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Monologue of the Anti-Hero: Trifonov and the Prose of the Last Decade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Konstantin Kustanovich
Konstantin Kustanovich*
Affiliation:
Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages, Vanderbilt University
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Extract

The question of humanity’s moral makeup has high priority in current sociopolitical and cultural discussions in the Soviet Union. At issue is whether a person is a “clean sheet” whose moral makeup represents nothing but the experience of and reactions to the surrounding environment, or, conversely, a “living soul” endowed with such mysterious and irrational faculties as love, mercy, and compassion. Concern about a lack of morality and spirituality in Soviet society increased significantly in the arts and media after the period of relative liberalization, the thaw, was over and another period, officially referred to now as “the period of stagnation,” began. This change took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Soviet literature of the time, pragmatism stood out as a primary cause for concern in the works of the derevenshchiki, the village writers. Their approach to this problem, however, was limited by their attempts to resolve it within the context of old and not necessarily adequate stereotyped oppositions: village versus city, nature versus technology, Russian versus western.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , Winter 1991 , pp. 978 - 988
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Inc. 1991

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References

1. Chistyi list (tabula rasa): Taťiana Tolstaia uses this phrase as the title for a story in her collection Na zolotom kryl’tse sideli. . . (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1987), 74-95. Compare Mikhail Roshchin’s article “Zhivaia dusha,” Izvestiia, 23 May 1987.

2. Certain of the village writers, for example, Belov, Vasilii in Vse vperedi (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987)Google Scholar, have recently added another juxtaposition, Russian versus Jewish.

3. See Mathewson, Rufus, The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, 2nd ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

4. See McLaughlin, Sigrid, “Jurij Trifonov’s House on the Embankment ,” Slavic and East European Journal 26, no. 4 (1982): 419–433 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (McLaughlin both deals with Trifonov’s poetics and provides a thematic analysis of the novella); Durkin, Andrew, “‘Taking Stock’ : The Role of Čexovian Subtext,” Slavic and East European Journal 28, no. 1 (1984): 32–41 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Woll, Josephine, “Trifonov’s Starik: The Truth of the Past,” Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 19 (1986): 243–258 Google Scholar; Patera, Taťiana, Obzor tvorchestva i analiz moskovskikhpovesteiluriia Trifonova (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1983)Google Scholar; Bocharov, Anatolu, Beskonechnosť poiska (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1982), 101–116 Google Scholar; Belaia, Galina, Literatura v zerkale kritiki (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986), 158–210 Google Scholar; Ivanova, Natal’ia, Proza luriia Trifonova (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1984)Google Scholar. See also the bibliographies in McLaughlin’s and Woll’s articles.

5. For the sake of brevity I will use the pronoun “he” when referring to an abstract protagonist, although in both Trifonov and other authors one finds male and female protagonists.

6. This formulation occurs in Trifonov, Iurii, “Obmen,” in Sobrante sochinenii, 4 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literaturu, 1986) 2:7–66.Google Scholar

7. Belaia, Literatura, 190.

8. Esin, Sergei, Imitator, in Sam sebe khoziain (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1985)Google Scholar.

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12. Petrushevskaia, Liudmila, “Takaia devochka,” in Bessmerlnaia Liubov’ (Moscow. Moskovskii rabochii, 1988), 144–158 Google Scholar.

13. Ibid., 158.

14. See, for example, “Milaia Shura,” “Okhota na mamonta,” “Krug,” “Ogon’ i pyl’,” “Spi spokoino, synok,” and “Fakir,” all of which appeared in Na zolotom kryltse sideli. . ., as well as “Poet i muza,” Novyi mir, no. 12 (December 1986), 113-119.

15. Katerli, “Tsvetnye otkrytki,” 109.

16. Tolstaia, On the Golden Porch, 71.

17. Ibid., 34.

18. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Emerson, Caryl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 70 Google Scholar.

19. The expressions “objectivization of narration” and “objective narration” are used here to denote the shift of the narrative’s dominant point of view from the subject of narration (the author) to its object (the protagonist or another character).

