SOURCE: Rougle, Charles. “On the ‘Fantastic’ Trend in Recent Soviet Prose.” Slavic and East European Journal 34, no. 3 (autumn 1990): 308-21.

[In the following essay, Rougle expounds on the increasing use of fantasy elements in Russian literature, especially during the 1970s and later. He also examines the major sources for fantasy elements as they are used in modern Russian literature, as well as common themes in these works, attempting to determine a common ideological ground in order to place this trend in a historical perspective.]

Until relatively recently, Soviet literature was very much dominated by normative definitions of realism which dictated, among other things, the mimetic depiction of reality. Fantasy and the fantastic—used here in the broadest sense of Kathryn Hume to mean all “departures from consensus reality recognizable to the reader as such”¹—was frowned upon and, for the most part, relegated to science fiction and children's literature.

Slowly at first in the 1960s and then more rapidly in the 1970s, this situation began to change, until by the middle of the decade it could be observed:

Today there is a clear tendency in realistic Soviet literature to incorporate more often and more boldly into the style and artistic thought of works, images and devices that were previously peculiar only to science fiction. Spatial transmutations and temporal dislocations, flights awake and in dreams, and images that seem to have come from the fairy tale have somehow imperceptibly and naturally invaded analytical prose that has accumulated considerable experience in the study of the complex phenomena of everyday life.

(Černjavskaja, 71)

Although the use of such elements was judged to be still rare and timid (Seleznev, 199), within a few years there was increasing agreement with V. Turbin's contention that “… fantasy, the grotesque, the fairy tale … are already very close to becoming the norm, a symptom of the literature of the 1980s (Turbin, 209; see also Ivanova, “Vol'noe dyxanie” and Bočarov, 49-67).

The list of works that rely extensively on elements of fantasy has in fact become quite long, and the sources they draw upon are diverse. Science fiction is an important component in works by such writers as Čingiz Ajtmatov, Anar, and Vladmir Orlov. The literary fairy tale has enjoyed something of a renaissance, and among the authors who draw extensively on folklore and often include “skazka” or “skazočnyj” in the titles or subtitles of their works, one finds both prominent and less prominent names such as Šukšin, Belov, Kaverin, Iskander, Natal'ja Sokolova, and Sergej Abramov. Literary and non-literary legends and myths figure significantly in works by Ajtmatov, Margit Zarin', Nikolaj Evdokimov, and Anatolij Kim, and in the genre of Ukrainian literature referred to as “chimerical prose.” Devils, demons, fairies, and witches roam the pages of novels and tales in which the supernatural, the uncanny, and the grotesque have obvious Romantic roots. Finally, other authors—Anar, Kim, and the Estonian Arvo Valton come to mind—experiment with distortions of consciousness and displacements of spatial, temporal, and causal perspectives that are reminiscent of modernist techniques.²

Two questions in particular arise as one contemplates a literary phenomenon of this nature: What are the sources of this evidently rather extensive trend, and do representative works relying on non-mimetic devices share any common thematic or ideological core that can help place the trend in historical perspective?

The first question is connected with the complex phenomenon of literary change in general and cannot be addressed exhaustively here, but a number of both universal and more specifically Soviet circumstances deserve to be pointed out. First of all, the rising popularity of fantasy and the increase in the fantastic in “high art” is a more or less global phenomenon (Rabkin, The Fantastic, 182). That the surge came somewhat later in the Soviet Union is probably due to the inhibiting effect of official cultural ideology, which only in the late 1960s began to modify the rigid view of the non-mimetic as a pernicious manifestation of modernism,³ so that many of the factors that have affected the Western phenomenon may also reasonably be assumed to apply to the Soviet case.⁴

