Translated material
How to write a denunciation correctly. Dmitry Bykov* - about the poetics and pragmatics of the most important genre of Russian life
Antiheroes of recent years in Russian culture are masters of inspired denunciations. The denunciation to some extent equates Nikita Mikhalkov and Zakhar Prilepin with the blogger on the payroll of the presidential administration Ilya Remeslo and the serial informer Abaturov-Korobkova. Dmitry Bykov takes a fascinating journey to the literary origins of this most important genre of Russian culture, and in the end he explains why his poetic guide on how to correctly write a denunciation has no practical meaning.
Denunciation in today's world (not only in Russia, which is comforting) is a completely legitimate genre, and perhaps one of the most widespread. Novels in the form of denunciations have been published for a long time - here the pioneers were the authors of Russian conspiracy theories, anti-nihilistic detective stories like “Nowhere” by Leskov or “The Troubled Sea” by Pisemsky, which Pisarev called “The Troubled Sea of the Author’s Bile.” And “Demons,” to be honest, didn’t go far. Literary merits are a separate issue: “Even if it’s a pamphlet, I’ll speak out.” Sincerity redeems a lot.
In the twentieth century, this tradition continued powerfully - for example, with the novel “Aphids” by Ivan Shevtsov or the novel “What Do You Want” by Vsevolod Kochetov, which survived in literature thanks to two brilliant parodies. The Russian conspiracy novel has its own set of stable features: it certainly contains a femme fatale in the function of a mediator, a double agent connecting the police world with the world of conspirators. A recent example is Konchalovsky’s “Chronicles of the Russian Revolution,” where all the cliches of a security detective are parodied; By the way, he was by nature protective and well-intentioned.
It’s not for nothing that “Bloody Pouf,” a two-volume denunciation of the entire Russian society, was written by Vsevolod Krestovsky, the author of “The St. Petersburg Slums” and a staff member of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The main enemies in a conspiracy novel are always members of the “small herd”, or “chimera” in Lev Gumilyov’s terminology: a malicious group with corrupting goals and values is formed in the body of a large empire. These could be Jews (most often), Poles and Caucasians, or there could be social categories - students, bohemians. There is definitely a good Russian person who is seduced, who becomes either a moral or physical (like Shatov) victim of a revolutionary circle. And, of course, the bearer of truth and the savior of the lost is an intellectual strongman - only Dostoevsky had the taste to do without such a hero and introduce instead the mysterious figure of Stavrogin, who ultimately became the main discovery of the novel.
The denunciation novel is always based on a deeply pessimistic, even eschatological idea of Russian modernity. Everything is bad, the empire is doomed, we are the kindest and most trusting - that is why social parasites, spies, foreign agents, depraved envoys of the West, like Kochetov’s Portia Brown, who turned into Sergei Smirnov’s Portia Whiskey, have appeared in our powerful but loose body. This eschatologism, which provides Russians with most of the nationwide mental disorders, is due to the fact that the “oprichnina” project does not exist without the constant threat of the end of the world, without persistent fear, which simultaneously mobilizes and weakens (this is truly the most unbearable combination).
Since the oprichnina denies the idea of progress, the ideal sees in the past, and in the present - one continuous degradation, the denunciation novel constantly reminds the reader that he is in the position of Robinson on a sinking island or, even worse, in the position of Gray Neck in the middle of a freezing hole. The novel-denunciation exploits the anxious and suspicious state of the majority of Russians, their confidence that their precarious and fragile well-being is being undermined around the clock by enemies, and if not by enemies, then by the course of things, aging, and degradation.
In essence, the “oprichnina” project, due to its intellectual poverty, was not intended to last long; it was already unacceptably delayed, and already in Peter’s time it was clear that the repressive state with a sadomasochistic sect at its head had completely dried up and degenerated into a continuous circle. Waiting for the Inspector General, or Captain Kopeikin, or the arrival of Shchedrin’s mysterious IT was the most important leitmotif of Russian literature, which is all about exhaustion, degeneration and the fact that today is not the same as yesterday. The whole literature of noble degeneration is about this, the whole “Anna Karenina”, the whole “The Cherry Orchard”, old Bolkonsky died with these thoughts, Fonvizin’s Starodum and Griboyedov’s Skalozub were tormented by them - and the conspiracy novel constantly talks about how everything deteriorates and dies. This applies to noble estates, Soviet dachas and post-Soviet private schools.
Hand in hand with the conspiracy novel is the novel of family decline - also telling how a prosperous family is ruined under the influence of harmful progress. Russia infected the whole of Europe with this genre, and numerous “Buddenbrooks”, “The Thiebaud Family” and “The Lautensack Brothers” appeared - we must not forget that they all grew out of “The Golovlev Lords”. Imagine Saltykov-Shchedrin, poisoned by conspiracy theories, and you will get anti-nihilistic and anti-dissident novels of the sixties and eighties of the twentieth century. Yes, there are plenty of them even now - Yuri Kozlov alone is worth it.
All this is very nice, you say, but we were not going to talk so much about denunciations in literature - they are not so harmful, although morally, perhaps, they are even more corrupting. We were going to talk about denunciation as a bureaucratic genre, about anonymous letters and letters to the editor, about revealing feuilletons, about the eternal philistine “I hereby bring to your attention”! Well, at one time I was thinking about an anthology of such denunciations: it’s not enough for the Literary Gazette to publish them under the pseudonym P. Khokhlovsky! (Khokhlovsky Lane, in which the publication is located; under this pseudonym, the author of these lines was slandered with particular passion and courage). There are masters and masterpieces here, but it is important to remember the main law of literary criticism: poetics is closely linked to pragmatics, the structure of the text is determined by the ultimate task!
And here a surprise awaits the professional informer: he, as a rule, is mistaken about his true motives.
Subscribe to read in full
Subscribe to Redefine.Media to read Republic
Subscribe [You can pay with a Russian or foreign card. The subscription is renewed automatically. You can unsubscribe at any time.]
Where does the subscribers' money go?