20. The Estonian writer Enn Vetemaa actually employed this method before Trifonov in his “little novels” Monument and Ustalosť, published in the 1960s. His works, however, did not win as great recognition and popularity among Soviet readers as did Trifonov’s. One of the reasons for that may be that Vetemaa’s protagonists have no qualms about their immoral actions; they resemble traditional villains—dogmatists and careerists—in the literature of the thaw. In the Soviet critic Lev Anninskii’s opinion, Trifonov “investigates precisely the ‘middle,’ precisely the ordinary, average person. Vetemaa, on the other hand, is experimenting with the ‘pure principle’ “ (Lev Anninskii, “Afterword,” in Enn Vetemaa, Monument: Malen’kie romany [Moscow: Izvestiia, 1978], 337.) This emphasis on the “pure principle” reduces the human aspect of Vetemaa’s works and, along with it, the reader’s interest.

21. I do not use the word “monological” here in the Bakhtinian sense, that is, to denote the all-embracing domination of the authorial point of view. Rather, the term refers only to the narrative technique of interior monologue.

22. In fact, in some works both Trifonov and the other authors discussed in this article briefly switch the narrative point of view from the protagonist to the author or another character. Such intrusion of other voices is especially characteristic of Tolstaia. The polyphonic character of her stories has been noted by critics, in particular by Elena Nevzgliadova (“Eta prekrasnaia zhizn’,” Avrora, no. 10 [1986]: 111-120) and Helena Goscilo (“Taťiana Tolstaia’s ‘Dome of Many-Coloured Glass’: The World Refracted through Multiple Perspectives,” Slavic Review, 47, no. 2 [1988]: 280-290). Yet even in Tolstaia’s stories it is virtually always possible to single out a dominant consciousness and voice, for example, Rimma’s in “Ogon’ i pyl’,” Simeonov’s in “Reka Okkervil,” Galia’s in “Fakir,” Nina’s in “Poet i muza.” These short digressions, however important in presenting other points of view, do not usually affect the general character of the narrative.

23. Golovin, Gennadii, “Anna Petrovna,” Znamia, no. 2 (1987): 77–120.Google Scholar

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25. See Sokolov, Vadim, “Rasshcheplenie obydennosti”; Mikhail Sinel’nikov, “Ispytanie povsednevnosťiu: nekotorye itogi,” Voprosy literatury, no. 2 (1972): 31–62.Google Scholar

26. The early Soviet critics of Trifonov accused him of not presenting a well-balanced portrait of Soviet life, but of depicting only gloomy reality. “It seems,” a critic writes, “that the world in which the characters from Taking Stock live has been subjected to an artificial ‘hermetization.’ And this, by the way, does not allow the author to show, with a sufficient expressiveness, the force which opposes philistinism and with which it clashes constantly in the society” (“Ot redaktsii,” Voprosy literatury, no. 2 [1972]: 66). Such criticism is irrelevant, of course, because at this point there is no such force in Soviet society.

27. Bakhtin, Problems, 199.

28. Ibid., 197.

29. Bocharov, A., Chem zhiva literatura? (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986), 109 Google Scholar. In Trifonovs works the “bearers of morality,” in my opinion, are not the old revolutionaries. Although they have lost their leading social role, they have preserved their ambitions, arrogance, and selfishness of sorts, along with old-fashioned revolutionary ideals. Trifonov often assigns the role of a “bearer of morality” to simple people, such as Grandma Nila, the maid Niura, or the housekeeper Atabalii. In this way Trifonov approaches the village writers. Other “bearers of morality” in Trifonov are found among a very few representatives of the real intelligentsia, such as Sonia in Dom na naberezhnoi or Sergei in Drugaia zhizn’.

30. Tolstaia, “Poet i muza,” 38.

31. Dostoyevskii, Fedor, Notes from Underground, trans. Garnett, Constance (New York: Dell, 1960), 61 Google Scholar.

32. Makanin, Vladimir, Bezottsovshchina. Soldat i soldatka (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1971), 109 Google Scholar.

33. Bondarenko, V., “Nauchiť geroia boroťsia,” Voprosy literatury, no. 7, (1980): 69 Google Scholar.