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From Vladimir Voinovich, one of the great satirists of contemporary Russian literature, comes a new comic novel about the absurdity of politics and the place of the individual in the sweep of human events. Monumental Propaganda, Voinovich’s first novel in twelve years, centers on Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, a true believer in Stalin, who finds herself bewildered and beleaguered in the relative openness of the Khrushchev era. She believes her greatest achievement was to have browbeaten her community into building an iron statue of the supreme leader, which she moves into her apartment after his death. And despite the ebb and flow of political ideology in her provincial town, she stubbornly, and at all costs, centers her life on her private icon. Voinovich’s humanely comic vision has never been sharper than it is in this hilarious but deeply moving tale–equally all-seeing about Stalinism, the era of Khrushchev, and glasnost in the final years of Soviet rule. TheNew York Times Book Reviewcalled his classic work,The Life & Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, “a masterpiece of a new form–socialist surrealism . . . the SovietCatch-22written by a latter-day Gogol." InMonumental Propagandawe have the welcome return of a truly singular voice in world literature.… (altro)
Vladimir Voinovich has done the unthinkable. It was unthinkable for Lenny Bruce to say “fuck” on stage in the 1950s—unthinkable but inevitable. There is nothing inevitable about what Voinovich has done: he’s written a novel about a woman who loves and believes in Stalin. Although in the West not quite as well known a genocidal demon as Hitler, Stalin is still pretty much in everyone’s top-ten list of all time murderous bastards. The amazing thing about Monumental Propaganda is that the novel doesn’t try to make you feel any less revolted about Stalin. In other words, Voinovich has managed to portray unsympathetic characters (Stalin, the woman who loves him) in a sympathetic way without robbing them of their bastardliness. That’s a nice trick, and Monumental Propaganda is a funny, devastating novel.
Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina is a middle-aged partisan and Communist Party member when the novel begins in 1957. During the “Great Patriotic War” (i.e., the Second World War), she led a unit that was twice decorated. She and her husband, a fellow partisan, together blew up a German power station. Thing is, her husband was still inside the power station when Aglaya pushed the plunger. But that’s how she is: there’s a job to be done, and nothing gets in her way. After the war she goes home to Dolgov, where she quickly rises in the ranks of the Party nomenklatura. She arranged to have a statue of Stalin made and erected in the town square: the monumental propaganda of the title. Revkina gives the dedicatory speech at the unveiling and “She managed to convey in a few words the idea of the exceptional usefulness and necessity, especially in our days, of all forms of propaganda, and in particular of large-scale, monumental visual propaganda designed to endure through the ages. The monument, she said, which had been erected despite the opposition of our enemies, would stand here for thousands of years, inspiring future builders of communism to new feats of heroism.”
Compliant after a few days of torture, Klaus Felsen, a successful German factory owner, is cashiered into the SS. His job is critical – purchasing or poaching wolfram, a particular metal need by the Reich, with Lisbon as his base of operations. More importantly, the port city is the source of wolfram. The greedy fingers of the nefarious past reach out to corrupt the future, where Inspector Coelho has barely begun gathering information for the case of the murdered girl.
Stalin’s hold on the imagination of certain Soviets (and even, to this day, of certain Russians) is known in Russian, as the human-rights activist Sergei Kovalyov (a contemporary of Sakharov and, like him, a scientist) wrote, as “derzhavnost, that is, the view of the state as a highly valuable mystical being that every citizen and society as a whole must serve.” The “slave mentality,” Kovalyov said, still exists from tsarist days: “the Gulag still exists” in the people’s “willingness to accept propaganda and lies, and in its indifference to the fate of its fellow citizens or to the crimes and transgressions including those committed by the state.” Voinovich’s novel was originally published in Russian in 2002 and, like so many ostensibly historical accounts, is meant to resonate with the present: it serves as a kind of allegory of the present in its recounting of the crimes of the past. The eerie thing about Monumental Propaganda is that its allegorical power is not limited to the current Russian kleptocracy: it serves as a critique of the mystique of power and propaganda in the U.S., as well. If, for instance, and following the aphorism of Marx found in Das Capital, “religion might have been regarded as opium for the people, it nonetheless contributed a lot of money to the budget.” The right-wing kleptocracy that currently controls the U.S. is in direct parallel, with its massive lies and its lifetime incarceration without charge, to the rule of Stalin. “Marxist-Leninists,” after all, “were good Marxists, kind people,” just as are Christian fundamentalists. “They wanted to establish a good life on earth for good people and a bad life for bad people…. And therefore they killed bad people” and, if practical, “they left the good people alive.”
Even though most Americans think the war in Iraq a bad idea, and that George W. Bush is destroying the U.S. economy, they nevertheless believe in the man and thus happily maintain that there was a connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam. As Katha Pollit recently wrote in The Nation, Americans have been sprinkled with “fear [not fairy!] dust.” We lack the courage of our common-sense convictions. We believe the lies because to not do so would result in cognitive dissonance. To avoid the insanity of cognitive dissonance, we have gone insane with fear—of terrorism, for sure, but the old bugaboos are still around: drugs, homosexuals, pagans… Why would Bush or Stalin lie about these dangers? They are the heroes of the state! After all, “a normal person understands that it’s dangerous and pointless to oppose universal insanity, and rational to participate in it. It should also be noted that people are all actors, and many of them easily adapt to the role written for them out of fear or in hopes of a worthwhile reward. The enlightened modern-day reader thinks that half-wits such as those we have described no longer exist. The author is unfortunately unable to agree. The sum total of viciousness and stupidity in humanity neither increases nor decreases….”
