment with “transgressive” mafia practices could be read
as an exoticized excursion into the “rowdy” Eastern Europe by a New Yorker disaffected
with the eternally repetitive world of order. In this way Girshkin would resemble one of
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the American expats “on vacation” from the stifling corporate culture: The Debutante,
then, becomes Girshkin’s bildungsroman, where Eastern Europe poses as an Orientalized
background, alternately “immoral” and “exotic,” disorderly from a Western perspective
and because of it all the more dangerously attractive to a humble Westerner.
But rather than furthering a character-based reading which centers of Girshkin’s
trials and tribulations in a “rediscovered” Eastern Europe or debates whether the mafia
are more vilified (“criminal”) or glorified (“daring”), I am interested in how the mafia
figure not so much as literary “characters” as Shteyngart’s medium for a critique of the
discourses and practices of capitalism and Western narratives of management—
somewhat echoing Tatarsky’s positioning within Pelevin’s narrative as less a “character”
and more a specific intellectual and ethical attitude. As we have seen earlier, Girshkin’s
affiliation with the local mafia is, importantly, a statement against the new Western
imperials carousing among “his people” in the impoverished Eastern Europe. Hence, the
point is not in outrageously endorsing mafia violence and lawlessness as “real” practices,
but in asking what they do politically within the narrative, what or who they help to
expose to critique. Pelevin tries to drown the Russian bourgeoisie in a flood of images—
since they are merely an exacerbated version of Western “legal” asset-grabbing and
spectacular consumption. Conversely, Shteyngart wants to drown (primarily) the
American bourgeoisie by turning their own business rhetoric against them, articulating
Stolovan mafia practices as a resistance to the colonization of individual time and
singular activity by ideologies of success in the corporate workplace through hard work
and upward mobility.
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The Stolovan mafia’s joys of “living easy and drinking hard” recall what De
Certeau terms a “tactic,” a “clever utilization of time” which, relying on “mobility and
trickery,” opposes the “strategic” “establishment of a place” that would erode the power
of individual time through its institutionalization, as in the establishment of a corporate
workplace (Shteyngart 143; De Certeau 38–39). In Prava the refusal to work becomes
possible: time is individually appropriated instead of socially regimented, hourly wages
are not fixed in any way and an unrestrained enjoyment of drink, drugs and crime takes
place during “work hours,” not only on the weekends.
This symbolically approximates what Debord calls “the revolutionary project” of
opposing the orderly consumption of a spectacularized society through the “withering
away of the social measurement of time in favor of an individual and collective
irreversible time which is playful in character” (The Society 116). Girshkin admires the
intensity, the creativity, even the violence, of the Groundhog gang after having spent
“thirteen years in the American desert” (188). They “smoked too much, drank too much,
killed too much” and although Girshkin characterizes this as a “different kind of
tragedy,” Prava is still “a better place to be unhappy” (188). In this context, violence
figures as a radical rejection of cooperation with Western business “experts.” The crime
of excessive consumption signals a reactive attempt at controlling one’s life, a defense
mechanism against the transitions to “serious” market capitalism, a refusal to become the
neocolonial yuppie class—all of which challenges the vilification of Eastern Europe as
“criminal.”
Shteyngart expresses this opposition to the “serious” discourses of capital, which
have established themselves as markers of “civilization,” by detourning them or by
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exaggerating their rhetoric in order to lay bare the very violence that makes it possible.
The mafia ridicule the respectably bureaucratic blandness of “legal” business practices,
confronting the calculated violence of “civilized” capitalism with unpredictable violence,
controlled insecurity with ultimate insecurity, legalized fraud with creative fraud. They
mimic the practices of capitalist colonials only in so far as they can use them to their own
advantage, celebrating the subversive potential of colonial mimicry that Homi Bhabha
identifies. This becomes particularly useful in the attempts to involve unassuming
American expats in pyramid schemes: the weakness of the legally sanctioned business
relations is exposed when the mafia and Girshkin invent PravaInvest, a perfectly
acceptable business simulacrum, including an advertising campaign with “glossy
brochures” featuring “plenty of environmental stuff . . . holistic centers and Reiki clinics”
to appeal to the idealistic Americans (190).
The Groundhog’s appeal to Girshkin to teach them “’Americanisms’ and
‘globalisms’” is a similar attempt to give their renegade practices just an advantageous
semblance of respectability, not a sincere desire to be like Americans (267). In effect,
teaching Eastern European mafia “Americanisms and globalisms” becomes as ludicrous
as commanding Eastern European states to become “civilized” capitalist democracies,
pasting neoliberal market economies violently onto the shambles of welfare socialism.
The satirized bankruptcy of the rhetoric of the global market uncovers, in another layer of
Shteyngart’s narrative, a disenchantment with the promise of post-communist reforms to
contain the crime and violence by prescribing “legal” business practices. The images of
the wildly segregated Prava society deflate such an optimistic prognosis: just as the
“Americanisms” and “globalisms” will not do much toward improving the situation of
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the Prava babushkas, so “legal” market reforms will not ultimately contain the crime but
rather entrench the conditions that replicate social antagonisms and foster mafia violence.
The Debutante grapples with the complexity of causes behind violence and crime in postcommunist Eastern Europe, offering a critique of market economy reforms and global
narratives of a multicultural brotherhood, which, as Nancy Fraser argues in her discussion
of liberal-democratic policies, effect, at best, “surface reallocations” of cultural “respect”
and economic “goods” to “recognized groups” instead of targeting the roots of inequality
among groups with the promise of radical social transformation (35).
Conservative Mimicry: Capitulation into an Alpha Immigrant
While Girshkin initially celebrates the mafia’s deliberately imperfect mimicry of
“civilized” work and consumption practices, he ultimately finds the various
Americanisms he rejects throughout the novel more palatable. This anticipates a narrative
containment in Shteyngart, whereby the mafia are seen from the perspective of American
“order” rather than as an articulation of revolutionary practice which subjects to critique
Western corporate discourses. The Groundhog and his men, as well as Stolovans and
other Eastern Europeans, are problematically reduced to Orientalist stereotypes that have
built the historically recycled image of uncouth, savage and violent Eastern Europe.
Shteyngart mercilessly employs ethnic and cultural stereotypes throughout the novel, but
when he crosses the border into Stolovaya, they increasingly refer to physical, even
racial, appearance. When Girshkin visits a Russian church in Prava, for instance, he
encounters “tired, stern faces” and “broad, heavy bodies bursting with thick veins and
copious sweat, looking as if they had been somehow blown out of proportion by a diet of
meat and butter” (263).
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At this point, the motley Eastern Europeans are no longer portrayed as subversive
tricksters who do not sincerely believe in the “American way of life,” but as poor mimics
who, regardless of how hard they try, can never accomplish the finesse of the “civilized”
Western world. For instance, when Girshkin meets the Groundhog at Brookline Gardens,
“the apotheosis of North-American upper-middle-classdom,” he mocks him for eating
cereal “with a heavy wooden ladle, the kind more suited for a bowl of thick Russian
porridge than American cornflakes” (350). The implication that Western trends are
worthy of being emulated, or that Eastern Europeans should somehow prove their merits
by “civilizing” their consumer tastes permeates a section importantly titled “Westernizing
the Boyars.” Girshkin, a Russian with an inside knowledge of America, assumes the role
of a teacher who will show his misguided compatriots the difference between kitsch and
good taste. Facing the audience of “Eastern European refuse in their cheaply cut suits,
their nylon parkas, their rooster haircuts and teeth blackened by filterless Spartas,”
Girshkin chides them for their tastes that are so inferior “a provincial from Nebraska
would have cause to laugh” (353–34).
Although Girshkin gets his way in this episode, the Eastern European mafia resist
his “civilizing” mission when it comes to cutting down on violence. At this point, their
flair for transgression is portrayed as dangerous rather than playful and liberating and
Prava, accordingly, becomes reified through images of urban violence. Not only can
Girshkin not evade an assault by the Groundhog’s men in this ubiquitously violent city,
but it also becomes a site of xenophobia and anti-Semitism which withdraws its welcome
to Jews (or Middle-Eastern Moslems, as Girshkin is mistaken first for a Turk, then for an
Arab). The anxiety of “civilized” America comes in full force when Girshkin’s American
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passport fails to protect him from either racist skinheads, mascots of post-communist
nationalism, or abusive policemen, who seem to have arrived in their Trabants from the
time of mythical communist brutality. Walking around Auschwitz, Girshkin ponders the
“Teutonic” and Stalinist purges of Jews and others, deciding that he has to “get out while
[he] can and by any means necessary” (406). Although this subtle parallel between his
mafia pursuers and the Nazi/communist butchers is quite uncanny, it is by no means
insignificant, in so far as it lodges Prava and by extension, Eastern Europe, into the
stereotype of an inability to escape the past, all its attempts to live in the present (to
liberally “improve”) doomed to repeat the atrocities, chaos and tyranny of the past.
In Girshkin’s final exit through the Prava airport, his American passport at last
becomes a legitimate ticket of escape while the Groundhog is stopped and harassed by
airport officials. This marks Girshkin as, after all, a privileged American who can visit
and leave the dangerous global periphery as he pleases, while the movement of the
natives remains safely contained. Prava is here reduced to a fantasy of temporary fun
before one can go back to the serious business of adulthood and it is comforting to know
that the wild crowds “down there” are held within secure borders and do not threaten to
come and disturb metropolitan centers (at least not in large numbers). Girshkin eventually
settles into a dull corporate job and a safe suburban house “properly insulated from the
elements by stucco and storm windows,” also settling for the eternal repetition of the
same (452):
This is America, where the morning paper lands on the doorstep at precisely 7:30
A.M.—not the woolly dominion Vladimir once ruled. So he’ll open his eyes and
unlock the door. He’ll put in his ten-hour workday. He’ll chat up the secretarial
pool and use his spare minutes to ascertain the standing of the local sports teams in
the back pages of the Plain Dealer, statistics necessary for the firm’s bizarre
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afterwork buddy rituals. (Vladimir is, as has been mentioned, partnership-track
material.) (451)
While this surreally domesticated, regimented lifestyle is clearly treated with
irony—all the more so because Girshkin the cool Manhattanite ends up in boring,
suburban Ohio—it nevertheless appears as a preferable option compared to the
“excessive” chaos of economically unstable, culturally intolerant Prava. From this
perspective, the Prava episode does become Girshkin’s coming of age, its appeal lost
once that Girshkin’s “youthful instinct” is gone (451). This is mimicry in its conservative
rather than subversive version, as a way to “fit into” society, capitulate before it, as
Girshkin does at the beginning when he performs what Rey Chow calls a commodified,
spectacularized “ethnic” for New York liberals and even more so at the end when he
blends into the despised corporate culture.
To an extent, then, Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook folds back
into what Eliot Borenstein calls the “male narrative of conquest, submission and coming
of age” characterizing “the post-Communist expat’s story,” as he categorizes
Shteyngart’s novel (33). However, it also importantly examines the global dynamic of
post-Cold War capitalism, with its Western expats and Eastern immigrants, its nouveau
riche, as well as the nouveau poor. Shteyngart views the “grand narrative” of
communism, or at least belief in it, with a dose of nostalgia, contrasting the collectivist
idealism of Eastern European communists with the disaffected, cynical crowds inhabiting
post-communist societies, thriving on spectacular consumption that stretches from East to
West. Like Pelevin, Shteyngart wonders if much has also not been lost through the
transformation of former communist societies into exotic playgrounds for Western
tourists, anxious to project a modern “ethnic” image and oblivious to the plight of the
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impoverished majority. The Debutante collapses the stereotype of “criminal” Eastern
Europe by showing it to be the side effect of transitions rather than its obstacle,
distancing itself from the West as a point of reference by “talking back,” by creatively
appropriating its own rhetoric.
Recalling the social and cultural benefits of the old communist era that are
increasingly lost with its waning, Pelevin and Shteyngart usher in a nostalgia for not so
much official Soviet life, but rather for the unofficial practices of everyday existence
which existed “in parallel” as Homo Zapiens’ Tatarsky notes, with official politics, in
spite of it but also because of it. In the face of post-communist and postmodernist climate
of instability, extreme social differentiation and lack of a foreseeable future, these texts
express a nostalgia for the familiarity of the former everyday existence, which, in
Svetlana Boym’s words, both “converge[d] and deviate[d] from official politics and
ideology.” (Common Places 24). In Russian, these “practices of everyday life” in which
De Certeau locates emancipatory potential are encapsulated in the word byt. Both their
function as social anchorage—as a common place, as shared social and cultural
practices—and their subversive potential vis-à-vis the official ideology have been
threatened because in the post-communist period of rapid changes, “people simulate byt”
(Boym, Common Places 224). Pelevin invokes such disparate “common places” as a pair
of dingy Soviet shoes and a military compound to both mourn the loss of this
comfortable, “parallel” world and ironize the sense of social unity, or community that
they officially purported to foster (“great” Soviet consumer commodities, “great” Soviet
people’s army). Shteyngart, on the other hand, despite the conservative narrative
denouement in The Debutante, emphasizes the necessity of keeping alive the subversive
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strategies of the “practices of everyday life” in the post-communist period, when new
corporate ideologies threaten to co-opt byt, the daily grind.
In this way Pelevin and Shteyngart importantly revise Western tendency to see the
Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries as lands of unrelenting oppression characterized
by binary master-slave relationships. As Adele Marie Baker observes in Consuming
Russia, “The tendency in the West to champion those writers who ran afoul of the Soviet
system was linked to a much broader tendency to view the Soviet Union as a monolithic
totalitarian entity in which the relationship between the rulers and ruled was one of
domination and subordination—rulership and resistance” (21). Instead, Baker suggests
approaching communist societies as “’sites of contestation,’ in Stuart Hall’s words, in
which nonofficial and daily life were engaged in various struggles with the dominant
party line,” in which small victories against the restrictions posed by the system were not
necessarily “tantamount to dissent” or intended to bring down the government (21–22).
Chapter 6 will explore the political potential of this particular type of nostalgia that
remembers and grieves over something that exceeds the official communist state and its
ideology, but that was also lost with the passing of that state.
CHAPTER 6
ETHNICIZING GUILT: HUMANITARIAN IMPERIALISM AND THE CASE OF
(FOR) YUGOSLAVIA
In Chapter 6, I further explore the post-communist “criminalization” of Eastern
Europe, focusing on narratives that use the 1990s’ wars in the Balkans to externalize
irredeemable criminal behavior (authoritarianism, violation of human rights, ethnic
cleansing, economic plunder and speculation). Other Eastern European countries’
positions on the Balkan wars serve to measure their allegiance to democracy, transitions,
protection of human rights (and to disassociate themselves from old and new
Orientalisms); the same language is used by the warring sides in the Balkans to demonize
the enemy and invest their own causes with legitimacy. I subject to critique the resulting
ethnicization of these discourses as Serbs, Croats, Moslems and Albanians each portray
themselves as bearers of democracy and multiculturalism, a strategy which in fact
resonates with the Western treatment of the conflict (with Serbs as the uncontested
underdog). Such treatment of the wars exposes the blind (racist) spots in political debates
from left to right, even in the most qualified apologies for NATO interventions in the
Balkans. I propose that we think this event through the tradition of Western imperialist
desire to articulate, categorize and ultimately “resolve the mess” in both the Balkans and
Eastern Europe, as well as through Hardt and Negri's discussion of the contemporary
logic of Empire and establishment of the right to intervene.
To tease out complexities in these discourses, I turn to Slavoj Žižek's writing about
the Balkans (and Eastern Europe in general), in conjunction with two other Balkan
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writers whose texts have “presented” the 1990s’ upheavals to Western audiences and
were only published at home after they achieved Western accolade: Dubravka Ugrešić's
autobiographical essays in Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan Wars to the American
Dream and Aleksandar Hemon's novel Nowhere Man. I read Žižek's writing about the
Balkans in relation to his own attempts to present himself to Western leftist-liberal
audiences as a native “expert” on the Balkans and on Eastern European “real existing
socialism,” as well as his protests against Western multicultural fascination with both
non-Western writers and communist dissidents like himself, exemplified by Geoffrey
Harpham's statement that Žižek challenges Western thought having emerged “from the
black lagoon of Stalinism” (“Doing the Impossible” 467).
Western imperialist (or, in Hardt and Negri’s definition, Imperial) discourses
overtake Žižek’s writing about the Balkans, problematizing its stated radical or leftist
allegiance. While Žižek critically dissects the New World Order, the alleged
humanitarianism of NATO interventions and Orientalist discourses about and within the
Balkans, his own thinking about the wars is nevertheless embedded within the theoretical
accouterments of multiculturalism (especially his lament over much-fetishized Sarajevo
as a “multicultural” city), identity politics, ethnicization of responsibility for the war and
demonization of the evildoers, in this case Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbian nation.