One such factor is the novelty of the fantastic, in two senses. First of all, against the predominantly mimetic background in the West and the overwhelmingly mimetic background in the Soviet Union, fantasy offers variety, relief, and freshness. (This is undoubtedly one explanation of the enormous popularity of Bulgakov's Master i Margarita (1965) and Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (Russian translation, 1970), two works that have exerted an especially strong legitimizing influence.) Secondly, there is a sense in which mimetic realism bears within it the seeds of its own destruction. Based on the assumption that reality is accessible to rational investigation and the promise to provide ever newer knowledge and insights, at some point realism is driven to confront phenomena transcending the consensus reality upon which mimesis is predicated, and the fantastic emerges as an alternative or preferred narrative mode (Hume, 37-44). Soviet literary ideology, of course, has resisted especially this latter point and may never concede it entirely, but today it is at least widely recognized that the non-mimetic offers novelty in both senses (see, for example, Bočarov, 50, 64).⁵

Another reason for the broad appeal of the fantastic is that pushing to the boundaries of consensus reality and beyond into the world of the imagination is quite simply entertaining, offering considerable opportunity for the humorous, the exciting, the pleasurably frightening, the intellectually piquant. As is familiar to the Western reader, of course, all too often “entertainment” becomes simple escapism designed to provide relief from a reality judged to be boring or frustrating. While it must be borne in mind that Soviet critics are extraordinarily sensitive to all suspected manifestations of such frivolity, they would seem to be correct in discerning the rather prominent presence of the entertainment motive in a great many works employing fantasy. Three complaints are registered especially often. First, many writers are inclined to use fantastic devices as mere gimmicks that may titillate the unsophisticated reader but contribute little of substance to the work. Second, fantasy is often merely philistine wish-fulfillment, as the “magic” in many works is used suspiciously often to supply the hero with scarce goods and services. Finally, some critics have objected to the “bookishness” (knižnost') of much of this fiction, by which is meant playful literary and cultural allusion whose main function is to flatter the supposed erudition of the superficially cultivated reader.⁶

If novelty and entertainment potential are among the major surface factors accounting for the appeal of fantasy everywhere, there are others that are intrinsic to the specific Soviet historical and ideological context. One (discussed at length in Peterson, 76-113) is the trend that can be observed in all post-Stalin literature away from the Purpose and toward a sharper focus on the private world of the individual, which has brought with it a renewed emphasis on the emotions and the imagination, key ingredients in fantasy. As part of this overall change of course there is also the quest for cultural identity that has marked the Soviet consciousness for the past 25 years. Turning to the people in an effort to mend the bonds of tradition severed by the Revolution, both Russian and non-Russian writers have quite naturally found inspiration in folklore, legend, and myth, all of which rely heavily on fantasy. Because of their concentrated, poetic expressiveness, it is precisely the fantastic elements in the literature of the folk that have been singled out as the most effective aesthetic means for joining past and present (see, for example, Seleznev, 199, 204).

The first to use these devices extensively, of course, were the “village” writers of the 1960s and 1970s. If fantasy was an element in their search for continuity, however, it is interesting to note that the fantastic also figures prominently in the effort underway in the late 1970s to break away from village prose, which is perceived to have become too parochial and confining. The central work here is Čingiz Ajtmatov's I dol'še veka dlitsja den' (1980), where Kazakh legend and a science-fiction subplot are among the devices contributing to the spatial and temporal sweep demanded by the call for the augmented “scale” (masštabnost') that became a watchword of the early 1980s (see Clark, “On the Mutability”). It was felt that what literature needed was a “new consciousness of space and time,” and it is significant that critic Vladimir Lakšin, who has argued extensively for the concept, should single out Vladimir Orlov's Al'tist Danilov, Anatolij Kim's Lotos, and Vladimir Krupin's Živaja voda as works in which fantasy is employed to expand that awareness.

