Vorabend ohne Ende.

Rollberg, Peter

While conscientiously forcing myself through the

German translation of Evgeny Popov's 1993 novel Nakanune Nakanune (literally "On the Eve of the Eve"), I could not help wondering how many German readers in actuality would derive any pleasure from this peculiar opus. Praised as an example of "Russian postmodernism," as "flamboyant reading," even as "a new type of Russian fiction," it is most unlikely to be enjoyed by anyone apart from the literary-theory crowd that habitates in symbiosis with so-called postmodernist texts. But even for postmodernists, a necessary condition for coming to terms with Popov's novel is a close familiarity with the nineteenth-century Russian classics. For one, the title alludes to Turgenev's reform-inspired novel On the Eve, published in 1860, but it also mocks a traditional topos of Russian belle lettres (a reflection of a deep-running tendency in Russian society): the expectation of a completely new social beginning always just around the comer, of humanity's ultimate catharsis, of a purging political thunderstorm, of a cleansing revelation that will at once transform the country's misery into pure bliss and justice.

As in any parody, the main plot skeleton of Vorabend ohne Ende (the German title means "Endless Eve") is crafted after a famous original, in this case Turgenev's: Rusia, the young daughter of an aristocratic Russian emigre, is in love with the political dissident Insanakhorov, who longs to return to his motherland as a savior. So do other members of this strange community residing in Germany; yet, when Insanakhorov finally crosses the Finnish-Russian border, he shrinks to minuscule proportions and eventually disappears altogether. (The latter plot twist, needless to say, is a deviation from On the Eve.) As is quite typical in Emigre communities, Popov's characters constantly engage in grandiose discussions about Russia's ways and her mission in the world, about personal honor and historical purpose, and about the meaning of life. They read philosophy and political theory, they still feel surrounded by the spirits of Marx, Trotsky, and Stalin, and they desperately try to connect with recent events in their abandoned homeland. The action here takes place on the eve of perestroika and during its aftermath, and it is sad to see how illusory all the hopes then harbored by those faithful humanists look now, and how infertile their hopes have proven to be in assessing literature and culture.

Yet none of the novel's notions is to be taken seriously. Those among Popov's readers who try to decode the names of various characters in order to discover the novel's "hidden meaning" fall prey to the author's wild playfulness. Yes, Mikhail Sidorovich looks like Gorby, and Vladimir Lukitch resembles Lenin, and Apyeltsin-Gorschkov's name probably hints at the current Russian president. But the catch is that Gorbachev, Lenin, Yeltsin, and other political figures also appear under their real names. And although the novel is stuffed with puns, hints, and allusions, these literary devices likewise are subverted. To be sure, there are caricatures, but they always have more than one referent, and for good reason@ Popov's esthetic is strictly non-Aesopian; he does not use fiction to encode messages that could also be expressed in a nonfictional way. And generally, his view of Russian history and its miserable, ever-repeating cycles avoids any conceptual coherence. This view seems to be more healthy and adequate to the nature of literature than what we find in the typical Soviet novel; in 1993, Popov seems to say, there is no need any more to hide messages that can be pronounced straightforwardly. Accordingly, the passages of absurdism which Popov's text contains are perhaps the novel's most interesting -- or least monotonous -- elements.

However, someone (a professor of Russian literature, I fear) must have told Popov that now is the time to be a postmodernist author, and likely this suggestion turned the novel into the colorless artifact it is. Authors of different epochs have of course possessed varying degrees of theoretical self-awareness, and usually this self-awareness helped them in grasping the secrets of craftsmanship and defining their own identity in the motley stream of cultural evolution. But in all cultures, together with this kind of esthetic literacy, factors such as personal experience, intuition, and inspiration as well as some sort of spiritual guidance were also recognized as crucial for artistry. Not so for postmodernist writers. One of their defining characteristics is the loss of esthetic naivete and a theoretical egotism that strives for the absolute. Moreover, not only is a truly postmodernist author always aware of what he/she is doing, he/she also incorporates his/her theoretical insights into his/her fictional texts. In "Endless Eve" Popov adheres to this rule and frequently chatters on about postmodernism and related issues. Also, as one of the laws of postmodernism dictates that genuinely original art is no longer possible and that all culture is reproduction and repetition rather than creation, Popov does not even attempt to create much of his own. he follows the text of Turgenev's On the Eve to the point of literal quotations. The only part of the book that claims to mean what it means is the afterword, in which Professor Johanna Renata Doring-Smirnov (a real person, but -- surprise, surprise -- he also appears in the novel) decodes word by word Popov's preceding fictional experiment, thus committing a rare act of tautological aggression that obviously aims at spoiling the entire game for any reader who was willing to play it on his own.

In the history of literary parody, one can find a broad spectrum of degrees of subtlety@ in this spectrum, Popov's novel appears as unrefined, more suitable for the satire-and-humor page of a Russian daily than for the connoisseur of literary lampooning. The gracious stylishness and exaggerated pomposity of pseudo-Turgenevian descriptions and dialogues are merged with crass vulgarisms Soviet-style. Truly, and perhaps unwillingly, "Endless Eve" proves the incompatibility of Turgenev's long-vanished classical culture and present post-Soviet postmodernism -- or, more generally, of nineteenth-century naive decency and twentieth-century self-absorbed cynicism.

To be sure, postmodernism's announcement of the author-subject as a mere construct is something Popov also buys, or else we would not find Popov himself among the novel's characters and many explicit references to his own work and to his literary buddies Viktor Erofeyev and Dmitry Prigov. Luckily, apart from those demonstrative acts of self-mockery, Popov, like Erofeyev and Prigov, has shown an impressive gift for selling his products in the West -- here at least revealing a healthy dose of realism which otherwise in this novel has been so totally discredited.

Returning to my initial question, it is still hard to grasp what kind of reader might take an interest in this type of literature. To me, literary theory as an aim in itself is meaningless, and literature that remains within the framework of any ism even more so. Not surprisingly, a major shortcoming of "Endless Eve" is its rigidity and forcedness, its lack of real wit. Only on one occasion did I feel moderately amused: when the narrator refers to the efforts of Bavaria's pet king Ludwig II as an early example of perestroika. Otherwise, Endless Eve, makes for tedious reading indeed. Perhaps the obvious carelessness with which this novel was written signals the narcissistic and cheerful self-destruction of Russian literary culture, and also the disappearance of the intellectual community that created it. After all, it was the intelligentsia's criteria that defined Russian letters' high moral and esthetic standards which are now declared obsolete.

Concluding the present reflections on this literary fiasco, suffice it to say that in "Endless Eve" the respected Russian author Evgeny Popov, who in the 1970s held a reputation as a good short-story writer (see WLT 67:1, pp. 107-27), has organized a feast of literary regurgitation and cultural-political carnage, but you have to belong to an exclusive crowd to be admitted to the party. Only a stem postmodernist may gain some fun from this novel -- if fun were not a concept so alien to postmodernism in the first place.