While in no way justifying Milosevic’s many political excesses, I hope to show how this
results in Žižek’s problematic endorsement of the NATO bombing of Serbia, a frequent
dismissal of Croatian, Slovenian and other nationalisms in the Balkans and a general
inability to articulate the Balkans as anything else but a symptom of and for the West: as
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a monstrosity produced by the New World Order and a “problem” for the West to
resolve.
Ugrešić and Hemon offer ways of thinking the Balkans, specifically the former
Yugoslavia, outside of the discourses of (failed) multiculturalism, ethnic identity and the
politics of guilt/demonization. Ugrešić places Balkan nationalisms within the context of
global identity politics, exposing them as a convenient tool for power circles to market
one's ethnic group or culture as distinct from all others and worthy of Western support. I
am interested in Ugrešić's critique of the type of multiculturalism that at once recognizes
“ancient ethnic hatreds” in the Balkans and tries to categorize her as a Croatian, Balkan,
or Eastern European author. Ugrešić challenges the preoccupation with the politics of
blame and alleged ethnic antagonism, re-articulating the former Yugoslavia as a state
existing outside of the politics of ethnicity, its spectral unity still haunting the war years
in the guise of letters and emails she receives from the Serbian, “enemy,” camp.
In turn, Hemon's novel similarly reacts against the repeated attempts by Americans
to categorize—and hence, understand—Bosnians as Serbian, Croatian, or Moslem.
Instead, Nowhere Man insists on a Bosnian identity which is a-national, at best a cultural
identity, largely nurtured in Sarajevo before the war. Sarajevo's recent mythologization as
a multicultural mecca is overshadowed by Hemon's remembrance of the 1980s primarily
through tongue-in-cheek references to communist propaganda and an account of Sarajevo
youth's entrancement with Western rock-an-roll. I will explore how this seemingly banal
theme precludes the various attempts to ontologize Sarajevo in the wake of the 1990s’
wars: as Auschwitz after Auschwitz, as a portentous symbol of Europe's future (if
multiculturalism fails), as testament to innate cruelty in the human species, etc.
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Critical Intervention
I have a slight problem with this whole story in which I cannot find my place,
recognize myself . . . Three sides, three entities [in Bosnia]. I do not belong to any
of those three entities. I was born in Yugoslavia, raised to respect its values
(whatever it was like, I like it better than any of the states that emerged after its
breakup) and since 1990 they’ve been trying to turn me into one of these three
entities—by changing my language, imposing religion, national feelings, family
trees, etc. I wish that when we talked about the breakup of Yugoslavia, we’d
mention this side too—Yugoslavs, citizens of a state that no longer exists. Who
took my state? How come that the second or third largest nationality in the census
right before the war no longer exists? I am fed up with listening to stories about
ethnic cleansing of one group by the other, of the third group by the second, of the
second group by the third. The only nationality that I can confirm no longer exists
fifteen years later is Yugoslav. They were cleansed most efficiently, so efficiently
that there is nobody left who will remind us that we existed, exist and are no more.
That’s why I don’t see any reason for surprise at our divisions.1
—A reader’s comment about the 10th
anniversary of the Dayton Agreement,
which put an end to the Bosnian war
(Belgrade news station B92, 21/11/2005)
How can “we” intervene in the Balkans via the former Yugoslavia? The prominent
discourses surrounding the 1990s’ Yugoslav wars treat them as paradigmatic of the postcommunist turmoil whose extreme(ist) articulation finds fertile ground in the (historically
bloody, bellicose) Balkans. As Andrew Hammond contends, “for western commentators
elsewhere in the [Balkan] peninsula, the representation of Yugoslavia formed the prearranged interpretative framework which needed very little modification when
accounting for Romanian orphanages, Bulgarian poverty, Albanian anti-government
protests or any of those other post-communist crises” (139). The tragedy of Yugoslavia is
thus both spectralized, multiplied, repeated, albeit less bloodily, among its Balkan
neighbors and remains unique in the sense that its unpredictability marks a definitive
disappearance of communism in Eastern Europe: if such a relatively “liberal,”
1
Translated from Serbo-Croatian by the author.
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“multicultural,” softly authoritarian communist society can fall victim to internal war,
what hope is there for others?
Yugoslavia as a metaphor for lost chance, which was always-already lost. The
duplicity of trauma: Western shock at the Yugoslavs’ suicidal destruction of its
multiethnic tolerance at the same time as this tolerance is retroactively inscribed into
Yugoslavia’s communist legacy precisely as a condition of possibility for such trauma,
for the articulation of Western shock at the “lack” (as a negative, colonial attribute) of the
will to preserve national harmony. That this retroactive inscription serves, mostly, to
open up the discursive space for Western mourning is affirmed by accounts which strip
communist Yugoslavia of the very possibility of multiethnic tolerance (of the progressive
Western kind). The pluralism of Yugoslavia was only possible with the “iron fist of
empire, the imperial inhibition of identity” (The Black Book of Bosnia 193). David Rieff
informs us, “we had been lulled into a false sense of what Yugoslavia was becoming by .
. . much pro-Tito propaganda”; he admits that there was a “South Slav” culture common
to Croats, Serbs and Moslems, but is quick to disassociate it from its Yugoslav trappings:
“though not ‘Yugoslav’ in the sense of either the pre-World War II monarchy or the
Titoist dictatorship” (Slaughterhouse 36, 71).
The war is always there, always to come, and yet its arrival is greeted by surprise:
Yugoslavia only becomes the possibility of multiethnicity post-mortem, when it is safely
dead, can no longer speak for itself and becomes a site for the projection of Western
multiethnic desire, which is also the desire to rescue, “restore” multiethnicity to this
troubled land. The “real” Yugoslavia is much more threatening because its Yugoslav
identity (like the phenomenon of “Yugonostalgia” among the warring ethnics) exceeds
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explanations supplied by narratives of “iron-hand communism” and of liberal-democratic
multicultural tolerance.
One way to explain why the war happened, in its extreme racist version, is by
simply criminalizing the Balkan peoples as automatons in the morality play of irrational
“ancient ethnic hatreds.” This version is typically related to Western justification for its
(alleged) non-involvement in the conflict, as there is “nothing one can do” about it. The
Clinton administration, for instance, was accused of such distancing from the conflict
before it “finally” intervened; European discomfort with military intervention in former
Yugoslavia was ascribed to a similar “misrepresentation” of the issue. In Critical
Geopolitics, Gearóid Ó Tuathail illustrates an instance of the politicization of the
seemingly neutral geographic discourse by discussing Clinton’s fear of involvement in
“the dangerous quagmire,” the “wild country” that is Bosnia (220). According to Ó
Tuathail, this enables “moral invisibility” to the conflict as it upholds the image of the
wild Balkans which are unresolvable and which will only expose American troops to
danger (220). Instead of washing one’s hands of the conflict—with many European
countries, by calling this a “civil war” where nobody should intervene, with the Clinton
administration, by calling this a “humanitarian disaster” rather than by its proper name,
“Holocaust” or “genocide”—Ó Tuathail recommends a moral engagement with this
“Holocaust,” lamenting that the subsequent intervention came too late.
Ó Tuathail’s book, inspired by Derridean deconstruction, importantly promotes a
critique of such seemingly universalist, neutral language like “moral responsibility,” and
exposes the politics behind “explaining,” rationalizing conflicts through the allegedly
apolitical language of geography, cause and effect narratives, or the employment of
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certain key “iterative” terms that reduce the singular complexity of any event. Yet he
succumbs to similar temptations in his case study of the discourse on Bosnia. The very
use of the term Holocaust or genocide to explain what happened in Bosnia, Croatia, or
Kosovo could be what Derrida means by an “iterative” term: a word that acquires its
meaning exactly as it is used in different con-texts, as it reinvents both itself and those
contexts, as it is repeated with a difference. Arguably, using labels such as the Holocaust
(or even the more general term genocide) importantly historicizes the Yugoslav war
horrors as “similar to” that uber-horror of World War II in order to elicit a certain ethical
response—a diplomatic and/or military engagement designed to prevent the bloodshed,
invoking the lessons learned from history.
Simultaneously, however, the use of such labels downplays the singularity of the
1990s’ wars in former Yugoslavia. It potentially blocks a multi-faceted discussion or
understanding of the wars by always-already approaching them with the “same” ethical
outrage that followed the World War II horrors: by problematically freezing the wars’
many actors in the imagery of Nazi-like moral depravation. In light of the discourses
about the “wild” Balkans, or “wild” Serbs, it can also cast the wars as an inevitable
repetition of the same (“ancient ethnic hatreds”), as an obscene repetition of that which
must never be repeated, the Holocaust. This repeated Holocaust almost provides the
onlookers with obscene pleasure as they, too, can repeat history, but with a difference—
the fanatics are now (thank god) in Eastern rather than Western Europe, “we” can now do
something to prevent disaster, this time fascists are, unpredictably, the formerly partisan
Serbs rather than the formerly fascist Croatians.2 It can happen to anyone.
2
In an article in The New Republic, Martin Peretz observes, “A Serbian victory in Bosnia does not leave
the Catholics of Croatia safe. The shadow of clerical fascism in Nazi-era Croatia is now stalked by the
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I am teasing out the terms of Ó Tuathail’s discourse because it encapsulates key
rhetorical gestures used by many commentators on the Yugoslav wars who are habitually
associated with progressive, liberal, or leftist politics. My primary concern in this chapter,
as it was in Chapter 5, is not the blatantly racist discourse which blames Yugoslav
disintegration on some genetic abnormality of the participatory nations, but rather this
progressive, “humanitarian” discourse which, finding fault rather with “iron-hand”
Titoism or manipulative, latter-day communist-nationalists such as Milosevic or
Tudjman, advocates a military intervention in order to rescue the “people.” In addition to
Slavoj Žižek, on whom Chapter 6 will dwell in more detail, Susan Sontag, David Rieff,
Václav Havel, Ken Loach, Jurgen Habermas, Milan Kundera and others have called for a
humanitarian action in Bosnia and Kosovo invoking a similar language of ethical, moral
responsibility in face of the renewed Holocaust identified by Ó Tuathail.
The problem with this war is precisely that it is irreproachable: this is not the
morally dubious, virtually unilateral, poorly justified intervention in Iraq by the globally
unfashionable American Republicans. This is, according to Edward Said, a war of
“liberal columnists and intellectuals,” and according to Alex Callinicos, it is supported by
the “Western left” and “NATO’s liberal apologists” (Said, “The Treason of the
Intellectuals” 343; Callinicos “The Ideology of Humanitarian Intervention” 176, 78). I
will be so bold as to argue that the intervention in the 1990s’ Yugoslav wars marks a
passage to what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri term Empire: the perfecting not “of
reality of clerical fascism in present-day Serbia” (The Black Book on Bosnia 148). Peretz’s statement not
only glosses over the “shadow” of former clerical fascism in present-day Croatia, but also rests on the
assumption that Croatia has since matured into a modern democracy by seeking entry into the West. The
Balkan Holocaust is both “of” Europe and extraneous to it: the Balkans are Europe’s responsibility because
of their geographic, cultural and racial proximity and yet they come “after” “our” history in which “we” in
Europe have matured from fascist dictatorships into liberal democracies.
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imperialist powers in the old sense” but rather “of the right to intervene, a new production
of norms and instruments of coercion” (9). Empire is “not formed on the basis of force,
but on the basis of presenting force as being in the service of right and peace”; depending
on the establishment of a consensus about the use of force, Empire “is called into being
based on its capacity to resolve conflicts” (15).
It is precisely the aforementioned leftist and/or liberal lament over Europe’s or
America’s non-intervention that “calls Empire into being”: the internalization of the
discourse about the “good” use of force on the “rogue” or “terrorist” states such as
Yugoslavia, or more precisely, Serbia. It is not so much that diplomatic (or, if absolutely
necessary, military) intervention as a political tool to forestall disaster—and undermine
such disastrous political leaders as Serbia’s Milosevic—should be dismissed altogether,
but that the particular type of intervention established through the Yugoslav wars,
justified by its aim of restoring multiculturalism and its humanitarian mission, was
problematic on several counts. Most immediately, the very myth of “non-intervention” or
“late intervention” can be challenged if we look at the series of critical interventions by
the European Union and/or the United States which helped to precipitate the wars: a
prompt recognition of Slovenia and Croatia as independent states (despite Croatia’s
discriminatory practices toward ethnic Serbs), a recognition of “multicultural” Bosnia’s
independence (despite the referendum on independence being split along ethnic lines,
with most Moslems and Croats in favor and most Serbs against), military and diplomatic
aid to the notorious Kosovo Liberation Army and Croatia’s ruling nationalists and,
perhaps crucially, favoring Serbia’s ruling nationalists as country representatives over a
sizeable political and popular opposition.
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More importantly, what is obscured in such a discourse is the way this intervention,
ostensibly aimed at rescuing multiculturalism from the Holocaust, adopts racist
undertones in the designation of Serbia as a terrorist state, in an open demonization of
Serbs (not just politicians, but the “people”) as aggressors and evil expansionists. The
irreproachability of humanitarianism, therefore, makes it almost impossible to raise the
question of ensuing civilian deaths among Serbs (let alone the political questions of their
right to self-determination, territory, etc.). The nobility of helping (or at least vowing to
help) Bosnian Moslems or Kosovo Albanians survive the war justifies helping Serbs die:
Like Giorgio Agamben’s “homo sacer,” they can be sacrificed with impunity, they
remain in the liberal blind spot as “collateral damage.” This discriminatory approach is
obtained through a hierarchical political discourse similar to the one surrounding the
American intervention in Iraq, discussed by Judith Butler in Precarious Life as an
establishment of “grievable” casualties through detailed narratives of lost lives which are
to be mourned (e.g., Daniel Pearl, WTO victims) and, conversely, of “non-grievable”
casualties through an omission of intimate information about persons killed, through “a
practice of effacement and denominalization” (e.g., Iraqi insurgents, Palestinian
terrorists) (38).
In a similar sense, then, Serbian casualties in the Yugoslav wars have by and large
remained “poorly marked,” indeed “unmarkable” in the Western media, to use Judith
Butler’s phrase, resulting from what she calls a discursive “dehumanization”: like the
dead Iraqi insurgents and civilians, the Serbian military and civilians “fit no dominant
frame for the human,” their lives are not narrated and therefore cannot be mourned (34–
35). In this nihilistic political interpellation, Bosnian Moslems and Kosovo Albanians
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become biopolitical objects of intervention as much as Serbs. The decision on their life
and death, although it has a seemingly more favorable outcome—and although they are
seemingly humanized through endless personalized stories of wartime suffering—is
likewise imagined to be the prerogative of the imperial police. The excuse of protectionist
humanitarianism eventually becomes a vehicle for exercising all sorts of forbidden
pleasures: destroying the evildoers’ civilian infrastructure, testing out controversial
weapons and promoting racist fantasies about the “other.”
It is not quite clear how any form of meaningful multiculturalism can be restored to
former Yugoslavia when the conflict is presented in such antagonistic—and
antagonizing—terms: as a morality play of “bad” Serbian nationalism and “good”
Bosnian multiculturalism, between “aggressive expansionists” and “passive victims.”
While the embracing of Bosnian Moslems or Kosovo Albanians is safer “over there,”
where “we” will look like open-minded multiculturalists, than “at home,” where “we” are
scared of Algerian fundamentalists and Turkish gastarbeiters, the very terms of this
political support are less than multicultural. Bosnian Moslems are supported precisely
because they are not religious, i.e., “fanatic,” because they are proclaimed to be of
Europe, democratic and modern—we can embrace them and integrate them in “our”
version of multiculturalism because we do not fear them.3 The stated goal of preserving
multiethnic pluralism and tolerance is thus countered with extreme identity politics,
3
David Rieff condemns Europe’s alleged non-involvement in the conflict, pointing out that “Bosnians
imagined that the fact that they were Europeans would protect them from the horrors of war. Europe, for
them, was a continent in which the cosmopolitan values they stood for had become the norm” (31). Susan
Sontag similarly counters arguments that this is a war between Moslems and Christians, immersed in
Balkan mythology and points out that “the Bosnian cause is that of Europe: democracy and a society
composed of citizens, not of the members of a tribe” (“There and Here: A Lament for Bosnia”). This
argument is replicated in her later support of a military intervention in Kosovo: the Balkans are in Europe
and Europe will not be able to conjure away images of the slaughter of people “who look like us” (“Why
are We in Kosovo?”).