Finally, the fantastic has a certain utilitarian appeal in the Soviet context. Because fantasy offers novelty and appeals to the imagination in ways that mimetic literature does not, it has been used from time immemorial as a means of capturing and holding the attention of readers in order to cajole and exhort them to adopt and act upon the author's vision of reality. It is interesting to note that, whereas the best post-Stalin mimetic literature has been moving steadily away from overt didacticism, works employing the fantastic display the opposite tendency. As will become obvious from the continued discussion below, they are almost without exception candidly and heavily sententious, so much so, in fact, that it is doubtful whether even the hardy Soviet reader could swallow the didactic pill without the fantasy coating.⁷

If the Soviet literature of the fantastic is conscious of its pedagogical function, it is only natural to ask what various authors are attempting to get across to their readers. The obvious point at which to begin such an investigation is the protagonist in representative works of the trend, for, owing partly to the legacy of the Russian past and partly to structures deriving from Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology and practice, Soviet literature has typically tended to focus on the hero as the ideoesthetic nucleus of the literary work of art. To perhaps a greater degree than in any other national literature, problems of historical, social, and existential meaning are framed in terms of the predominant and/or desirable male personality, whence the recurrent centrality of such categories as “the superfluous man” and “the positive hero.”

The positive hero inherited from the classical period of Socialist Realism embodied a certain set of psychological attributes—spontaneous energy, willpower, stamina, etc., which, when molded by the correct ideological perspective in the “spontaneity-consciousness dialectic” described by Katerina Clark, produces a synthesis personifying the ideal Soviet Man of the future and demonstrating the scientific correctness of the historical vision projected by the Party (See Mathewson, 115-259 and Clark, The Soviet Novel, 15-22, 46-68).

In the hero of the fantastic work we find many of the same elements and categories arranged in a new pattern which, in some respects, is an exact reversal of the established one. Thus if the typical Socialist Realist hero numbered among his positive attributes emotional spontaneity, energy, closeness to nature, and so on, these are precisely the qualities that are subverted in the new protagonist by a kind of cerebral and/or conative hypertrophy and a narrow egotism which combine to cut him off from himself and others. Nikita Ivanov of Natal'ja Sokolova's Ostorožno, volšebnoe!, for instance, is a talented and dedicated worker and at bottom a decent person, but his “emotional culture,” as it is called, is poor. Self-centered and stubbornly rationalistic in his approach to reality, he is insensitive to others and reluctant to become involved in struggles, however just, that do not immediately affect his personal interests.

An even clearer example is Aleksej Drozdov, the cerebral scientist-hero of Sergej Zalygin's Os'ka—smešnoj mal'čik. The fantastic dreams he has on two occasions near death are an extended philosophical discourse on the pernicious effects of abstract thought divorced from concrete human needs and concerns. In the most important vision, it is suggested that abstraction, be it ever so “scientific,” spawns destructive amorality, and that utopian projects for remaking the world and humanity are the products of such spiritual sterility.⁸

The nameless Student in the Azerbaijani writer Anar's much noted story “Kontakt” (see Latynina, “Forma” and Znaki vremeni, 147-55) displays the same overdeveloped reliance on the rational to the exclusion of the emotional, and he is driven nearly to insanity by his inability to find neat explanations for the series of uncanny happenings that make up the bulk of the story. In the end, a mysteriously appearing “astrophysicist” explains to him that he has been the subject of an extraterrestrial experiment testing the human capacity for alogical perception. The conclusion of the work summarizes the problem that is being posed through this kind of hero:

Whether or not there will be any contacts depends on whether we can agree to a violation of our immovable logical laws of reason … if we keep on trying to find a clear rational explanation for everything unusual, incomprehensible or inexplicable that we cannot fit into our consciousness, … if we reduce everything to the poor laws of our ever so imperfect reason, then no contact with anyone will ever be possible.