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exposing an aporetic moment in the contemporary ideology of multiculturalism which
had a veritable schizophrenic effect on Yugoslav disintegration. As Diana Johnstone
argues in her discussion of the Kosovo war,
Starting with the pretence of militant anti-racism, “humanitarian intervention”
finishes with a new racism. To merit all these bombs, the “bad” people must be
tarnished with collective guilt . . . . Tony Blair clearly adopted the doctrine of
collective guilt when he declared that there could be no humanitarian aid for the
Serbs because of the dreadful way they had treated the Kosovar Albanians. (168)
Rather than seeing the conflict as a singular constellation of narratives,
circumstances and events that combined to produce the war, this ideology relies on the
politics of blame and collective guilt, ethnicized (for the most part) as Serbian and on the
politics of reward for the good ethnicities, (for the most part) Moslem, Albanian, or
Croatian. So tenacious is this simplistic division into “aggressive” and “victimized”
ethnicities that Moslem, Albanian and occasionally Croatian nationalism and chauvinist
policies are frequently justified as “defensive” and “democratic,” or are even glossed
over.4 The point is not that we should “redistribute” the guilt equally (something that
Žižek, as we will see, finds fault with) or gloss over Serbia’s undoubtedly gruesome share
in the war—the responsibility must be acknowledged—but rather that this facile system
of ethnic meritocracy widens the rift among and within countries emerging from the
former Yugoslavia instead of healing it.5 The discourse of being or not-being European
4
As we will see later, Zizek argues that the world community has endorsed “weaker nationalisms” like
Bosnian or Albanian, but punished “stronger nationalisms” like Serbian and sometimes Croatian. This
policy is at its most problematic when it attempts to justify even ruthless nationalist extremists as defenders
of freedom — Christiane Amanpour’s consistent (and influential) praise of the notorious Kosovo
Liberation Army as “freedom fighters” during her CNN reporting on the NATO bombing of Serbia is a
case in point.
5
In an article published in the Serbian literary magazine Reč, Drinka Gojkovic affirms the necessity of
mapping the coordinates of Serbia’s collective responsibility for the wars. However, she argues that this
will not come out of either the external imaginings of Serbs as “primitive mythomaniacs” or “self-centered
provincials, blind to crime” (Gojkovic charges “world moralizers” Susan Sontag, Thomas Friedman and
Michael Ignatieff with promoting such an image and for mandating Serbia’s punishment and self-
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(civilized, modern, democratic, capitalist) preceded the Yugoslav wars—the secessions
from “old-fashioned” communist Yugoslavia cannot be understood outside of global
identity politics, outside of the attempt to escape the stigma of being in the backwards,
non-European, communist Balkans. It encouraged a proliferation of highly dependable
“client states,” fighting each other for Western recognition in domains of democracy,
human rights and economic reform (Andrew Hammond 149).
It is in this con-text that Western intervention, diplomatic as well as military,
becomes schizophrenic: on the one hand, it attempts to preserve multiethnic tolerance and
cooperation and on the other, it plays favorites among the assorted ethnics, encouraging
them to national self-determination, to marketing their “cultural specificity,” in short, to
re-inventing themselves as independent nations. On the one hand, support for Bosnia as a
symbol of multiculturalism and on the other, support for Bosnia as a state where identity
politics takes over: ruled by three nationalist parties, with Croats and Moslems voting yes
for independence, Serbs voting no. Promoting national emancipation from what
Dubravka Ugrešić jokingly calls, parodying Croatian nationalist discourses, “the prison
of nations” that was communist Yugoslavia contradicts mandates to downplay nationbuilding in order to foster “true” multiculturalism and tolerance of minority rights. The
difficulty of reconciling the allegedly long-awaited, open assertion and emancipation of
national identity, on the one hand and nurturing of meaningful multiculturalism where the
flagellation), or from internal imaginings of Serbs as “innocent victims.” Rather — and this is where the
insistence on assuming collective responsibility carries true ethical potential — Gojkovic believes a
confrontation with one’s guilt is possible by engaging with the host of texts published in Serbia that
criticize its recent politics, nationalism and behavior in the wars, highlighting complexities beyond the
binaries of “criminal” or “innocent” Serbs. For Gojkovic, any meaningful assumption of responsibility also
takes time, beyond instantly proving to the international community that one has transformed into a
“democratic” country (“What Do We Do Now?”).
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new nation would decenter itself as a primary nation-builder, on the other, is
paradigmatic of problems facing liberal multiculturalist ideology everywhere.6
Perhaps this is why most newly independent countries in the region still have
problems with overcoming nationalism: it was a key strategy in the process of justifying
secession by employing insular, self-contained discourses of victimization. The attempt
to escape the “backwards” Balkans and join “Europe” was articulated as a necessary
disassociation from ethnicities seen as “Balkan” or “Oriental” (e.g., Serbs for Croatia,
Moslems/Albanians for Serbia and Macedonia). The process of ethnic differentiation was
encouraged both from the inside—through openly racist narratives about “us” Europeans
and “them” Orientals—and from the outside—through the more subtle narratives of
cultural racism about, for instance, “democratic,” “hard-working,” “tolerant” Slovenians
and “authoritarian,” “shifty,” “corrupt,” and “narcissistic” Serbs. The near impossibility
of carving an ethnically pure space for the transcendental fulfillment of European
fantasies of belonging, together with the fashionable ideology of multicultural pluralism,
has made this process perpetually delayed. Full emancipation is thwarted because of all
those non-European “others” living in “our” midst; despite the attempt to escape, once
and for all, its in-between civilizational status, the Balkans are still stuck in-between.7
6
Gunter Grass’s The Call of the Toad, as we have seen in Chapter 3, comments on this very problem as
exemplified by post-communist Poland.
7
Even in liberal, affluent Slovenia, the poster-child of EU enlargement, citizens voted overwhelmingly to
remove residence rights to thousands of people from other parts of former Yugoslavia in a 2004
referendum. These non-Slovenian residents, known as the “erased,” have been punished for not renewing
residency in independent Slovenia: they are seen as ungrateful “Yugonostalgics” who oppose Slovenian
independence and are thus considered disloyal. Here we see an interesting paradigm shift in the
enforcement of exclusionary policies, which seek to cleanse a European Slovenia not so much of nonEuropean, Balkan others, but of the very idea of Yugoslavia.
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In spite of this paradox—this crisis of identity which ensures enduring conflict—
post-communist rescuing of the former republics from the Yugoslav “prison of nations”
is hailed as liberation, as emancipation. For all their shock and mourning over the death
of Yugoslav multiculturalism, liberal discourses enshrine the superiority of their own
version of multiculturalism over that exercised by communist Yugoslavia by presenting
the latter as fake, as a forced arrangement. It is imagined as an oppressive regime that did
not allow for much articulation of national or religious identity (the “inner self,” the
“essence” supposedly yearning to breathe free, to be vindicated) in order to prevent
conflict. Given the history of national conflicts in the Balkans, this is seen as a potentially
necessary but ultimately misguided policy, since suppressing “ethnic hatreds” could
make them even stronger (hence the 1990s’ wars, such theories conveniently say). Or, in
another version, Yugoslavia superficially acknowledged national and religious
differences, creating an artificially harmonious community. Communists simply did not
know how to foster “true” multiculturalism where one would assert one’s culturallinguistic-religious identity, as well as reach out to others.
In the discourses surrounding the 1990s’ wars, Bosnia, especially Sarajevo, become
curiously exempt from the superficial multiculturalism of communist Yugoslavia. Almost
ubiquitous laments over a multicultural Sarajevo that is being destroyed appear in
academic, as well as popular press: Bosnians are not breaking away only from the
economically inefficient, defunct communist Yugoslavia, but also from a nationalistchauvinist Serbia, which nonetheless stubbornly preserves the cumbersome communist
apparatus of the dead state.8 (Among other things, here we can surmise the paradigm that
8
In an article published in The New Republic, Patrick Glynn aptly summarizes the justification for favoring
some nationalisms over others: “State Department officials in 1991 regarded the Slovenian, Croatian,
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made some nationalisms more “multicultural” and others more “chauvinist”: Bosnian,
like Croatian, plea for independence is a welcome anti-communist gesture, touching a
soft spot in Western democrats, whereas the Serbian plea for a centralized federation is
perceived as a dangerous allegiance to communist authoritarianism.) At stake is not a
polemic inquiry into the multicultural fabric of Bosnian society in order to evaluate the
validity of such discourses, but rather the very discursive imagining, articulation of
Bosnia in this manner: its ossification as a fetishized site of liberal desire where the “free
world” can mourn its own late involvement which led to Bosnia’s unnecessary sacrifice.
Its establishment as a Western fetish, or what Ivaylo Ditchev aptly calls the creation of
“capitals of victimhood” such as Bosnia or Kosovo which can attract geopolitical
investors, virtually crystallizes in the recent trend of taking foreign tourists in Sarajevo to
the sites of major executions, carnage and concentration camps (Belgrade is quickly
catching up by taking its tourists to the sites damaged in NATO bombing) (246).9 It is
this ontological reification of Sarajevo as Auschwitz after Auschwitz, as multiculturalism
under siege, that somehow becomes its final image, precluding an in-depth inquiry into
conditions that led to the war, especially those that helped discredit the Yugoslav option
and promote nationalist politics on all sides.
Simultaneously, this casting of Sarajevo as a pluralist paradise that needs to be
rescued sets the stage for a second death of Yugoslavia, after it has already died through
Macedonian and Bosnian leaders as at least nascently democratic and pro-Western in orientation. It was, as
American officials well understood, the still-Communist regime in Serbia that was repressive and prone to
violence” (The Black Book on Bosnia 133).
9
See, for instance, a recent BBC article “Tourists Flock to Bosnia War Tours,” where sites of carnage and
former escape routes from the besieged Sarajevo are marketed through such Hollywoodized names as “The
Mission Impossible Tour.” As we will see later, Dubravka Ugresic comments on this uncanny yet
marketable mixture of actual war horrors in the Balkans and internationally acclaimed Hollywood action
movies.
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multiple secessions: Sarajevo can finally be disassociated from its Yugoslav context, it
can repeat its multicultural heritage, but “get it right” this time—in a modern, liberaldemocratic milieu. Preserving Bosnia is thus emphatically not about preserving old
Yugoslavia (which, as David Rieff and others tell us, could only come up with
ramshackle multiculturalism). Bosnia, yearning for life in the midst of a siege and mass
murder, eventually survives as a revised, improved Yugoslavia—enlightened through
humanitarian imperialism. Serbia, on the other hand, not only literally brings death to
everyone, but is portrayed as an obscene (vampiric) repetition of a dead state, of the
oppressive, communist Yugoslavia.10 It is this insistence on burying, once and for all, a
state proclaimed to be dead, this discursive silencing of the pre-1990 Yugoslav option—
especially of the Yugoslav identities and social fabrics—that Chapter 6 hopes to address.
As the epigraph to this section suggests, at stake is not only the question of “us” and
“them,” of who did what to whom and to which extent, but of how the Yugoslav (or
another supranational) option was ethnically cleansed, splitting the populace irrevocably
into national “entities,” into “us” and “them.”
Enjoy your Bombing! Slavoj Žižek’s Ethnic Hierarchies
Slavoj Žižek, by far the most influential and well-known intellectual from former
Yugoslavia among Western academics, casts the Yugoslav wars as the question of ethnic
“entities”—always-already invested with presence, self-same, monolithic—and of their
respective responsibilities in the war. It is not so much that he discounts the tradition of
Yugoslav multiculturalism (he acknowledges the constructed nature of “ancient ethnic
10
Also see Tomislav Longinovic intriguing essay on a Western “gothic imaginary” which frames “the
serbs” as perfect phantoms, “skeletons in the closet of Europe”, whose “obstinate resistance to bombs and
starvation is a vampiric one, since it is the secret of those who stand outside of reason and the light of day”
(46–7).
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hatreds”), but rather that he follows a Western humanitarian logic in separating evil
nationalists from noble multiculturalists and establishing hierarchies between entire
“entities” thus qualified. Predictably—and this is where Žižek mimics the mainstream
Western approach to the conflict most transparently—this leads him to pick “Serbs” as
the main culprits who must be stopped, i.e., bombed, while often dismissing, or covering
up the other nationalisms in the region as defensive, unimportant, or multicultural.
Žižek’s political transparency consists not so much in coinciding with the majority
opinion in this assignation of blame, but in his discursive participation in the implicitly
racist language of imperial intervention: the purpose of correctly identifying the enemy is
to facilitate a correct Western involvement in the wars; a castigation of one “entity’s”
cruelty in the name of multiethnic tolerance justifies cruelty against this entire “entity.”
In this, Žižek’s writing on the Yugoslav wars, like much of his writing about
former Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe and “real existing socialism,” targets primarily
Western audiences. Yugoslav wars are already “global”: Žižek is not addressing internal
complexities, antagonisms, or dialogs taking place, or wondering what kind of outside
intervention would be necessary to forestall intensifying conflict or increasing accounts
of ethnic cleansing. Rather, he always-already considers Yugoslav wars as if from the
“outside,” so to speak—the acceptability of intervention is already inscribed in the very
breakup of Yugoslavia, before the war has even started. This fixes Yugoslavia in a
position of impossible self-sufficiency, impossible independence, political as well as
symbolic. Its internal conflicts are not merely mediated by global identity politics and
fantasies of European belonging versus rejection; rather, for Žižek, Yugoslavia’s travails
are but another adverse symptom of the New World Order, a spin-off of global capitalist
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antagonisms and a problem for major Western powers to resolve. Yugoslavia’s
legitimacy—and the legitimacy of what comes after its breakup—depends on Western
standards and recognition:
I think a very simple thing that the West should have done in '90, '91, is to establish
the fact that Yugoslavia no longer exists and then to set a certain series of minimal
criteria and every entity—which is of course not only political democracy but also
respect for national ethnic rights and so on and so on—and then only states which
respect this will be recognized. Instead of this, the West, I claim, played a game
which was for a long time basically a pro-Serb game. (“Human Rights and Its
Discontents”)
This position is all the more significant as Žižek also gains legitimacy before his
Western audiences as an “insider,” as someone who knows intimately the dynamics of
the Yugoslav system and its breakdown. Hence, his approval of the outside military
intervention gives even more political leverage to Western supporters of the NATO
actions against Bosnian Serbs and Serbia proper. Žižek both revels in and attempts to
combat his somewhat controversial, yet sexily exotic status among Western academics.
He has reacted vehemently, for instance, to Geoffrey Harpham’s presupposition of a
difference between him and Western theorists based on the worst clichés about
communism, that Žižek’s alleged disregard of the boundaries of critical academic
discourse has to do with the bursting forth of creative energies contained by iron-curtain
communism (where, supposedly, no philosophical thought was allowed).
To Harpham’s proposition that Žižek may be a “sublime theorist” or an “obscenityobsessed Thing” engaging in “para-academic” intellectual activity (in the smoky bars of
Slovenia), pushing the limits of critical discourse with the goal of “overthrow[ing]
Western thought,” Žižek responds, “Is anyone who deploys a critical distance towards the
predominant model of academic knowledge really either pretending to be a genius
transcending the limits of ordinary mortals or an obscene Thing?” (“Doing the
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Impossible” 467; “Critical response I: A symptom-of what?”). Harpham’s qualification
of Žižek as a “para-academic” not only ignores the facts—Žižek rejects the mystique of
the term by explaining that he was denied employment as a “real” academic in
communist Slovenia—but also invests him with the aura of intellectual transgression, of
theory and debate being steeped in “real life” (smoky bars again), just like Žižek is
implicitly venerated for talking about a communist system in which he actually lived.
Žižek himself reinforces this authority, coming out as somewhat of a rebel in leftist
circles that have taken a keen interest in him. Because of his “native expert”
knowledge—his foreignness and his supposed flair for transgression—he can both correct
those misguided Western leftist who fetishize Cuban or Yugoslav communism and make
controversially nostalgic comments about certain aspects of “real existing socialist”
regimes which most Western leftists would find unsavory. Žižek occupies a similar
position vis-à-vis Western blaming of Serbs and NATO’s subsequent interventions
against this enemy—he outrages (or believes he does) leftist opponents of the bombings
by openly supporting NATO’s mission to stop genocidal Serbs. He reacts against a leftist
relativization of blame, or the argument that all sides in the war are equally nationalist
and thus guilty (suggested, for instance, by Alain Badiou); he “corrects” the mistaken
leftist assumption that Milosevic’s Yugoslavia is an inheritor of the multicultural spirit of
Tito’s state (“NATO, the Left Hand of God?”; “Human Rights and Its Discontents”). But
in this Žižek appears as less of a controversial rebel than he would wish—in a similar
way that Nabokov’s claim to a tragic intellectual isolation among leftist US academics
loses its power in the face of a mainstream Cold War climate. Žižek’s portrayal of the
war and support of the bombings, despite his astute criticism of the ideology of
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“humanitarian intervention” or even the “humanitarianism” of the intervention,
nevertheless recapitulates the mainstream concepts of a multicultural, human rights
discourse that it seeks to transcend.
For Žižek, a virulent critic of that elusive entity, the New World Order, the very
“humanitarianism” of NATO interventions is suspect on the grounds that it is always
followed by “the vague, but ominous reference to ‘strategic interests.’" (“Against the
Double Blackmail”). The NATO actions in Bosnia and Yugoslavia are justified on the
basis of an “ethical normativity” of “universal human rights which assert themselves even
against state sovereignty”; although there is no explicit reference to political or economic
interests, Žižek argues, this “newly emerging normativity of ‘human rights’ is
nevertheless the form of appearance of its very opposite” (Did Somebody Say
Totalitarianism? 245). It seems, however, that a humanitarian intervention would be
acceptable for Žižek if it could truly deliver what it promises, that is, punish a country
that violates human rights: “Is not this the only hope in our global era—to see some
internationally acknowledged force as a guarantee that all countries will respect a certain
minimum of ethical (and, hopefully, also health, social, ecological) standards?” (“Against
the Double Blackmail”). Positively valorizing the concept of Empire discussed by Hardt
and Negri, Žižek does not question the very establishment of the right to intervene,
therefore; rather, the problem lies in the occluded interests of the force that intervenes, as
well as in the ideology of humanitarian intervention itself.
This “militaristic humanism,” by assuming a purely ethical or moral legitimation,
“depoliticizes the military intervention, changing it into an intervention in humanitarian
catastrophe” rather than in a “well-defined political struggle” (The Fragile Absolute 57).
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It sets the ground for an intervention on behalf of an ideal “subject-victim” who is not a
political agent, but someone who is simply caught up in the madness of the conflict and
whose suffering must be stopped at all costs (58). The intervening force makes sure that
the “subject-victims” are not allowed to “cast of this helplessness by asserting themselves
as a sovereign and self-reliant political subject” (59). Predictably, then, NATO intervenes
in Kosovo on behalf of the terrorized and displaced Albanians, the privileged and passive
humanitarian victims. However, it becomes fearful and hostile when it discovers
“recalcitrant” political subjects in Kosovo: not only the Kosovo Liberation Army
engaging, without NATO consent, in murder, drug and human trafficking, but Albanians
in general opposing the NATO mandate in post-liberated Kosovo because they now see
outside management as occupation. It seems that, in Žižek, this politics of victimization is
a larger phenomenon and humanitarian interventionism—which reduces singular political
struggles to a US police intervention against “terrorists” or “unlawful combatants” that
disturb global order—is but one of its manifestations (Welcome to the Desert of the Real!
91).
The intervention among both “terrorists” and “victims” interpellates them in the
biopolitics of what Agamben terms “mere life”—and here Žižek echoes my earlier
observation that both sides are patronized by being granted certain human rights rather
than being treated as sovereign independent citizens: the right to live, eat, have shelter
and express one’s religious, cultural or linguistic identity (92). The main problem of
today’s global political climate, for Žižek, is that this biopolitics of “mere life,”
predicated on the ideology of victimization and harassment, becomes the ultimate
political horizon—paralleling the establishment of liberal democracy as the political
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master-signifier. To extend my earlier argument that a liberal ideology of humanitarian
interventionism is irreproachable, this type of politics also precludes opposition: we can’t
say we’re against “human rights” and in favor of “terrorists,” against “liberal democracy”
and in favor of “fundamentalism” or “totalitarianism.”
But despite this critical problem with the ideology of humanitarian interventionism,
Žižek supports the NATO actions in former Yugoslavia even as they polarize the
populace into helpless, passive victims and incredibly politically powerful terrorists.
Indeed, like many former Yugoslav republics, he appropriates the position of a victim in
hopes to capture Western political attention and thus ends up blaming NATO for
intervening too late and for playing a pro-Serb game in the meantime (for Serbs, of
course, it is a pro-Croat or pro-Moslem game; for Bosnian Moslems, it is a pro-Croat or
pro-Serb game). Žižek does not subscribe to the explanation of the conflict as a
pathological inter-ethnic showdown and insists that these myths are manipulated by
nationalist politicians on all sides to gain popularity.11 He also identifies European
fantasies of belonging which take place through a disassociation from one’s “Balkan”
neighbors, where the “multiple displacement of the frontier clearly demonstrates that . . .
we are dealing not with real geography but with an imaginary cartography” (Fragile 4).
Thus, “For the nationalist Slovenes the [European-Balkan] frontier is the river
Kolpa, separating Slovenia from Croatia; we are Mitteleuropa, while Croats are already
Balkan, involved in the irrational ethnic feuds which really do not concern us—we are on
11
See, for instance, The Metastases of Enjoyment where Zizek argues that the “Western gaze is thoroughly
responsible” for its own seduction by the myth of Balkan “primordial cruelty”: in “ex-Yugoslavia, we are
lost not because of our primitive dreams and myths preventing us from speaking the enlightened language
of Europe, but because we pay in flesh the price of being the stuff of others’ dreams” (212). Yugoslavia is
not the other of Europe, but rather “Europe itself in its Otherness, the screen on to which Europe projected
its own repressed reverse” (212).
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their side, we sympathize, but in the same way one sympathizes with a third world victim
of aggression” (“Ethnic Dance Macabre”). But indeed, as with many liberal or leftist
commentators, this gesture primarily serves to disprove the claims that “there is nothing
we can do” about centuries-old Balkan conflicts and to argue that a military intervention
is desirable and possibly beneficial. In Žižek, the traditional, Orientalist racism of
refusing to intervene in the “wild Balkans” overrides—and overshadows—the
patronizing, liberal racism of humanitarian intervention.
Indeed, Žižek perhaps unwittingly reinforces the discourse of a seemingly
benevolent, humanitarian intervention to aid “victims” (who are nonetheless invested
with a clear ethnic identity). His critique of Western political responses to the Sarajevo
siege disaster points to a “libidinal economy” of Sarajevo’s victimization, i.e.,
Westerners’ “unavowed desire” to preserve it “in a kind of atemporal freeze, between the
two deaths . . . a victim eternalized in its suffering” (Metastases 213). To counter this
racist suspension of the victim, which provides the Western gaze with a safe, mediatized
outlet of “otherness,” Žižek argues for a more radical humanitarian action, beyond
providing “just enough humanitarian aid for the city to survive, exert[ing] just enough
pressure on the Serbs to prevent them from occupying the city” (213). The problem lies
not in Žižek’s argument for putting an end to the siege through outside intervention, but
rather in his redoubling of Sarajevo’s “final image” as the victim and in the terms of
intervention which sacrifice “terrorist” Serbs with impunity and rescue “victimized”
Bosnian Moslems by investing them with an idealized (yet patronizing) lack of political
agency.
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Žižek’s explanation of the wars echoes my earlier discussion of liberal
humanitarianism which justifies independent Bosnia as a project of isolation and
improvement of the best legacies of former Yugoslavia (multiculturalism) and mostly
castigates Serbia as an im/potent, rump embodiment of a superseded communist state,
lashing out in its dying throes. The political lines are drawn according to unambiguous
and apparently fixed binaries: challenging a presumed leftist idealization of Milosevic’s
Serbia as an inheritor of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Žižek proposes that Alija Izetbegovic’s
Bosnian presidency, rather, continues the former state’s heritage more faithfully. The
popularity of Tito’s portraits in 1990s’ Bosnia’s political offices “proves” its continued
devotion to multiculturalism; Bosnia is frequently lauded as the most tolerant and open of
former Yugoslav republics, a place where being-Moslem did not mean some
fundamentalist “madness,” but led to an original rock music scene and cultural scene in
general.
Hence, “the war between Bosnia and Yugoslavia was the war between what was, to
put it conditionally, good about the old Titoist legacy, the war between the idea of a
multi-cultural, tolerant—why not use these terms?—Yugoslavia and the new logic of
nationalism” (“Human Rights and its Discontents”). Žižek is not an unambiguous
apologist for “real existing socialism” of Tito’s Yugoslavia, but he redeems its
multicultural legacy, which, “even if [it] is a purely manipulative ideological invention,
nonetheless it produces certain material effects” (“Human Rights and Its Discontents”).
Izetbegovic’s Bosnia, especially Sarajevo, is thus almost transformed into a leftist fetish:
it is invested with a “utopian element” of old Yugoslavia.
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While Bosnian Moslems—and frequently Kosovo Albanians—are the only
“entities” behaving in a “civilized” manner in former Yugoslavia, Milosevic’s Serbia
destroys the very utopian element of Tito’s Yugoslavia while preserving its most
regressive aspects. Serbia has fallen prey (quite willingly, though) to a “nationalist neoCommunist leader” and therefore the fight against Milosevic by the seceding republics
running for their lives is likened to the Allies’ fight against Hitler (“Against the Double
Blackmail”). Žižek evokes the typical tropes of the Holocaust and Hitlerism used to
explain Milosevic’s reign over Serbia, contributing to the irreproachability of
Yugoslavia’s breakup by catering to both leftist and liberal imaginations: the
multiculturalist republics respectful of communist Yugoslavia’s legacy seek refuge from
a nationalist monster; the democratic republics respectful of Yugoslavia’s liberal legacy
seek refuge from an orthodox communist. Of course, this is a problem, not because the
image of Milosevic’s Serbia is inadequate or unreasonable, but because such an argument
obscures the legacy of other deadly nationalisms in the region. Žižek’s discursive framing
of former Yugoslav wars is torn between this acknowledgment of the rise in nationalism
in all republics and the insistence on blaming some nationalisms and exculpating others.
In this respect, Žižek theorizes the way nationalist politics gained ground across
former Yugoslavia: “every nationality has built its own mythology narrating how other
nations deprive it of the vital part of enjoyment” (Tarrying with the Negative 204). Thus,
Slovenes are deprived of their potentially Western European affluence by “Serbians,
Bosnians, . . . because of their proverbial laziness, Balkan corruption, dirty and noisy
enjoyment,” while Serbs are robbed of the results of their hard labor by “Slovenian
unnatural diligence, stiffness and selfish calculation” (204). But the darker (reverse, as it
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were) side of nationalisms other than Serbian is suppressed in Žižek, for what matters is
not their ideological overlap but rather their “concrete” manifestations—at least the ones
that Žižek selectively discusses. Thus, Žižek follows a Western humanitarian logic in
exonerating “weaker nationalisms (Bosnian, Kosovar)” and castigating “stronger
nationalisms (Serbian and by means of subtraction, the Croatian).” Indeed, even the
“yakking popular on the Left about the [pro-fascist] Ustasche symbols in Tudjman's
Croatia” means little set against the “Serbian aggression against Bosnia in 1992”
(“NATO, The Left Hand of God?”).
Žižek acknowledges that even the 1990’s Bosnian presidency is not completely
innocent in that they “played a strange game”: "let Serbs and Croats fight each other and
then we'll take over” (“Human Rights”). This statement allegedly invests them with
political agency, on which Žižek insists in order to combat the ideology of
(self)victimization, but it nevertheless comes across as no more than a token gesture
intended to provide balance. This becomes especially apparent in Žižek’s problematic
insistence that even Croatian nationalism, which openly embraced the fascist symbols
and ideology of the World-War-II Nazi puppet state, has its redeeming moments: “[E]ven
such a degenerate, sad regime as the Tudjman regime in Croatia still acknowledges Tito
and the old Yugoslav legacy as a legitimate tradition. Even if he is—and he definitely
is—a proto-fascist figure, Tudjman still includes Tito within the great Croat legacy, or
however he puts it“ (“Human Rights”).12
Why this insistence on differentiation between entire “nationalisms,” already
assumed as givens? If Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian and other nationalisms have their
12
Not surprisingly, Zizek ennobles Slovenia’s nationalist secession in the same way — they too preserved
the respect for Tito’s legacy.
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redeeming sides, counterparts, or at least complexity (oppositional parties?), then how is
it credible that only Serbian nationalism is monolithic, straightforward, fixed? Most
significantly, how does this forward the multicultural politics that Žižek allegedly
espouses when it not only contradicts his theorization of the rise in antagonistic
nationalisms everywhere in Yugoslavia but also elevates certain “ethnics” (and their
“enjoyment” of their nations) above “others”? This alleged insistence on multiculturalism
which obscures its racist side, its unacknowledged “reverse,” as Žižek would say,
strengthens the interventionist ideology of liberal humanitarianism which he sets out to
challenge.13 The main culprit in this politics of blame is undoubtedly Milosevic and even
Serbian politicians before him (so Serbian politics is monolithic not only synchronically
but also diachronically).
In Žižek’s historical cause-and-effect narrative, it is Serbia which sets the stage for
the first (symbolic) death of Yugoslavia: by denying autonomy to its provinces Kosovo
and Vojvodina in the 1974 Constitution and by allowing Milosevic’s takeover of power
in the late 1980s. While no doubt significant, this “originary” moment of breakup is
exposed to challenge—for instance, why not date the breakup of Yugoslavia to the rise in
Albanian nationalism and calls for independence in the 1970s and 1980s? Or to the
nationalism of the so-called “Croatian Spring” in the 1970s? Or to Slovenia’s and
Croatia’s calls for independence in the 1980s? My aim is not to “blame” any single event
or “entity” for Yugoslavia’s breakup, but rather to highlight the need of looking at all of
13
As some theorists have noticed, if there is support for a multicultural Bosnia which presumably extends
respect and tolerance to all its constitutive ethnicities, then how can this be reconciled with the politics of
hatred toward “Serbs,” who are also supposed to be part of Bosnia’s multicultural family?
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them together, considering their interactions in the particular political and economic
constellations whose complexity Žižek discounts with a specific ideological goal in mind.
What results from the war situation presented in such binary terms and from this
unified historical narrative which monopolizes the discourse of the breakup through a
rationalization, a cause-and-effect narrative that points to indisputable Serbian
delinquency, is an unapologetic support of NATO’s punishment of Serbia. Unlike liberal
apologists who justified the intervention by saying that it punishes the “politicians” rather
than “people,” Žižek has no qualms about bombing “Serbs” as a “people.” Although he
identifies many problems with the humanitarian intervention, as discussed earlier, Žižek
nevertheless believes the NATO action to be justified, replying to the “pseudo-Leftists”
who are squeamish about the bombing: “Precisely as a Leftist, my answer to the dilemma
‘Bomb or not?’ is: not yet ENOUGH bombs and they are TOO LATE.” It is not just
about getting over the years of “entertaining illusions that one can make a deal with
Milosevic,” a claim that not only installs Milosevic as the uber-Serb who fully represents
and embodies the nation, but also strips “Serbs” of the power of negotiation—i.e., one
cannot negotiate with “terrorists” (“Against the Double Blackmail”). It is also about
punishing “Serbs” for their nationalism:
When the Western forces repeat all the time that they are not fighting the Serbian
people, but only their corrupted regime, they rely on the typically liberal wrong
premise that the Serbian people are just victims of their evil leadership personified
in Milosevic, manipulated by him.14 The painful fact is that Serb aggressive
14
The Clinton administration and NATO commanders frequently emphasized that their actions are really
meant to protect the “people” against Milosevic’s government. However, their official statements and
media apparatus nevertheless exposed the “people” as a target, for what else could account for a deliberate
disabling of civilian water and electricity supplies and the arrogance reflected in NATO spokesman Jamie
Shea’s remark, “We are able to turn off and on the light switch in Belgrade”? That the bombing provided a
significant dose of enjoyment of the “justified” hatred of Serbs as a people is confirmed by Thomas
Friedman’s statement which “admits” to targeting the nation, not only its leaders: “We are at war with the
Serbian nation and anyone hanging around Belgrade needs to understand that. This notion that we are only
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nationalism enjoys the support of the large majority of the population—no, Serbs
are not passive victims of nationalist manipulation, they are not Americans in
disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the bad nationalist spell. (“Against the
Double Blackmail”)
The effectiveness of NATO’s bombing as a “humanitarian” method, or a
democratic tool for efficiently re-educating “bad” nationalists into “good”
multiculturalists is a topic in its own right. What is at stake in Žižek’s nihilistic politics is
the very biopolitics of “mere life” which can justify the “collateral damage” among not
merely Serbian nationalists, but “Serbs” as an undifferentiated, cancerous body—all the
more ironic as cancer is on the rise in Serbian bodies since the bombing, because of all
the “concrete” manifestations of the NATO intervention that Žižek chooses to discuss in
theoretical terms. Indeed, Žižek’s approach, while seemingly devoted to the utopian
“excess” of Yugoslavia’s ideology of multiculturalism, insists on a clear delineation of
differences among the warring ethnics, contributing to the vying for Western accolade by
former Yugoslav republics through a denigration of “others.”