(155)

In those cases where the hero's isolation is not due specifically to his hypertrophied reason, it is usually traceable to the callous egotism that thrives in philistine society or within the “establishment,” into which he is often successfully integrated. The heroes of Nikolaj Evdokimov's two works employing the fantastic epitomize this type. Thus, Vladimir Maxonin is a middle-aged Moscow school principal whose sensitivities have been dulled by years of humdrum routines, and Sergej Grigor'evič Tixomirov, one of the central characters in the long novel Triždy veličajšij, is likewise a bureaucrat who has lost the ability to relate meaningfully to others. Vadim, in Sergej Abramov's story “Melodija rannego utra,” is a successful artist whose works have photographic realism but little feeling or inspiration. Loxov, in Anatolij Kim's Lotos, has turned his back on his mother to pursue his artistic career. The musician Kristofer Marlov of Marger Zarin's Fal'šivyj Faust panders to the vulgar tastes of the interwar Latvian bourgeoisie and confuses authorship of a gourmand cookbook with true art. The negative side of the demons and semi-demons in Evdokimov's Triždy veličajšij and Vladimir Orlov's Al'tist Danilov and the traits they must overcome to become truly human and achieve communion with others derive from the hierarchical, bureaucratic nature of the supernatural world, which is a Menippean copy of the real one.

The hero of the fantastic work, then, is an “incomplete” man, emotionally and, to varying degrees, morally handicapped and isolated from society. The type is not uncommon in mimetic fiction, of course, but its overwhelming predominance here establishes it as a key element in the pattern to which this literature tends to conform. Briefly, in the typical plot structure there is a confrontation between this inadequate being and some “fantastic” phenomenon, an emotionally intense experience defying logical explanation that may or may not be plausibly explained in the end. The encounter serves to jolt the hero out of his alienation and/or provides him with some epiphanous insight into reality that leads him at least to the threshold of a richer mode of being in which he is in greater harmony both with himself and with his fellows.

The familiar Soviet didactic goal or socialization is clearly apparent here, but the agencies by which it is accomplished differ from those of the classical Socialist Realist work. Most conspicuous by its absence, perhaps, is the Party or its surrogate as the indispensable catalyst in the synthesis, although there are some partial exceptions to the rule. In Sokolova's Ostorožno, volšebnoe! for instance, the loquacious and intrusive “author” controlling and commenting upon the events is a journalist whose indefatigable party-mindedness is everywhere apparent, and one of the hypostases of the Good Wizard Ivanov who helps Nikita in his battle with Evil is a friendly volunteer policeman whose political zeal is little in doubt. Another example is the intricately structured but ultimately transparent political allegory of Marger Zarin's Fal'šivyj Faust, where a socialist minister of culture before the Nazi invasion of Latvia and a politically active Russian prisoner of war open the eyes of the hero, a reincarnation of Christopher Marlowe imbued with the individualistic ideals of the Renaissance, to the realization that the true artist must be devoted to the people and can thrive only in a socialist order (87-95, 287; see also Peterson, 200-205).

More typically, however, the hero's road to spiritual health brings him into contact with the other, less politicized forces of emotion and imagination, embodied in certain agents or vehicles. Not surprisingly considering the role that village prose has played in the fantastic trend, one such source is the simple people. Thus it is surely no coincidence that the mother of Orlov's Danilov is a Jaroslavl' peasant girl, and one of the personifications of wholeness in Zalygin's Os'ka is the eponymous hero, a simple Nenets whose closeness to nature and profound insights into reality are repeatedly contrasted with Drozdov's sophisticated but barren abstractions.

The folksy čudak or eccentric, who has become increasingly common in mimetic works as well, fits quite naturally into fiction advocating greater reliance on intuition and imagination (see Peterson, 76-113). Early examples include Kuz'ma in Vasilij Belov's Buxtiny vologodskie (1969) and Ivan the Fool in Šukšin's stylized fairy-tale Do tret'ix petuxov (1975). More recently, there is Aleksandr Kirpikov, the hero of Vladimir Krupin's much discussed tale Živaja voda (1980). A flawed character more than superficially reminiscent of Ivan Afrikanovič in Belov's Privyčnoe delo, Kirpikov is redeemed by his organic ties to the life and imagination of the people as reflected in their folklore and legends. Like the saintly heroes of many of these works, he is a seeker of truth. Realizing through the folk tale of the “living water” that his life has been worthless, he quits drinking and swearing and shuts himself up in his cellar to seek spiritual renewal. The fantastic element of the story is a miraculous fountain of “living water” discovered in the village. Except for Kirpikov, upon whom it has no effect, it makes everyone who drinks it younger and healthier. It does not improve them morally, however, and that is the whole point of the allegory—perfection cannot be had through panaceas handed down from on high, but must be attained through one's own initiative and efforts (Latynina, “Kirpikov”).

Woman, perhaps because she is associated in the male mind with the powerful and mysterious forces of the erotic and the maternal, is by far the most common agent of rebirth. In a number of works she is the sorceress whose “magic” removes the scales from the hero's eyes and heart. In Sokolova's Ostorožno, volšebnoe! for example, the phenomenon which starts Nikita on his quest is the mysterious image of a beautiful girl in a subway window. He tries to avoid involvement in the struggle against the evil spirits' conspiracy to unleash a nuclear holocaust on the world, but when the House Fairy (Domovaja Feja) reveals to him that the image is his idea of beauty and that he is moreover in love with the girl who casts it, he is spurred to action, and the rest of us can live happily ever after.

Sergej Abramov's women are often sorceresses. In “Melodija rannego utra,” it is the beautiful undine Taja whose feminine mystique lies behind the uncanny events of the story and opens the hero Vadim's eyes to a wondrous new world of life and art. In “Dvoe pod onim zontom,” Dan, a not very successful circus juggler, miraculously masters tricks he has been trying for years when he falls in love with the beautiful and mysterious “good sorceress” Olja. When he foolishly refuses her “magic” out of male pride, however, he loses his newly acquired proficiency and again becomes a second-rate performer. In a lecture on man and woman that could stand as a manifesto of the synthesis toward which much of this body of fiction is implicitly aspiring, the gruff old circus director Til' explains to Dan the error of his proud ways. Women, he expounds, are all sorceresses, provided they have not sacrificed their femininity in their foolish struggle for equality with men. As for men:

… a real man is also a rarity these days. What is a real man? When it comes to work, he's fierce; he'll break himself in two, but he'll get the job done. But he's also tender, Dančik—fragile, and only steely on the surface. Inside, underneath his steel casing, there is, to use a scientific term, a substance that is very susceptible to a woman's magical power. And a good sorceress easily manages this substance. Women, Dančik, should shape us from the cradle to the grave—that's the way of nature. There's no fighting nature—you'll be sorry if you do.

(97-98)

In Zalygin's Os'ka—smešnoj mal'čik there is no magic, but woman is nonetheless central to the theme of the work. Aleksej Drozdov's wife Antonina Petrovna, especially in the many flashback visions when she was still simply his beloved Tonečka, is one of his strongest links to the “real,” natural world, the tether that keeps him from drifting off into the artificial, destructive fantasy of S Island. This, indeed is Woman's role in the world—she is “… an anchor binding humanity to itself; without such an anchor, who knows where and what we would be today …” (357-59).

Although not given such extensive attention as in Abramov's and Zalygin's works, the power of Woman is apparent in other fantasies as well. Thus in Evdokimov's Proisšestvie it is Irina who leads the hero back to the wondrous world of nature and the imagination (cf. Peterson, 163-70); in the same author's Triždy veličajšij and in Orlov's Al'tist Danilov, the human side of the semi-demons Raxasen and Danilov is quite clearly connected with their human mothers, while their demonic nature is attributed to their fathers. Love of mortal women is a significant factor for both on their road to full humanity. In Evdokimov's novel, even Thrice Exalted (Satan) himself is led by remembered love of Eve in the Garden of Eden very nearly to overcome his diabolical being in a burst of truly human compassion. In the same work, the callous bureaucrat Sergej Grigor'evič's path to salvation lies through reconciliation with his mother and reawakened love for his symbolically named mistress Sonja and the crippled son to whom she is selflessly devoted. In Anatolij Kim's Lotos, Loxov's renewed love of his dying mother and erotic love for the nurse tending her are catalysts in his rediscovery of life.