Although Žižek opposes the biological racism of “primordial hatreds,” he
nevertheless sets the stage for a seemingly more liberal racism through the discussion of
guilt in ethnic terms (rather than political, economic, etc.) and the mobilization of
ethnicity as the zero degree of either assertive, self-defensive politics or aggressive,
destructive fascism. In this way, Croatian “ethnics” can always be half-exonerated for
their nationalist enjoyment, regardless of the singularity of the situation in which “they”
find themselves, whereas Serb “ethnic” fascism will be replicated mimetically at different
historical moments, whether we are speaking of 1974, 1986, or 1992.
at war with one bad guy, Slobodan Milosevic (who was popularly elected three times), is ludicrous”
(“Steady as She Goes”).
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But let me replicate myself—this discussion is not meant to elevate Serbian
nationalism or portray it in a more favorable light, or “tell the truth” about Bosnian
Moslem nationalism. It is not the question of preferring Izetbegovic’s vision of Bosnia
over Milosevic’s vision of Bosnia, or vice versa. Instead, what if neither of these were
adequate (as Žižek would likely say), but something completely different were true—
what if neither option inherits the spirit of Tito’s Yugoslavia? What haunts, exceeds
Žižek’s discussion is the existence, however utopian in (spite of) its impotence, of a proYugoslav party as an option in the Bosnian elections in the 1990s and the fact that most
Bosnian Moslems did not vote for it. Neither did Bosnian Serbs or Croats. Even if this
pro-Yugoslav option, i.e., its embodiment in the party, was clearly powerless and
superseded, it would still be possible to speak of a pro-Yugoslav political attitude, a
gesture of respect for Tito’s ideology of multiculturalism. This attitude would likely
oppose the politics of ethnic identity, of blame and guilt, as well as of a discursive
denigration—or support for bombing—of any one of Yugoslavia’s “nationalities.”
Instead, the former Yugoslav republics have gained independence, but have nurtured it as
introverted new nations. They have not, as Žižek claims, preserved the spirit of Tito’s
Yugoslavia, nor have they formed some sort of loose confederacy which would have
challenged the nationalist-chauvinist Milosevic government with the full force of its
multicultural utopianism. For accounts which somewhat complicate Žižek’s, therefore, I
turn to Dubravka Ugrešić and to Aleksandar Hemon.
Croatian, Balkan, Eastern European, or “Other”? Dubravka Ugrešić and the
Condition of Global Dissidence
Like Slavoj Žižek, the contemporary Croatian author Dubravka Ugrešić also
grapples with the process of ethnic self-differentiation in Have a Nice Day: From the
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Balkan Wars to the American Dream, dramatizing the trauma of undecided Balkan
identities which perpetually long for the mythical West, yet can never merit its
acceptance. A political exile from Croatia, Dubravka Ugrešić develops Have a Nice Day
as a series of cultural reflections about the relationship between her abandoned East and
her newly acquired West. In contact with the West (initially Holland and more
prominently, the United States), Ugrešić’s essays embody a conflict between, on the one
hand, the discourse of globalization—for her a traditional colonial narrative which
proffers Western models as a goal for the West’s “others”—and on the other hand, a
questioning of such a discourse.
While she initially positions herself as an Eastern European “other,” denouncing
Yugoslav “backwards” nationalism and celebrating Western Europe and the United
States as leaders in the march towards global progress, Ugrešić ends up criticizing
streamlining Western multiculturalism which to her reflects the process of globalization,
promoting globally recognizable and thus consumable “identities.” Because this conflict
remains largely unresolved, Ugrešić establishes herself as a dissident from both former
Yugoslavia’s (“Eastern”) nationalist euphoria and American (“Western”) stultifying
multiculturalism. Noting that both ideologies, while seemingly contradictory, depend on
clear identity politics as the zero degree of any political action or privilege, Ugrešić
struggles to locate another way of operating in the modern world. Particularly interesting
for our purposes is her attempt to resurrect and piece together the old Yugoslavia which
is being destroyed physically and discredited discursively—with the aid of local
nationalist as well as global multiculturalist narratives.
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At the beginning of the book, Ugrešić’s escape from war-torn Croatia to
Amsterdam lands her thoughts in the midst of Orientalist binaries, which provide a
framework for her reflections on the East-West divide:
In the Bodega Kayzer café I drink coffee and write down pairs of opposites. Left—
right; organized—disorganized; democracy—democratic symbols as a substitute
for democracy; civilized—primitive; . . . rational consciousness—mythic
consciousness; facing the future—a necrophiliac preoccupation with the past;
predictability—unpredictability; an orderly system of criteria and values—absence
of system; individual consciousness—collective consciousness; citizen—
nationality. I fill the left-hand column under the heading Western Europe, the right
under Eastern Europe. (22)
At this point, Ugrešić assigns the first items in the binaries a more privileged
position, while taking upon herself the burden of inferiority that the second items entail.
She personifies Eastern Europe as a “sister” she cannot escape: a disgracefully
uncivilized double who wears “cheap make-up,” “talks too loudly,” “wipes its lips with
its hand,” and whose desperate eyes reveal a “need to stop being a second-class citizen
and become someone” (23). This almost contemptuous realization of one’s own
insignificance and peripheral status is further enhanced by Ugrešić’s references to
Croatia’s desire to have its civil war misery recognized by the West. Her mother
persistently asks, “And do they know about us over there? Do they write about us?” (32).
They don’t, Ugrešić implies, because the “beautiful Western Europe” can afford to think
about more important things than the misery of its “others” (26).
Her denunciation of the then nationalist politics in Croatia labels Ugrešić as a
“permanent émigré” from her own country and intensifies her association of the Balkans
with intolerance, brutality and moral degradation, qualities which place them at odds with
the “civilized” West (224). As Ugrešić explains to her bewildered New York shrink, “I
come from a phallic culture, male; a culture of batons, sticks and knives, according to
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need” (53). Later she painstakingly enumerates all that is wrong with her Balkan land—
“mythic, tribal thinking , . . . primitive, savage ways, . . . illiteracy, . . . the criminal
mentality, . . . the newly composed rural mentality which weeps as it kills and kills as it
weeps” (54). These qualifications have their implied, more positive opposites—values
that, in Ugrešić’s reflections, are scarce in the Balkans. This “lack” reifies the Balkans as
a place which Western modernity has side-stepped; indeed, the Balkans’ ideological
displacement from modern Europe is reflected in the shrink’s incredulous reaction to
Ugrešić’s horror story: “I doubt that any of that can be taking place in the heart of
Europe, on the threshold of the twenty-first century” (55).
Juxtaposed to this wounded Balkan/East European image is Ugrešić’s portrayal of
the West, particularly the United States, as an organized, smoothly functioning, rational
society, leader to the global future, the exploration of which affords her much
amusement. An exile-flaneur, Ugrešić becomes enchanted with the vibrancy of New
York streets and declares that it is “not a city of dreams, it is a city built by us, dreamers”
(214). By describing New York as a city of “us” and not “them,” Ugrešić appropriates
her new abode as an outgrowth of her own American dream among others and expresses
her solidarity with this collective “imagined community” of New York immigrants. This
feeling of communion also signals that she might be able to rebuild her shattered sense of
home in this alien country. As she smiles the “smile of a convalescent,” sitting on a
Central Park bench, New York allows Ugrešić to recuperate from personal anxieties and
once again achieve “normality” (151).
Perhaps this is why, as she slowly punches holes in this image, she poses the
question, “And what gives me the right, from my refugee’s disjointed, neurotic, desperate
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and disabled perspective, to judge a world which is freely setting up its norms, its norms
of its normality?” (150). Her criticism of her Western hosts is accompanied by a sense of
guilt because in exile she has recovered the academic privileges that she has irrevocably
lost in Croatia; in her words, she has become a “privileged refugee” (25). But she
nevertheless notices that the “norms of normality” to which she pays homage depend on
classifying her as a Yugoslav refugee whose perspective is appropriately skewed,
disjointed and desperate. She becomes a mascot of both Balkan and more broadly,
Eastern European “otherness” which can be securely streamlined into the host society and
help reinforce its superior position. Ugrešić reflects on the “Parisians talking about the
yugomafia and Londoners about ‘ustashas’ and ‘chetniks,’ the fear of civilized Europe”;
“Ha-ha, you’re a dangerous lot, down there . . .” they tell her (28). The images of the
Balkans that she sees in the Western media—“desperate, wretched, disheveled people
with wild eyes”—only serve to strengthen the “myth of the wild Balkans” (110).
Ugrešić also challenges Western portrayals of Eastern Europe as a monolithic
entity; in a similar way that she is locked in the image of a wretched refugee from the
Balkans, she feels classified as a victim of Eastern European “Iron-Curtain” communism,
a veritable “homo sacer” whose only acceptable position can be that of victimhood. “As
soon as I crossed the border,” Ugrešić says, “the customs officers of culture began
roughly sticking identity labels on me: communism, Eastern Europe, censorship,
repression, Iron Curtain, nationalism (Serb or Croat?)—the very labels from which I had
succeeded in protecting my writing in my own country” (139). The humorous scene in
which an American journalist, trying to express her sympathy for Ugrešić,
condescendingly recycles America’s demonization of communism (“’I know it was
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terrible,’ she said emotionally, screwing up her face”) helps Ugrešić expose the
preconceived notions about Eastern Europe which only seek to reaffirm themselves
(139). Of course, the irony that Ugrešić tries to point out to her readers is that her
communist Yugoslavia was never part of the “Iron Curtain.”
This renders Ugrešić’s portrayal of Yugoslav intellectuals in the West all the more
grotesque: revising personal histories, they deliberately play into Western stereotypes of
repression behind the “Iron Curtain” in order to reap benefits from the system. A
Yugoslav journalist who engages in what Rey Chow calls “coercive mimicry,” or
mimicry of a predetermined ethnic “identity,” proudly informs Ugrešić, “I’ll sell garbage
from the communist store-room . . . I’ll give them the expected picture of the world,
stereotypes about life behind ‘the iron curtain,’ stereotypes about grey [sic], alienated
Eastern Europe standing in line for sour cabbage” (67). Ugrešić importantly questions the
ethics of reinforcing one’s peripheral status, but also hints that in order for a periphery
writer/journalist to enter the Western mainstream, he/she is under pressure to conform to
the expected image of the periphery. Thus, when Ugrešić observes, “But we never stood
in line for sour cabbage,” it is clear that within the dominant discourse on the West-East
divide, Ugrešić’s insight might not be readily “marketable” (67). Instead, she must play
into the logic of global identity politics that insists of understanding her position via the
pre-determined image of “being” Croatian, Balkan and/or Eastern European.
As a challenge to such a logic, rather than engaging—like Žižek—in a politics of
blaming “bad” or praising “good” ethnic (id)entities in the Balkan wars, Ugrešić focuses
on the process of self-differentiation itself, implying that every side is similarly caught up
in it. Simultaneously, she resurrects a different, less “marketable” story of the subaltern
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Yugoslavs who do not live up to the myth of wild Balkans, ethnic hatreds or clear
national identifications. These are the people she left in former Yugoslavia, who did not
have the privilege of going “global” or of infiltrating themselves into Western
metropolises. Such people, she hints, are historically paralyzed by the entrenched
Orientalist discourses on the Balkans and Eastern Europe, which can dismiss their
individual war tragedies as consequences of “expected” nationalist escapades in the wake
of a post-communist chaos which do not happen in the civilized West.
The peripheral subaltern gains a voice in Ugrešić’s narrative in the guise of her
mother’s insistent phone calls from Croatia, recounting the latest horrors but also
revealing humorous, idiosyncratic exchanges between mother and daughter. Ugrešić also
includes letters from her friends scattered all over the former Yugoslavia, people who
mainly want to survive and evade the war; such subaltern actions of survival, as Pheng
Cheah would say, “cannot easily be romanticized or recuperated as hybrid resistance”
(302). H. from Croatia writes to Ugrešić about the miserable living conditions and a
surreal political metamorphosis (“Our new state is like a fairy tale . . . A good fairy came,
waved a magic wand and turned us into—Europeans”) and also inquires after a mutual
friend from Serbia, the official “enemy” territory (90). In turn, in a letter from Serbia, J.
laments not being able to visit her friends in “enemy” Croatia; she denounces nationalist
warmongers who chased home the people “demanding not to be divided into sheepfolds
according to nationality” (94). Personalizing the “other” effectively disturbs the discourse
that seeks to reduce the “other” to stereotypes. Ugrešić’s narrative, in fact, performs the
spectral unity of former Yugoslavia, not in terms of “official” communist politics, but in
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terms of its “unofficial” sense of solidarity and friendship collapsing nationalist
boundaries.
This method also gives Ugrešić’s narrative a polyphonic quality, enhanced by her
need to consider every experience through a “double exposure.” “I see everything in
double exposures,” Ugrešić says to her shrink, “I look at the American flag and suddenly
I seem to see little red sickles and hammers instead of white stars . . . I walk down Fifth
Avenue and suddenly see the buildings falling like card houses . . . Everything is mixed
up in my head, everything exists simultaneously, nothing has just one meaning any more,
nothing is firm any longer” (55). By situating the Yugoslav experience in the United
States, Ugrešić gives the Balkan nationalist conflicts the global relevance which they
have been denied by the discourse of globalization, a discourse that depends on
associating Balkan nationalism with a “lack” of civilization, progress, democracy.15
Ugrešić’s diasporic experience resembles what Radhakrishnan calls a “ghostly location,
where the political unreality of one’s present home is to be surpassed only by the
ontological reality of one’s place of origin” (175). In the United States, Ugrešić
supplements the unreality of her present condition by invoking the ghostly remnants of
her vanishing country. Indeed, she anxiously reconstructs the country that she constantly
warns is vanishing, both through its own self-destruction and its increasingly peripheral
status in global relations. She enumerates memories of vanishing places, customs,
15
Reading Have a Nice Day after September 11 brings this point home. As Ugresic desperately tries to
make the shrink understand her story, she hints that the war in Yugoslavia may become a global virus: “But
what about the virus? What if at this moment, while the two of us are talking, the Empire State Building is
collapsing! And you tell me that everything’ll be all right!” “You know yourself that it’s impossible!”
replies the shrink (56).
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experiences; she lists the names of people who have already been classified as
“disappeared.”
The attempt to salvage the memory of a country doomed to extinction is also a
reassertion of its past against its civil-war present and against its proclaimed goal of a
bright future in the European Union and the prestigious “free world” society. Although
she has no illusions about communism, Ugrešić mocks Croatia’s hasty readiness to reject
everything “Yugo-communist.” What takes place politically in independent Croatia is
portrayed as an emancipation from the “prison of nations,” but Ugrešić unmasks it as an
attempt, rather, to further one’s cultural specificity in the context of global identity
politics and gain national legitimacy among eminent Western powers (234–35). The
entire propaganda of the country which hatched out of the Yugoslav conflict, Ugrešić
implies, is directed towards shedding the image of the “backwards” Balkans and proving
that its national identity is not only separate and well-defined, but also modern,
democratic and beneficial to the West: “we are not beasts thirsty for blood like our
enemies” the television images say (236). In the process, monuments to scientist Nikola
Tesla and writer Ivo Andric become replaced by a monument to German Foreign
Minister Genscher, who championed an international acceptance of Croatia’s
independence (235). Croatia’s already peripheral status, it seems, is further exacerbated,
paradoxically, by the country’s enthusiastic denial of its cultural heritage—which it
shares with other Yugoslavs—in its desire to get closer to the elusive West.
Ugrešić draws parallels between the present process of Croatia’s “Westernization”
and the past exposure to Western values and commodities within the communist
Yugoslavia. In a chapter appropriately titled “Yugo-Americana,” Ugrešić explains how
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the American dream arrived in post-World War II Yugoslavia through “Truman’s eggs,
milk and cheddar cheese,” through translations of Kerouac and Ginsburg and most
importantly, through Hollywood (106). According to Ugrešić, this permeation of the
Yugoslav milieu with American cultural products launched Yugoslavs into a collective
American dream, but also created among them a sense of equality in the global world.