In all of these cases, love is the force that leads the hero back to “the fairy tale that is life” (Abramov, “Dvoe,” 98), to the realization that “the fairy tale is right next to us” (Sokolova, 331), and that the most fantastic fantasy” is what we are accustomed to call the usual, the ordinary, or the everyday (Zalygin, 233). Having recovered this childlike capacity for naive wonder, he is then able to go on to experience compassion and integration with the human community as a whole. As becomes apparent in Orlov's enormously popular novel Al'tist Danilov and in Kim's Lotos and Belka, art works in similar ways.⁹

Danilov, as has already been mentioned, is a semi-demon born of a human mother and demonic father, and the plot of the work shows him moving towards complete humanity. Actually, from the outset he displays considerable human gentleness, altruism, and sensitivity, and these “flaws” make him a most unsatisfactory tool for the evil spirits in the Nine Strata (Devjat' Sloev), a satirical copy of the real bureaucratic world, whose true instruments and even inspiration are the greedy philistines and the proponents of various hypocritical or solipsistic theories.

One such source of evil has invaded even the world of art, and it is here that Danilov provides the most significant evidence of his innate humanity. The central figure is the gifted but fatefully mistaken violinist Zemskij, whose theory of “silent” music (tišizm) is easily deciphered code for decadent modernism. The world, Zemskij asserts, is cacophony of everyday noises; the only true music sounds within each individual and cannot be played audibly at all. Corresponding to this definition of incommunicable art divorced from real life is an extreme Romantic view of the artist as a solitary prophet to whom everything and everyone is merely raw material (410-16).

Opposing these views are Danilov and Pereslygin, the talented composer whose works he performs. Danilov is convinced that art expresses the higher harmony that Zemskij denies, and that the task of the artist is to communicate this music to his fellow humans. He chooses to remain human when he plays precisely because art is so inalienable a part of human communion and so delicately attuned to human emotions and aspirations. Participation in this communion is not reserved to the professional artist, but issues from a creative attitude within the reach of all. As Pereslygin tells Danilov when asked why the interesting parts in his symphony were given to the traditionally humble and subordinate viola: “There must not be any servant instruments. … In music everything is great and everything can resonate! You just have to let it sound! You have to be able to find that sound!” (400).

Danilov does find it. Part of the sentence imposed upon him by the demons dissatisfied with his behavior is that he is to develop to the utmost the vital human capacity to experience painful compassion not only for those in his immediate surroundings, but also for the woes of all humankind (590), for it is here that art and humanity most significantly coincide.

Art is also at the center of the attempted or completed spiritual regeneration of the heroes in Anatolij Kim's thus far most fantastic works.¹⁰ Loxov, the artist protagonist of Lotos, selfishly abandoned his mother on Sakhalin to devote himself to his career in Moscow. Tormented by guilt, he now returns after sixteen years of neglect to find her on her deathbed. This confrontation with the death of a loved one is the catalyst that brings him out of his self-imposed isolation to gain a new sense of communion with the world.

Through love and art, the isolated “I” of the flesh enters an almost mystical union with what Kim perhaps not altogether felicitously calls the infinite WE of the spirit, where each individual joins in “the eternal Choir that roars and thunders, filling with its peals the hollow cupola of the world” (307). The central emblem of this fusion in Lotos is the title symbol itself, an orange that Loxov fashions into the form of a flower and places in his mother's hand as a last, seemingly helpless but in fact powerful gesture of love and contrition that conquers the loneliness of death. Humble and ephemeral as the orange is, it becomes an eloquent manifestation of the quintessentially artistic ability common to all children to marvel at the wondrous transformations and transfigurations that are the throbbing heart of life and nature.

The Lotus was to tell his mother what art is, … explain to her the essence of the incomparable joy of transfiguration. … The voracious, lowly caterpillar that leaves behind it a sticky brown trail, creeping on its belly and groping half-blind for food, will someday see the clear starry sky as it soars above the forests and meadows.