Because they could identify with common human concerns of American soap opera
characters, Ugrešić concludes, her American friend “Norman’s mother in Detroit and my
mother in Zagreb were in that sense equal inhabitants of the global village” (109). With
that in mind, Ugrešić mentions a story by Croatian author Pavle Pavlicic, in which he
compares ordinary life in Hannibal on the Mississippi and Vukovar on the Danube,
casting the American and Croatian towns as equal actors in parallel worlds. But to
Ugrešić, this “sameness of various worlds” has been destroyed by the reality of the civil
war in Croatia, when Vukovar was razed to the ground (110). This metaphoric realization
of material inequality brings to light the precariousness of equality simulated by a mutual
consumption of cultural products. This conclusion also seems to be a warning that present
Croatian attempts to become “Westernized ” may bring them into the sphere of Westernlike market consumption, but not into the sphere of material equality with the West.
Even the “television equality” is not what it seemed to be, Ugrešić realizes, as her
exilic experience provides her a glimpse into ways in which Western media strengthen
the Balkan myth, which only widens the gap of inequality. It is paradoxical then, that,
while the media expect Yugoslavs to live up to the Balkan myth, in the civil war itself,
people continue to live out the American myth: “Croatian soldiers wear bands round their
foreheads like Sylvester Stallone, the town of Knin is known as Knin Peaks and the
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Serbian paramilitary groups are Kninjas” (111). Ugrešić thus concludes, “The world had
evidently become a global village. Perhaps it had become a global American village, but
we needn’t go into that here“ (108). The implication of Ugrešić’s discussion is that,
although Sylvester Stallone, ninjas and “wild-eyed” Croatian and Serbian fighters
represent symbols of equally brutal violence, violence embodied by the American myth
seems palatable while the one embodied by the Balkan myth is clearly unacceptable and
appropriately “othered.” In this light, Croatia’s present anxiety to escape the Balkan myth
and embrace the West only gives credence to this problematic distinction. Throughout the
essays, embracing the West means participating in a consumer mentality, ideology that
adjusts anything into a perfectly marketable commodity. In that sense, not only is
Ugrešić, as a “representative of a postcommunist country,” expected to “sell” a story
about her experience to the Western market,16 but Croatia’s war horrors themselves have
to live up to “marketable” standards: “If the war horrors in Croatia had been presented by
an international fashion designer, someone would have noticed them” (139, 24).
To challenge the dichotomies according to which the West “rescues” the East from
the nightmare of chauvinist nationalism into a tolerant multiculturalism, or from the
nightmare of communism into liberal-democratic capitalism, Ugrešić compares the
United States and Yugoslavia/Croatia in terms of a shared ideological heritage. Ugrešić
finds a Western ideology of mass production and marketing of not only goods but human
behavior as stultifying as Eastern European communist ideologies, and in the case of
16
According to Martha Kuhlman, “A Danish critic vehemently reproached Ugresic in 1993 for Fording the
Stream of Consciousness, misreading the work as an offensive satire of the war. The critic accused her of
engaging in a crass form of literary escapism when she actually had other pressing concerns like the
‘bloody war’ raging at home” (679). Kuhlman adds that Ugresic is often expected by Western interviewers
to act as the spokesperson for her country, although, as Ugresic says “the Yugoslav writer has traditionally
not been called upon to be the voice of the people and never really wanted that role” (679).
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former Yugoslavia, populist nationalism. In this sense, Ugrešić compares seemingly
disparate societies on an equal footing, highlighting the flaws in what she perceives as
their mainstream value systems and subverting the superior West/inferior East
dichotomy. Thus, when one of her American students asks her if she thinks that kitsch is
a typical product of communist systems, she is able to reply, albeit timidly, “Kitsch is a
global phenomenon” (170). Both communist and nationalist empires of kitsch, with their
superficial, maudlin symbols of “brotherhood and unity” or national costumes and
folklore come to resemble American television kitsch which advertises certain models of
behavior, a “new American sensibility, undisguised sentimentality, a new, ‘better quality’
attitude to life” (181). Continuing to see everything in double exposures, Ugrešić ponders
on the American anxiety to overcome depression (“strong personality”) and project an
image of happiness; the “aggressive synopsis of American happiness” promoted in films,
soap operas and commercials recalls to Ugrešić the images of Eastern European
“totalitarian happiness, images of parades, happy masses acting as a collective body” (73,
74). Her subsequent epiphany sounds paradoxical and exaggerated, but effectively
highlights the common characteristics of the two worlds: “America has imposed the
dictatorship of happiness” (74).
Ugrešić does not ultimately opt for any of these discourses—both the discourse of
globalization and the Croatian nationalist discourse (on its way to global Westernization)
seek to streamline behavior into “acceptable” models. In Croatia, Ugrešić’s writing is
expected to be “Croatian,” while in the West, Ugrešić’s writing is expected to be
“ethnic,” i.e., “Balkan” or “Eastern European.” This double bind gives credence to
Benedict Anderson’s critique of what we call global cosmopolitanism: in his view,
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“diasporic,” “transnational” identity is “at bottom, simply an extension of a census-style,
identitarian conception of ethnicity.” To borrow Anderson’s phrase, wherever Ugrešić
“happens to end up,” she remains a “countable” Croatian (131). This tendency to focus
on Ugrešić’s ethnic identity, in Croatia, or ethnic stereotype, abroad, has indeed graced
numerous writings about her work. In 1992, Croatian magazine Globus published an
attack on Ugrešić and a number of other Croatian authors for attending a conference in
Rio de Janeiro instead of helping the national cause. The article declared that the authors
had “serious problems with their own ethnical [sic], ethical, human, intellectual and
political identity” (qtd. in Stef Jansen 87). The authors’ ethnic identity took precedence
over the analysis of any (other) aspects of their texts.
In a parallel example from Western academia, Ugrešić’s physical appearance as a
symbol of an ethnic stereotype found its way into Ellen Spitz’s conclusion to an article
about Ugrešić’s work. Echoing Ugrešić’s description of the “wild-eyed” Balkans in
American media, Ellen Spitz writes, “The stranger’s hair is unruly, her facial skin creased
with worry, her motley garb unkempt. Perhaps she needs just a warm smile” (153). Spitz
admits that the “stranger” has made her feel uncomfortable, acknowledging her own
tendency to fear the “other”: Ugrešić appeared to her as “the demonic Mr Hyde, or that
horrifying portrait of Dorian Gray” (154). Importantly, in Spitz’s article, Ugrešić’s
Orientalist image nevertheless becomes a necessary appendage to an analysis of her
writing.17
17
Some western writing about Zizek takes a similar approach, especially in semi-academic, semi-popular
magazines such as The New Yorker, for instance. Discussions of Zizek’s philosophy are often not only
overtly sensationalist (Zizek “transgresses” the limits of acceptable academic discourse or outrages
audiences with “radical” statements) but also accompanied by a reference to his exotically bearded, bearish
and blue-jeaned appearance.
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Ugrešić’s strategy in Have a Nice Day, therefore, is to avoid any clear ethnic
categorization. She refers to herself as a “dissident” whether talking about her
experiences in the United States, Holland, Croatia, or communist Yugoslavia. At the
same time, her attempt to reconstruct the Yugoslavia that is being dismembered in a civil
war is the project of redeeming the relevance of the past in the context of the present: the
wars do not affect only “Moslems,” or “Croats,” or “Serbs,” but also the people who
would not be streamlined into “sheepfolds” of nationality, whose politics is assumed to
be dead and thus becomes marginalized, both through local and global interventions.
Against Pater/Patria: Aleksandar Hemon’s Sarajevo Blues
The novel Nowhere Man by a Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon
approaches the wars in Yugoslavia primarily as the tragedy of dissolution of old social
identities and fabrics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In a recent interview, Hemon wonders
if the “Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature adequately responded to the experience of war
and genocide if it considers itself a monolithic cultural unit.” He thinks that the matter of
dealing with the war’s legacies is a question of different generational responses. While
the “older generations are fully immersed in national self-pity,” the younger generation
(exemplified by authors Miljenko Jergovic and Semezdin Mehmedinovic) seems more
“prepared to confront the disasters of war and identity breakdown . . . This is because
they can understand the war not as a war of ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ not as a war between two
(or three) ethnic identities with transcendental historical essences but as a war that
destroys old and engenders new identities” (Igor Lasić, “Kulturom protiv gena”).18
18
Translated from the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian by the author.
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In Nowhere Man, which builds substantially around the 1980s’ Sarajevo and its
youth culture, this younger generation which undergoes a dissolution and transformation
of identity in the civil wars that follow is dramatized through the characters of Jozef
Pronek and his childhood friends. Sarajevo as its 1980s’ youth culture is an urban space
written primarily through an unprecedented flourishing of domestic rock and pop bands,
subversive comedy shows and playful detournement of official communist ideological
clichés. This narrative and thematic gesture overtly extracts Sarajevo from a host of
popular discourses in the wake of its destruction. Not only does it consistently preclude
the casting of its history as a multicultural utopia which nevertheless contains the hidden
nationalist seeds of its own destruction, but it also resists its postwar image as a “capital
of victimhood” by failing to sentimentalize the past, now assumed to be irretrievably lost.
In Hemon, Sarajevo’s destruction in the 1990s’ wars cannot be retrospectively traced to
either lurking ancient ethnic hatreds among Serbs, Croats and Moslems or to an
inexplicable corruption of multicultural tolerance and mutual respect among Serbs,
Croats and Moslems (or people embodying several ethnic heritages). It is not discussed in
those terms; the coordinates of national or religious identification remain absent; the
“three entities” simply aren’t. Hemon’s novel does not offer, therefore, a cause and effect
narrative that would act as a rationalization of the war, an explanation of why the war
happened.
Rather, the war is seen as an event, in a Badouian or Derridean sense, but with a
more negative connotation: as something that does not depend on preexisting conditions,
but happens unexpectedly and without anticipation. Alain Badiou describes the “event”
as what takes place being “absolutely detached from, or unrelated to, all the rules of the
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situation”; for Jacques Derrida, the “event” becomes a “singularity, an alterity that cannot
be anticipated” (Badiou 68; Derrida, Specters of Marx, 65). For Hemon, a possible
explanation, albeit insufficient, endlessly flawed and deferred throughout the novel—
after all, the specter of war, of the event-to-come, “cannot be awaited as such, or
recognized in advance”—lies in the aforementioned generation rift (Derrida, Specters of
Marx, 65). The older generations are prepared for an inter-ethnic war by, paradoxically,
former Yugoslavia’s patriotic discourses which promote a glorification of the army and
an aggressive masculinity, supposed to protect ethnic “brotherhood and unity.” The
younger generations, to whom Jozef Pronek belongs, remain alienated from patria, its
army, as well as its ideal of masculinity, although these keep interpellating them as they
persistently cut to the core of social relationships. Pronek and his peers are not good sons
to either their “fathers” or their “fatherland,” embodying a union between the apparently
contradictory systems of patronizing patriarchy and independent masculinity.
Hemon follows Pronek through a “global” narrative which opens in Chicago,
where an unnamed Bosnian refugee narrator recognizes Pronek in an ESL class, flashes
back to Pronek’s childhood and youth in pre-war Sarajevo, then switches to Pronek’s
adventures in Ukraine, initial refuge from the war, narrated by an American of Ukranian
descent Victor Plavchuk and ends with Pronek’s cruising through a number of temporary
jobs in present-day Chicago. This allows Hemon to demystify the conflict in Bosnia as an
exceptional global event. Rather, it is considered alongside the war in Rwanda and even
haunts the benevolent and controlled industrial destruction of Chicago: in the first section
of the novel, titled “Passover,” Chicago comes across as an ominous urban space,
informed by a lack of intimacy, transitoriness, evictions, joblessness and various
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intimations of cruelty and violence. Not only is Bosnian violence not exceptional in the
context of concurrent global events, but its history—told through Pronek’s personal
history—resists the essentializing clichés about Bosnia’s alternating ethnic coexistence
and antagonism, compounded by iron-hand communism.
As almost a slap in the face of such historical reifications, Hemon’s narrator
proclaims, “Sarajevo in the eighties was a beautiful place to be young—I know because I
was young then . . . . The boys were handsome, the girls beautiful, the sports teams
successful, the streets felt as soft as a Persian carpet and the Winter Olympics made
everyone feel that we were at the center of the world” (49). The narrative is self-reflexive
here, hinting that what ensues is not the anticipated (hi)story of Sarajevo and therefore
forces the reader to open up to the “event” of an alternate historiography. If one includes
“only the important events” of life,” the “fireworks of universal experiences, the roller
coaster rides of sympathy and judgment,” one “denies the real substance of life: the
ephemera, the nethermoments, much too small to be recorded” (41).
Pronek’s life in 1980s’ Sarajevo is told through such a mix of “important events”
and “ephemera,” the “real substance” of his life existing alongside with and far exceeding
the “official” historical events. This coexistence rather than appropriation, or sublation,
between the official and unofficial lives particularly becomes evident in Hemon’s
treatment of the state ideology of communism, which the 1980s’ youth culture can
recognize and poke fun at, but by which it is not necessarily threatened. The narrative
continually highlights communist clichés promoted institutionally in schools, workplaces,
the army: on the first day of school, Pronek “learned that Nature was everything that
surrounded them; that Tito was president; that the most important thing in our society
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was preserving brotherhood and unity” (37). The slogan of “preserving brotherhood and
unity” is repeated throughout the novel, most strikingly when Pronek begins the
compulsory military service with the Yugoslav army. There is a certain cyclical boredom
of ideological regurgitation, exemplified by the annual rituals of celebrating “Tito’s
birthday and other important dates from the proud history of socialist struggle and selfmanagement. The school choir sang appropriate songs about miners striking and dying
for freedom, about the revolution akin to a steely locomotive” (38). And yet, these clichés
invest the past with a certain sense of security, or familiar routine, as much as the
repetition of the phrase “brotherhood and unity” highlights its own disappearance in the
context of the Bosnian war.
From the perspective of Pronek and the generation growing up in the 1980s’
Sarajevo, such slogans are less an imposition than a stuffy ritual to be observed: it is a
well-known secret that many do not believe in it, yet they pay it homage as it does not
significantly contradict the practices of everyday life. For instance, Tito’s death in 1980
is more a nuisance for Pronek than an earth-shattering political event, since Pronek’s
budding rock band’s show, scheduled on the day of Tito’s death, has to be cancelled:
Pronek becomes “mad at Tito and his selfish mortality” (44). In parallel, a concert
celebration of a Party-congress anniversary during Pronek’s tenure in the army does not
elicit a virulent condemnation of the brainwashed orchestra “performing a song about the
people’s joyful spirit”; rather, the narrative zeroes in on Pronek’s wistfulness, his
jealousy of the guitar player—he misses his Sarajevo band (61). What emerges in
Hemon’s narrative is not so much an image of oppressive, iron-hand communism, but of
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a rather ridiculous, bankrupt, ritualistic propaganda, which is breaking slowly along the
interstices of the aforementioned generation gap.
Pronek’s parents, embodying the older generation of Yugoslav socialists, are not
quite as well-equipped as their son with the tools of recognizing the bankruptcy of
propaganda: they believe in the benevolence of the army, in “brotherhood and unity,” in
the wonders of socialism and yet it is clear that they have been happy in this system, so
these are not wholly empty clichés. The distance between the old-guard Yugoslavs and
the emergent cosmopolitan youth culture is exemplified by the parents’ suspicious
attitude toward Pronek’s infatuation with English language and British/American music,
to them the tools of capitalist “spies.” And yet Pronek’s study of English is not quite a
reaction against the oppressive, insular communist regime: rather, it is precisely the
regime that encourages this cosmopolitanism, as Pronek takes English lessons in the
“Pioneer Center Blagoje Parovic,” where he meets his future best friend Mirza (36).
In a sense, the regime is also indirectly responsible for an actual “brotherhood and
unity” developing across former Yugoslavia, not so much because of official institutional
policies, but because of the experience of contact and travel, of friendship and love affairs
that far exceed what the system aims to achieve—in a way beating it at its own game. It
is this experience of mixing, of the possibility of communication across ethnic—or
Yugoslav republic—boundaries, that is also lost in the 1990s’ war, as we have also seen
in Dubravka Ugrešić. The unnamed narrator of the “Passover” section, upon reading the
“Defenses Collapse in Gorazde” headline in a Chicago newspaper, can only associate the
town with spending the “summer at a seaside resort for Tito’s pioneers and [falling] in
love with a girl from Gorazde. Her name was Emina and she taught me to kiss using my
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tongue” (13). From the perspective of this “ephemeral” experience of “brotherhood and
unity,” it becomes virtually impossible to understand the tragedy of Gorazde in 1994, the
mass murder of its Moslem population.
Such moments continually puncture the narrative of Pronek’s childhood and are
considered in a double exposure, echoing Ugrešić and highlighting the contrast between
the absence of identity politics and its ontological—and ontologizing—importance in the
war. In a Croatian seaside resort, Pronek falls in love with Suzana, a girl from Belgrade;
in Sarajevo’s café “Nostalgija” Pronek becomes infatuated with Sabina, whose
participation in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics is contrasted with her loss
of legs in a 1993 breadline shelling. The memory of an unnamed girl’s crescent-moonshaped birthmark is juxtaposed with the memory of her death by a shell in 1993. The
possibility of contact, here exemplified by love affairs and friendship, is closed off,
abruptly, by the very imagery of war and its act of ethnic categorization, of discursive
enclosure. The gesture of ethnic naming that will take place in the war is ostensibly
absent from Hemon’s Nowhere Man: although a local might easily guess, at least partly,
someone’s ethnic identity from names such as Dusko (Pronek’s father’s best friend),
Mirza, Emina, Suzana, or Sabina, the very refusal by the narrative to name something so
obvious now performs the “brotherhood and unity” that is facilitated by, but far surpasses,
the official ideology. Throughout the novel, Pronek equally refuses to name himself, to
declare his identity to either locals or to Americans in Chicago: whenever he is asked if
he is Serbian, Moslem or Croatian, he simply answers that he is the “Bosnian.”
This “Bosnian,” or more specifically, “Sarajevan” identity, is associated with the
flourishing of an urban youth culture in the 1980s, bringing with itself a certain
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cosmopolitanism and liberalization to Yugoslavia although, as we have seen, not
necessarily to pose a radical challenge to official socialist ideology or to “Yugoslavia” as
an idea. Hemon comments on a phenomenon that in fact contains significant theoretical
potential in terms of exploring both the decline of and lost potential for reform of the
Yugoslav—and global—socialist paradigm. Implying that this cultural development
carried utopian potential, Slavoj Žižek stresses that it is ironic a fratricidal war took place
in Bosnia of all places, since it “was the center of rock and pop culture, was . . . the
republic of Yugoslavia where rock music was by far the strongest” (“Human Rights and
its Discontents”). Pronek’s keen interest in the domestic and international music scene,
especially his long-standing affair with the Beatles, after whom he names his own band—
significantly in his own language, Bube—uncannily invokes the trajectory of rock and
pop music in Bosnia.
In his discussion of the Yugoslav music scene legacy which finds its way into Emir
Kusturica’s 1990s’ films, Stathis Gourgouris dwells in some detail on the phenomenon of
Bosnia’s Bijelo Dugme, a band dubbed “the Beatles of Yugoslavia” (“Hypnosis and
Critique,” in Balkan as Metaphor 336). Like Pronek’s bands, first Bube which draws on
the British rock culture of the 1960s and 1970s and later Blind Jozef Pronek and the Dead
Souls, which is inspired by American blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson and others, Bijelo
Dugme drew on and appropriated a number of Western music forms: glam rock, heavy
metal, new wave, mainstream rock and pop. Gourgouris argues that the bands like Bijelo
Dugme opposed the communist regime by making such controversial crossovers into
Western music, but without unquestioningly adopting and mimicking American or
British forms. He is quite right in claiming that Bijelo Dugme’s frontman, Göran
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Bregovic, somewhat outrageously “Balkanizes American pop culture,” by “incorporating
local (Bosnian) folk elements into the material” (340, 336).
In a similar way, Hemon casts Pronek and his posse’s affair with the Beatles, for
instance, as an ironic, tongue-in-cheek homage to the “great band,” highlighting the
cultural hybridity and incongruity of English and Bosnian locales: imagining themselves
to be John, Paul, George and Ringo, they design an album cover which is to feature an
aerial shot of Sarajevo, “with four stars sparkling in the four different parts of town:
Cengic Vila, Bas Carsija, Kosevo, Bistrik” (43). Thus affirming their symbolic allegiance
to the urban space and culture of Sarajevo, they also season American blues notes with a
Bosnian folk song form, Sevdalinke, which, like blues, portrays “a feeling of pleasant
soul pain, when you are at peace with your woeful life, which allows you to enjoy this
very moment with abandon” (49).
I would argue that this specifically playful, ironic pastiche of Bosnian/Yugoslav
folk elements and Western music forms marks a politically and culturally significant
vision of “Yugoslavia” engendered through the 1980s’ youth culture: one that can open
up to the West without the danger of being submerged in its cultural exports, one that can
pay homage to the various Yugoslav folk forms without fetishizing them as expressions
of a national(ist) “essence.” In that respect, this culture, albeit critical of the old
communist paradigm—exemplified by Pronek’s parents xenophobia and perpetuation of
a superseded, ritualistic propaganda—is not necessarily opposed to the idea of a socialist
Yugoslavia as such, but rather largely emerges from its multicultural space, from its
ideology and aims to reform it rather than abolish it. In this respect, the antagonism that
Gourgouris posits between the Yugoslav rock scene and official regime is exaggerated:
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since the Yugoslav rock culture, including Bijelo Dugme, was “thoroughly committed to
absorbing an aesthetic attributed to the ‘enemy’” and became a “fully fledged genre of
resistance,” the fact that Bijelo Dugme is now “spearheading the current ‘Yugonostalgia’
fashion” can only be read as paradoxical and ironic (337–41).
Resistance to what, one might ask? What is there to be “resisted” and who is this
“enemy” when official Yugoslavia was increasing its welcome to a Western cultural
aesthetic? Rather, another argument in Gourgouris seems to do more justice to this
complex process of ideological, aesthetic restructuring in the 1980s: he describes this
rock culture as one that “flourished by profoundly epitomizing Yugoslavia against the
state’s monopoly of signification” (338). This utopian gesture of coopting the
signification of the project that is Yugoslavia from a stuffy, imaginatively depleted
regime is evident in other artistic and music movements across Yugoslavia that originated
in the 1980s, perhaps most directly in the work of Slovenia’s Laibach and the NSK
collective.19
Hemon’s novel, in a sense, performs a similar utopian gesture, trying to preserve
this particular aesthetic from what became a fetishization of folkloric forms in the early
1990s, enshrining a nationalist aesthetic that underwrote the inter-ethnic wars to come.
As Gourgouris notes, Bijelo Dugme’s intensifying folklorization in the late 1980s with
the goal of deconstructing, or ridiculing increasing nationalism, coincided with an
increasing nationalist use of folk music, so that their anti-war song, “Spit and sing, my
Yugoslavia!” was coopted by the nationalist, pro-Milosevic demonstrations in Belgrade
19
For instance, in the documentary Laibach: A Film from Slovenia, the band members argue that they
continue the specifically modernist, utopian project that was Yugoslavia, which has since symbolically and
physically died.
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(337). Significantly, Jozef Pronek also reads Bijelo Dugme’s folklorization as a
straightforward betrayal and contribution to this emergent nationalist aesthetic—unnamed
in Nowhere Man, but clearly looming on the horizon. Right before the war starts, Pronek
writes a review of the new Bijelo Dugme album for a student newspaper, describing it as
“the lowest form of Balkan peasanthood hidden under the gingerbread veneer of hard
rock stolen from the stadiums of America” (67). This glorification, as Pronek sees it, of
“Balkanness” coincides with increasing ethnic differentiation, here embodied by
affirmative action policies: in the same paragraph, we learn that Pronek’s father had been
demoted at work because “new people were coming, their ethnicity their only
qualification” (67).
The ensuing ethnic conflicts not only spell the demise of utopian urban youth
cultures across Yugoslavia, but also capitalize on the macho-patriarchal paradigm
embedded in Yugoslavia’s communist institutions, but both preceding and existing
outside of them. In other words, the ideal of aggressive masculinity, while encouraged by
the cult of the army and by paternalism of the state and its supreme leader, Marshal Tito,
is not limited to any particular ethnicity, locale, or institution: it underlies family
relations, friendships and love affairs alike.20 Intimations of violence in interpersonal
relationships and the need to prove one’s manhood are ubiquitous: the frequent childhood
fights between boys in Pronek’s neighborhood (especially between Sarajevans and
newcomers) are echoed in the “actual” war, where Mirza, writing a letter to Pronek in
20
This perspective also informs Hemon’s recent short story “Love and Obstacles” published in The New
Yorker of Nov. 28, 2005. As former Yugoslavia, spanning Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia, is mapped through
a teenage protagonist’s train ride, intimations of violence and misogyny come up in the conversation
between two former prisoners, with Serbian and Bosnian accents respectively, sharing the compartment
with the boy.
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Chicago from the Bosnian trenches, is reminded of “boys who build the fortress and fight
other boys” (132).
Mirza also tells a story of a Sarajevo sniper who kills a man and a woman whose
lives he had initially spared because they were in love; because the woman beckons the
man to come to him one day instead of the reverse, he kills him: “if woman can tell him
what he must do, he cannot live” (132). This misogynist arrangement of relationships
also informs Pronek’s parents’ marriage—the mother is frequently silent, almost nonexistent, while the father, who is prone to assuming “a karate fighting stance—a memory
of his days in the police school deeply inscribed in his body,” bonds with his son by
telling him gory stories full of murder and violence that he heard on the job (53). It is
thus profoundly ironic that Mirza ends up fighting in a war whose ideology of violence
he has always opposed—after their compulsory service in the Yugoslav People’s Army
before the war, both Mirza and Pronek come to the conclusion that “only an idiot can
enjoy the army,” its “perpetual humiliation,” brainwashing, implicit homophobia and
misogyny (60–62).
Nowhere Man dramatizes a Yugoslav generation that could not identify with the
war and the culture that (potentially) brought it about, with the particularly masculinist
mythology that underlay both the communist apparatus and the nationalist euphorias. As
in Ugrešić, there is a potential for a “Yugoslavia” which subverts, exceeds and exists
alongside with official communist propaganda; Hemon traces this utopian possibility in
the Yugoslav urban cultural milieu that emerges in the 1980s, both Yugoslavia’s high
point and its greatest victim, its last flourish. There is a sense of political and cultural
experimentation and open-endedness that could replace, invigorate the superseded
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ideological clichés. The society is on the cusp of something new, something to come—
and what comes in the future, therefore, is not the only possibility. The ethnic wars, the
ontology of identity, forecloses this type of experimentation, permanently labeling
Sarajevo as the new Auschwitz, the image that Hemon’s narrative attempts to complicate.
CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSION
I end this work by looking at narratives that might figure as sites of resistance to
the “end of history” thesis, in case of (Eastern) Europe, to a belief in its teleological
emancipation and end of all trouble upon becoming EU-nionized. Parallel with the
strengthening of the European Union and especially since the downfall of the Berlin
Wall, there has been a proliferation of films that consider—and recreate, as it were—
Europe’s “imagined community,” to borrow Benedict Anderson’s concept, on a level that
both intersects with and undermines official EU discourses. A turn toward film here is
not a simple question of genre, although, arguably, filmic narratives frequently cut across
national boundaries more easily than national literature or television shows, potentially
fostering a different ethics of intercultural, transnational communication, a more radical
model of European collectivity than that offered by the EU. The films that I have in mind
also carry potential as an archive in Jacques Derrida’s sense, as a reproduction, repetition
of cultural memory which always opens up to the future: “the question of the future itself
. . . of a promise and of a responsibility to tomorrow” (Archive Fever 36). The archive
that arises through the films speaking to both East and West on an equal footing, carrying
the memory of Europe’s divisions, as well as Europe’s utopian desires, opens up the
question of Europe’s future, of the “to come” or “as if” rather than “as is.”
I limit my discussion to three films in particular which perform this opening toward
a transnational dialogue and a collectivization of interests beyond simple economic or
political cooperation (a cooperation which, in the neoliberal capitalist models that have
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come to dominate the EU, often marginalize large segments of semi- or non-European
populations). Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye, Lenin!, Emir Kusturica’s Underground and
Theo Angelopoulos Eternity and a Day also imagine instances of social solidarity which
complicate both racist exclusions of Europe’s “others” from its benefits and liberal
identity politics which underpins official multiculturalism. Goodbye, Lenin! comments on
former East Germany’s climate of Ostalgie by both unmasking as false and resuscitating
the (dubiously) utopian character of the country’s former social arrangement. Its
“recreation” of GDR communism does not merely lead to a realization of the former
regime’s political bankruptcy, therefore, but also revives a model of communist
solidarity, a critical attitude toward labor exploitation and an antinationalist Germany
which is in stark contrast with what arrives after the Berlin Wall, in Germany, as well as
in the rest of formerly communist Eastern Europe.
Underground, in turn, argues against the sometimes rigid identitarian politics that
characterizes conservative, as well as liberal, multicultural models increasingly taking
hold over Europe, retrieving a model of social communication which views national,
cultural, etc. identity as fluid and open and focusing on relations among human
singularities rather than on established “groups” with established “differences”—a
project particularly important in light of popular discourses explaining the 1990s’
Yugoslav wars as those between ethnic and religious “groups” with irreconcilable
“differences.” Importantly, Underground links this alternative type of collective
organization with the communist experiment that was former Yugoslavia. Finally,
Eternity and a Day undermines the floating West-East hierarchies by imagining the
possibility of Western European opening toward an Eastern European “other” with a
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sense of ethical humility, of responsibility which exceeds economic or political
patronization and by gesturing toward the past potential of leftist politics in non-Eastern
Europe.
Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! opens up with East German protests against
the Berlin Wall in 1989, causing Christiane, a prominent party member, schoolteacher
and single mother with two children, to collapse into a coma when she sees her son Alex
beaten by the policemen during the demonstrations. Alex, from whose perspective the
story is told, attempts to preserve, or “rebuild,” the East German landscape for his mother
after she wakes up from the coma, judging that her confrontation with what he jokingly
calls “the triumph of capitalism” after the downfall of the Wall may cost her another
heart attack. Alex's attempt to simulate the East German state proclaimed to be dead
consists in a careful preservation of East German commodities, a re-creation of the
official news programs and revival of the ideological accoutrements of the regime, such
as the ever-present pioneers or his mother's letters to the textile industry in the interest of
the people, of social justice. This assemblage, in effect, revives the East Germany that
would no doubt appeal to its citizens' sense of a shared past—something they could
recognize, identify with, or laugh at. But while Alex revives these “real” practices of
everyday life, he also makes it clear that the East Germany he puts together for his
mother is the one he “might have wished for,” implying that this image of Germany is but
an illusion (Goodbye, Lenin!).
In a sense, it can be said that the narrative that Alex creates is “impossible,” and as
such, is mocked by its various betrayals—by what we call “reality,” placing a clear
dividing line. This way of reading Ostalgie also characterizes Charity Scribner’s recent
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study Requiem for Communism, where she says that an assemblage or musealization of
various communist paraphernalia can help us mourn the communist past once and for all,
engaging in a “tender rejection” of this political illusion, rather than nurture a
“fetishization of a diseased past” which can only lead to melancholy and political
paralysis (304). But Goodbye, Lenin! undermines this dualism—and unstated hierarchy—
between a healthy rejection through mourning and an unhealthy fixation through
melancholy. Alex’s gesture of recreating GDR in all its quasi-utopian glory both does and
does not lay the old state to rest through mourning; it is not just about acknowledging that
GDR was fake, but rather about thinking what it “should have been,” opening up the “as
if” discourse which indirectly criticizes the past regime at the same time as it acquires a
new, dynamic meaning in altered circumstances. The recreated East Germany that doesn't
exist outside of Alex’s mother's room becomes his “little oasis of peace” from the
changes that take place, the only place where Alex can rest and sleep (Goodbye, Lenin!).
Thus providing a symbolic anchor of stability, this oasis is also a repository of the still
existing past practices, a nostalgia for the familiar that helps Alex confront the alien
world of the Deutsch Mark and capital.