Our transformation by art is similar, thought Loxov. … the artist uses his gifts of dream and imagination to picture in advance what he would have seen fluttering like a butterfly among the stars.

(300-301)

Loxov's own experience describes such a metamorphosis. As he enters this transcendent state, the usual oppositions between animate and inanimate, human and animal, individual and collective, life and death are submerged and united in an undifferentiated cosmic Substance whose affinities with Buddhist philosophy were immediately noted (cf. Merler et al.). Time reveals its circular, closed essence, and the animal and the human fuse as Loxov remembers in the nurse to whom he makes love the vixen he will meet fifteen years later at his mother's grave (337-38). His past, present, and future selves interpenetrate in a single consciousness that moves freely across all temporal, spatial, and causal boundaries.

… ij, the unnamed hero of Belka, is not so fortunate. An artist like Loxov, he initially possesses a marvellous transfigurative power that allows him to embrace and become anything or anyone. This special gift, he explains, allows his soul to leave his body and “zigzag like a real squirrel scampering across the branches of a dense forest” to inhabit any imaginable person or animal (10-11). The narrative is a constantly flickering manifestation of this protean consciousness, as the “squirrel” darts, sometimes twice or more in a single paragraph or even sentence, in and out of the identities of the other main characters Dmitrij Akutin, Innokentij Lupetin, Georgij Aznaurjan (all of them … ij's fellow students at art school), and Liliana Borisovna, Dmitrij's first art teacher and lover.

Working against this kind of “transincarnation” (perevoploščenie), however, is another sort of transformation (prevraščenie) in which the animal substance usurps the transcendent, human one and changes the person into a beast which embodies some definitive psychological or moral trait. Working everywhere in the world as a gigantic “conspiracy of beasts” (zagovor zverej), this insidious force manifests its power every time the individual, whether through violence, egotism, or shallow philistinism, leaves the path leading to WE, and all of the characters in the novel succumb to it. In … ij's case, it is betrayal of art that leads to his downfall. Sacrificing his artistic vision, he marries a “cow buffalo” and takes a job at a magazine producing the sort of exhortatory posters that clutter the walls of Soviet workplaces. Repulsed by the bestiality he sees around him and tormented by the awareness of his timid squirrellike self, he longs to rid himself of this side of his nature and become a “genuine human.” He makes a fateful error, however, when he singles out as his model what might be called the Promethean Man—the proud master of the Universe who would use his science and utopian dreams and abstractions to impose his will on nature and eradicate evil by force. Convinced that this is the goal toward which he must strive, he decides to obliterate the animal in himself by killing a real squirrel.

WE take complete charge of the Epilogue to propound the moral of the tale. Squirrel was right to want to eliminate the animal in himself, but murder, whether of an innocent squirrel or millions of people in the name of some great idea, can never lead to true humanity. On the contrary, such violence is a ruse employed by the very conspiracy Squirrel sought to defeat. He loses his marvellous powers of transmutation and lives out his days as “a quiet office worker, an eternally anxious low-ranking official, henpecked at home by his wife and son” and cut off forever from the fantastic but basic reality of WE (263).

What can be said of the impact of works such as these on the Soviet literary landscape as a whole? Two areas in particular come to mind. First, the widespread use of techniques and devices departing from established mimetic norms has legitimized in practice what proponents of a more flexible and open definition of realism have been advocating for years in theory. Stream of consciousness, temporal and spatial dislocations, fractured narrative voice, and grotesque or whimsical imagery no longer raise many eyebrows among either readers or critics, and in this sense the trend represents an advance. Works of fantasy have been bolder than most mimetic fiction in using previously little exploited literary and non-literary motifs, images, legends, myths, and the like. This has undoubtedly expanded the literary horizon.