Alex sarcastically comments on the changes that take place post-1989, playfully
juxtaposing the idealistic rhetoric of Western “freedom” and “individual
entrepreneurship” to the new experiences of his family. Alex comments that East
Germany has adopted a new “culture” as he goes to a video store renting and showing
pornographic movies; this point becomes especially significant when one of his older
neighbors complains about the new policies that have scrapped certain cultural programs
that used to be on television. In the new Germany, Alex's sister Arianne becomes “free”
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to flunk out of an economic theory degree at the university to work at the shiny new
Burger King, with its dubious rewards such as the “employer of the month” title she
earns. Following the restructuring of the old economic system, there is widespread
unemployment and even Alex loses his old job. He is upset with his sister for leaving
school, as well as for falling in love with a former “class enemy,” a West German named
Rainer, whom Alex resents because he has emigrated to the East to live on the cheap. As
East Germany frantically tries to catch up with its more developed and glossy twin, Alex
comments that life has become much faster and Christiane, unaware of the changes,
wonders why Alex is much more tired after coming home from his new job than he used
to be after the old one.
As the film progresses, it becomes clear that the recreation of East Germany is
crucial to not so much Christiane as to Alex, a member of the young generation who
should be rejoicing at the downfall of the stuffy old regime, at the freedoms of the new
one. Alex continues, against the odds, his mother's utopian spirit and social engagement
that he earlier rejected; for instance, he praises her letters to the textile industry for
“offering constructive criticism to improve conditions in society” (Goodbye, Lenin!). In
his final news production, on the eve of the German unification which significantly
coincides with Christiane’s death, Alex features a famous GDR astronaut Sigmund Jahn
look-alike. The fake Jahn announces his “succession” of Erich Honecker to the post of
prime minister and states, “socialism is about reaching out to others and living with them;
it is not only dreaming of a better world but making it happen”; he concludes, “ideals we
believe in continue to inspire people around the world.”
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In the context of the disillusionment that the new state brings, this gesture of
repetition constitutes neither a melancholic obsession with the past nor a clean rejection
of the past through mourning, but rather an archiving of cultural memory in Derrida’s
sense, always-already at the site of its destruction, the memory whose meaning we will
only understand in the future-to-come, one that itself keeps the future open. This gesture
of repetition emerges in another scene in Goodbye, Lenin!, where a disembodied statue of
Lenin is transported through Berlin in the post-Wall gesture of de-monumentalizing
communism, of symbolically destroying the possibility of memory through removing
communism’s material traces—“repeating,” as well, a similar scene in Angelopoulos’
Ulysses’ Gaze, where a giant bust of Lenin is transported on a barge traveling upstream
on the Danube. The statue is a reminder of the ossification of a communist impulse in the
form of cult personality, of paralysis through an impasse of political imagination. And
yet, its disembodiment itself potentially recontextualizes it, interrupting its ossified
meaning, opening up toward its redefinition in the future—perhaps with an emancipatory
promise, but certainly with an uncertain destiny.
These narratives’ preservation of the (material, symbolic) memory of communism
at the very site of its destruction—recording the statue of Lenin at the very moment that
the statue is deposed, so to speak—also registers the very process of what Claudia
Sadowski-Smith calls the “conservative politics of amnesia” which she claims has been
implemented in East Germany and elsewhere in Eastern Europe since 1989 (121).1
Against this “discrediting of memory,” which means that “socialism could be associated
1
This is not to claim that Lenin’s statues are among the most positive legacies of communism which need
to be preserved, quite the opposite, but rather that this politics of erasing the memory of communism was
manifested, among other things, in erasing all of its visible signs, including the Berlin wall, statues of
communist ideologues, hymns, flags, street names, etc.
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exclusively with the label of totalitarianism,” Sadowski-Smith stresses the importance of
narratives that rescue certain utopian potentialities of communist societies, along with
their sense of egalitarianism, justice, strong interpersonal relationships and fluidity of
social hierarchies (121, 124).
Achieving a similar political effect as Goodbye, Lenin!, Emir Kusturica’s
Underground revives the fluidity of social and national identification, solidarity of
interpersonal relationships and an anti-nationalist politics that is associated with the
memory of former Yugoslavia. Underground, like Goodbye, Lenin!, highlights the
disconnect between an idealized portrayal of communist heroes and the “reality” of
political corruption. At stake is not only the gradual betrayal of such ideals and the
abandonment of communist ideology and/or practices, but also an abandonment of the
multi-ethnic, Yugoslav idea, which is inseparable from the communist era. The film
traces the different paths, from World War II onwards, of two communist revolutionaries
fighting Nazism, Marko and Blacky. When Blacky becomes Gestapo’s main target, he
decides to go “underground” to wait for the right moment to return, depending on
Marko's protection. Seizing the opportunity to seduce Blacky's wife Natalija, however,
Marko literally keeps Blacky, his family and a number of war refugees underground, in
the basement of his house, for the next twenty years, perpetually delaying their return by
invoking comrade Tito's orders and continuing Nazi victories and brutalities. During this
time, which follows the postwar communist takeover, Marko rises in the party ranks,
turning into a flat, lifeless, but well-paid bureaucrat, while Blacky, incredibly, remains a
revolutionary at heart, still believing in the communist idea and persisting in his loyalty
to comrade Tito—and comrade Marko.
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Marko is almost a stand-in for that enlightened Yugoslav dictator, Tito, as he
manages to instill in the people living underground the idea of a “permanent revolution,”
state of emergency and scarcity, in the name of which they foster solidarity and engage in
hard work, while Marko, like Tito and the assorted Party cronies, lives in luxury. This
disconnect between naivete and opportunism seemingly casts the underground people as
ignorant, fanatic followers and Marko as an average pragmatic politician. But the film
complicates such a reading, as Blacky’s underground existence and his unabated idealism
haunt Marko's descent into opportunism. In a sense, Blacky is almost literally “buried,”
yet revived on the ground as a fallen communist hero, thus occupying a truly ghostly
position, but as a ghost who refuses to die, who maintains “real” idealism as opposed to
the commodified idealism reflected in the monuments to heroes, which the regime itself
prefers.2 Marko and Natalija eventually recognize that their lives have become an easy
repetition of bureaucratic stereotypes, full of deadweight; faced with this realization, they
decide that they can no longer “live in the country of liars and murderers,” blow up the
house, releasing the underground people from virtual captivity and disappearing from
Tito's Yugoslavia (Underground).
This coincides with the very moment that Tito’s Yugoslavia itself disappears. It is
in this context that we encounter Blacky again and again in a war, but this time in
Yugoslav civil wars following the downfall of communism. We also encounter Marko
and Natalija who adjust their opportunism to the new situation, becoming “multicultural”
war profiteers who trade with Croat, Moslem and Serb armed forces alike. Blacky,
2
Kusturica plays with communist monumentalization too — the uncovering of Blacky’s statue in front of
Party sycophants and trained student pioneers becomes the ultimate instance of Marko’s betrayal of the
revolution, of its domestication.
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significantly, does not adapt: he maintains a fidelity to his former ideals, which seem
jarringly old-fashioned. He confuses UN officials when he asks them to call him
“comrade” instead of “sir” and tells them that he is fighting “fascists.” While this implies
that Blacky is out of touch with reality and does not know what war he is fighting, I
suggest reading it as a utopian repetition of the communist, as well as the Yugoslav idea
under different conditions, as the only ethical position in the war. Serbian and Croatian
nationalists, as well as the war profiteers, all of whom Blacky's army captures, are in a
sense “fascist,” and his declaration to the UN official that his only superior is “his
country” becomes Kusturica's gesture of mourning for the socialist Yugoslavia dying at
the hands of local nationalists, the international community and profiteering
businessmen—after it has already been betrayed by Party bigwigs like Marko.
This repetition haunts the final scene of the movie—frequently praised as the most
poignant—where all the dead and the undead protagonists of the film, all the friends and
enemies, “revive” and congregate on an anonymous river bank, for a symbolic repetition
of Blacky’s son’s wedding that has already taken place “underground.” Blacky, Marko
and Natalija are again, momentarily, friends, Marko saying “let bygones be bygones,”
and Blacky replying that he “can forgive but not forget” (Underground). In the film’s
epilogue, Marko’s brother Ivan turns to the camera and says, “Here we built new houses
. . . with gates wide open for dear guests. With pain, sorrow and happiness, we'll
remember our country as we tell our children stories that sound like fairytales: once upon
the time there was a country” (Underground). But the disappearance of a country can
never be definitive; the inheritance that is Yugoslavia is this utopian community in the
final scene, with its possibility of communication in spite of—or maybe because of—the
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antagonism, sidestepping the identity politics of ethnicity, religion and class. This is also
expressed in the failure to definitively name the river bank which at the very end breaks
off and floats away, with all the protagonists rejoicing on it, the failure to give an identity
to the community, the land, or the politics.
Throughout the film the various characters—speaking with Serbian, Bosnian,
Croatian accents, although without being clearly marked (or marking themselves) by a
nationality—communicate, fight and then communicate again. Many critics of
Kusturica’s films, frequently critics from former Yugoslavia and the Balkans, have
interpreted this as Kusturica’s contribution to the Western exoticization of “wild Balkan
peoples” who are seemingly multicultural and get along but can inexplicably jump at
each other’s throats the next moment.3 This exoticization is closely linked with
entrenched stereotypes about Serbs, Croats and others articulated during the Yugoslav
civil wars, which cast them as exemplars of the Balkan “tinderbox,” ethnic groups whose
fragile coexistence is always-already threatened by irreconcilable differences.
And yet, this inherent violence is also somehow endearing, so Kusturica is here
faulted for a humorous, absurdist approach to ethnic conflict, which implies that the
Balkan “types” are indeed violent, but that this also means they have more passion, color
and overall jois de vivre than boring, civilized Europeans. However, such readings do not
do justice to the complexity of the narrative in Underground, especially as the film seems
to deliberately serve up Western stereotypes to the West itself only to subvert the politics
of ethnic, religious, etc. identity and emphasize renewed communication and friendship
regardless of the history of supposed irreconcilable differences. What if another reading
3
For instance, see Slavoj Zizek’s disparaging discussion of Kusturica’s politics and artistic perspective in
the introduction to The Fragile Absolute.
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is possible—what if the politics of friendship, of solidarity with the other, keeps other
markers of one’s identity fluid, open, or ultimately meaningless?
One way to break through the intellectually paralyzing charges of Balkan selfexoticization is to read Underground as a narrative that deconstructs liberal
multiculturalism, that highlights the sharing of a conflictual history, of social antagonism,
not as a gesture that confirms Western stereotypes about the Balkans, but rather as an
admission to a secret from which multiculturalists shy away. Not as a disparagement of
the Balkans per se, but as a commentary on the complacency of Western liberal
multiculturalism. The latter prescribes a get-along group identity politics both without
radically tackling the relations of power between different groups as potential sources of
conflict and, more importantly, without envisioning the possibility of mutual
communication and organization that weakens the rigidity of any one group.
Underground offers former Yugoslavia as the possibility of a community whose
solidarity is predicated upon anti-nationalism and socialist egalitarianism and whose
existence is annulled precisely at the moment that ethnic and religious identity politics,
even in its most liberal, multicultural of guises, takes over.
The film’s ending, however, is promisingly open-ended and so is its final message,
that “this story has no end” (Underground). This utopian open-endedness, the absence of
a limiting, or closing off of a political horizon also characterizes Angelopoulos’ Eternity
and a Day, which in a similarly vicarious way ponders on the fate and meaning of
“Europe” at the close of the twentieth century. Not only is this open-endedness suggested
by the title of the film, but by its very narrative structure as well, which meanders and
changes unexpectedly, precluding any certain denouement for the main character, a
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famous Greek author Alexandre, or for the homeless Albanian boy he befriends. The
narrative ostensibly goes against—interrupts the ontology—of what “should” happen, of
what typically happens to illegal Albanian refugees in a “Western” locale, in this case
Thessaloniki and of what transpires in an encounter between a Greek citizen and an
Albanian non-citizen. It centers on Alexandre who has been diagnosed with a terminal
illness and wanders around Thessaloniki trying to decide whether to enter a hospital or
not; he also wanders in and out of memories of (apparently failed) personal relationships
with friends and family, memories that intersect with implicit reflections on Greece’s
political past, present and future.
Alexandre encounters an Albanian boy who is about to be arrested as an illegal
alien and ends up taking care of him in various ways throughout the film. He not only
rescues the boy from an imminent arrest by offering him a ride in his car, but also
retrieves him after he is abducted by an illegal adoption ring. At one point he decides to
return the boy “home,” and drives him to the Albanian border, but after seeing the
emaciated faces of prospective Albanian immigrants lined along the barbed-wire fence,
decides that exile is better and returns the boy to Thessaloniki. Eternity and a Day builds
this relationship without endowing with more social power either the Greek author or the
Albanian refugee: Alexandre is neither a vigilante citizen identifying illegal aliens “in our
midst,” nor is he merely a good Samaritan taking care of someone less socially
privileged.
Rather, Angelopoulos opens up the possibility of a utopian understanding of
Europe’s inter-ethnic, inter-religious relationships as he breaks the hierarchy between the
recognized citizen and the unrecognized homo sacer. In a sense, Alexandre treats the
335
Albanian boy as a neighbor who occupies the same physical and symbolic space as
himself; it is not that the boy is merely rescued by Alexandre, but that Alexandre himself
is “decentered” as a good Greek citizen and feels himself to be an exile, a foreigner in his
own country. The Albanian boy’s utterances continually change Alexandre’s course of
action, keeping him open to the possibility of fostering a selfless relationship—and it is
this communication that allows for the crossing of a threshold of cultural alienation, that
makes for an unpredictable change in one’s behavior and politics. Having decided to
complete an unfinished poem by a nineteenth-century Greek poet, Alexandre finds
himself depending on the Albanian boy for “his own,” Greek language, for the very
possibility of great Greek literature: in a symbolic repetition of the nineteenth-century
poet’s gesture, the Albanian boy “buys” Greek words from passers-by in an effort to help
Alexandre to “speak” to his own people. In this respect, it is the homo sacer who is a
transmitter of language, a creator of meaning; Alexandre, in the meantime, has trouble
speaking and completing sentences.
In parallel, Greece itself is “decentered” in Alexandre’s musings as the essence of
Europe, in its much vaunted role as a cradle of European civilization. Eternity and a Day
presents Alexandre’s remembrance of the alienation of his personal relationships with a
sense of mourning for not only the lost potential of friendship, but for the lost political
potential in Greece. This is reflected in Alexandre’s friends’ and family’s indifference to
whether the left or right would win the election of 1967, the chaotic indecisiveness of
which resulted in a disastrous right-wing military coup and seven-year dictatorship. In the
film there is a gesture of repetition of this lost potential of the Greek left in a scene
featuring the street demonstrations in which protesters bear red flags; one of them climbs
336
the bus on which Alexandre and the Albanian boy are riding, momentarily taking up the
entire camera frame with the red flag. This nostalgic move—a reflection on what
Greece’s political landscape would have looked like if it hadn’t been for the military
dictatorship, a desire for the “as if”—importantly links Greece to its “inferior,” nonWestern, non-EU(ropean) communist neighbors through a “contagion” with communist
politics. Eternity and a Day stresses Greece’s ethical responsibility to its neighbors—and
the responsibility of treating them as neighbors, with a sense of social egalitarianism—by
situating Greece in a redefined, recontextualized “Europe,” one that admits to its history
of communist movements, military dictatorship, war, or carnage, without foisting these
off on its uncivilized Eastern fringes.
Films such as the ones discussed briefly in this chapter redefine the concept of
Europe, the hierarchy between Western and Eastern Europe, as well as between European
and non-European others. Clearly this is not merely the question of genre and there are
other modes of intercultural communication that effectively redefine the concept of
“Europe” (or broadly, the “West”) but the urgency with which recent films have taken up
this role could be a barometer of the other changes to come. Filmic and other artistic and
cultural narratives figure as rallying sites around which resistance against political
disenfranchisement, racist antagonism, or economic exploitation can be organized. At the
same time that they delve into the complexity of racial or ethnic prejudice and its
accompanying economic aspect (Code Inconnu, Time of the Wolf, Lila Says), or express
dissatisfaction with economic neoliberalist greed and accompanying social conservatism
(The Edukators, Goodbye, Lenin!) they also envisage potential alternatives to European
social arrangements, including a utopian move toward a politics of friendship (the ethics
337
of the neighbor), of regionalism rather than nationalism, of social egalitarianism and
solidarity.
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Nataša Kovačević received her B.A. from the University of Belgrade, Serbia,
where she majored in English language and literature and minored in Russian language
and literature. She received her M.A. from the University of Kentucky, a joint degree in
TESOL-linguistics and English literature. Her research interests, which have inspired the
doctoral dissertation, include Eastern European and American literature, postcolonial and
Marxist theory, globalization and multiculturalism.
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