As to themes and ideology, we have seen that these are remarkably homogeneous. Every work discussed above begins with the premise that problems of social reality must be solved not by collective action toward some abstract goal or ideal, but by individuals striving to perfect their emotional and moral sensibilities. This has led in some cases to open rejection of the rationalistic goals of the familiar materialist utopias and, as the ideals of logic and discipline are increasingly replaced by a more affective conflation of compassion and creativity incarnated especially in femininity and art, to some serious doubts as to the omnipotence of rational thought itself. Works of fantasy did not initiate this tendency toward a more personalist outlook—far from it (see Hosking, 30-32, 197-98)—but their unanimous adoption of it has contributed to its spread.

All of this can only be welcomed, for it has undeniably enriched Soviet literature. In the worldwide context of fantasy fiction, however, judgment must be somewhat less generous. Soviet critics note with satisfaction that however fantastic some of the devices being used, the works using them have not broken with Belinskij's dictum that departures from the mimetic, if they are to be permitted at all, must focus on revealing and correcting flaws in social reality (see Bočarov, 66-67). Adherence to such guidelines may have helped prevent Soviet fantasy from lapsing into the escapist twaddle that floods Western bookstores, but it would also seem to be at least partly responsible for one less desirable result. If in the best Western works fantasy is used to challenge received notions of reality and explore other possible meaning systems (see Hume, 168-97), the didactic imperative as it has been employed thus far in Soviet fiction tends to inhibit such exploration, and the appearance of a Soviet Kafka, Marquez, Borges, or Calvino does not seem imminent. Yet fantasy shows no signs of fading from the literary scene.¹¹ On the contrary, now that the phantasmagoric reality of Stalinism has become a legitimate subject of fiction, critics and publishers have both publicly and privately noted a renewed surge in the fantastic (see Ivanova, “O ‘ručnom mužike,’” 265), and in a few years a new survey and analysis may well be appropriate.

Notes

1. Hume, 20, 23. The nature of fantasy is of course an enormous and controversial topic. Hume's very general definition seems adequate to the survey here, as it appears to coincide with what Soviet critics and authors mean by the fantastic. For discussions of this theoretical side of the question, see Bettelheim, Irwin, Rabkin, and Todorov.

2. For discussions of these and other relevant works, see, in addition to the sources already cited above, Lipoveckij, Mixajlov, and Pogribnij. The most extensive Western treatment is Peterson. See also Vishevsky.

3. The long-winded and tangled Soviet discussion focused on the notion of artistic “uslovnost'.” See, for example, Dmitriev.

4. Because the present article is primarily historical and thematic in scope, I am choosing to ignore here the interesting question of the psychological and philosophical function of fantasy. See, for example, Bettelheim, Hume, 147-97, and Rabkin, Fantastic Worlds, 4-71.

5. It should be noted in passing, however, that not all opposition to fantasy comes from political conservatives. Many radical reformers insist that exposés of the past should be mimetic.

6. See in particular Anninskij, “Mne by vaši zaboty” on Orlov's Al'tist Danilov; Urnov on Zarin'; Lipoveckij on Kaverin; Nemzer on Kim's Belka; and Semenjuk on Abramov. These and other critical reactions are reviewed in Spindler Trubetzkoy.

7. One other possibility deserves at least to be mentioned: If some writers are entertaining in order to preach, perhaps others are preaching in order to be allowed to entertain. The critics referred to in n. 6 above seem to suspect the latter.

8. Of the writers dealt with here, Zalygin most clearly expresses the ambivalent attitude toward science that has marked much recent Soviet fiction. See March, 227-28.

9. See Karasev for a very interesting discussion of the relationship between art and fantasy in recent Soviet fiction (particular attention is devoted to Al'tist Danilov and Belka).

10. For the extensive Soviet discussion of Lotos and Belka, see Anninskij, “O čem že pela belka,” Kunycyn, Merler, Jukina, Nemzer, and Semenov. See also Beitz, et al.

11. For two very recent works, see Orlov, Aptekar', and Žitinskij.

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