If this all sounds like a dark and pessimistic assessment of the state of things, and of states in general well—it is! But Monumental Propaganda is gloomy in the way that only a fine Russian novel can be: it laughs and dances in the midst of the Gulag or on its way to the gas chamber.
Stalin’s statue, like the man himself, took a fall. Power changed hands, and the “cult of personality” of Stalin was denounced. The statue, one morning, is dragged down from its pedestal. Aglaya Stepanovna is horrified, and bribes the worker charged with removing the idol to bring it to her apartment. And there it lives until Aglaya Stepanovna’s death decades later, in a tiny Soviet apartment. And “lives” is the right word for, farcically, the statue seems to be alive. Its eyes follow Aglaya Stepanovna and display approval (or not) for her actions. Middle-aged when the book begins, by halfway through (in the 1960s), Aglaya Stepanovna attracts a lover. But “I can’t with him here,” she tells her erstwhile boyfriend. Why not? the man cries, “It’s nothing but an inanimate object, cast iron, a piece of monumental propaganda, that’s all.” But, of course, it’s not just a hunk of scrap metal; it’s a personification of derzhavnost, of the mystical power of the state. For Aglaya Stepanovna “the most powerful manifestations of love and hate are quite indistinguishable from each other.”
But, of course, it’s not just a hunk of scrap metal; it’s a personification of derzhavnost, of the mystical power of the state. For Aglaya Stepanovna “the most powerful manifestations of love and hate are quite indistinguishable from each other.”
One type of derzhavnost replaces another. Another character, known as the Admiral (who thinks that “an abundance of poets is a sign of a people’s savagery”), “used to divide… post-October Revolution history into the eras of Cellar Terrorism (under Lenin, when they shot people in the cellars…), the Great Terror (under Stalin), Terror Within the Limits of Leninist Norms (under Khrushchev), Selective Terror (under Brezhnev), Transitional Terror (under Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev) and Terror Unlimited (the present time).” Ah—so that’s where we are, in the era of Terror Unlimited. Osama bin Laden is ever the great demon; never mind that he’s chained to a dialysis machine and must, therefore, be in the care of some nation (Ours? Theirs? Is there a difference, and does it matter?), he is now a brand name and terror is branded on our souls. Stalin, Bush, Osama (pick one) “is our idol” a character says in the 1990s. Monumental Propaganda “does not belong to the genre of crime fiction, being no more than a truthful reflection of our criminal social reality…” It is a brilliant novel—“so brilliant that at first they wanted to award him a doctorate for it, but then they gave him five years in exile instead.”
Ably translated by Andrew Bromfield, who has also brought us the brilliant Victor Pelevin and Boris Akunin, Monumental Propaganda is both funny and frightening, in the way that so many of the new Russian novels are. It comes highly recommended to those interested not only in Russia, but in the current state of the world as well.
Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book ( )
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Nel febbraio 1956, il giorno in cui si concluse il XX Congresso del PCUS, nella Casa Provinciale del Ferroviere veniva letta ai dirigenti locali del partito la relazione riservata di Chruscëv sul culto della personalità di Stalin.
Citazioni
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L'abbondanza di poeti è una caratteristica dei popoli primitivi. Così la pensava il mio anziano amico Aleksej Michajlovic Makarov, soprannominato Ammiraglio, di cui parlerò piu avanti. Quando me lo disse per la prima volta, mi sembro un'affermazione assurda, ma lui elenco paesi e varie parti del mondo dove la gente vegeta nella miseria e nell'ignoranza, alcuni non conoscono l'elettricità e la carta igienica, ma annoverano un numero impressionante di akyny, asugy, di poeti del popolo o di corte. Là il potere si rivolge con trepidazione alla parola poetica e i bravi poeti (coloro che scrivono bene del potere) vengono generosamente ricoperti di doni, a quelli cattivi (coloro che scrivono male del potere), invece, si taglia la testa. Qualche volta il rischio di rimanere senza testa influisce così tanto sulla coscienza, che può capitare che i cattivi poeti scrivano molto meglio dei bravi, i loro versi allora vengono ricopiati nei quaderni, imparati a memoria e tramandati di generazione in generazione. Benché a Dolgov l'educazione dei poeti avvenisse secondo un sistema dolce (non tagliavano la testa, ma neanche li lasciavano vivere in pace), il numero dei versificatori pro capite superava chiaramente il fabbisogno.
Tutti vedevano che il monumento era veramente diverso dagli altri, in virtù della forza misteriosa che emanava. Stava in mezzo alla piazza dalla quale si dipartivano strade e stradine in tutte le direzioni. Ma se prima convergevano come per case, risultato della caotica e secolare crescita urbana, ora era fisicamente percepibile che quelle vie e quei vicoli fossero attirati lì dallo straordinario magnetismo emesso dal monumento, e che esso era proprio il centro naturale della città, o meglio il centro senza il quale la città non poteva funzionare, come una ruota senza perno. Chi allora viveva a Dolgov non riusciva a figurarsi come la città avesse potuto anche solo esistere, senza la scultura.
[...] il cervello di una persona tendenzialmente ideologica è costruito in modo tale che sapendo una cosa, ne crede un'altra.
[...] più si ruba, più si è inflessibili dal punto di vista ideologico. Perciò, di fronte all'accaduto, la reazione della sala fu sincera e decisa. Anche se venne dopo un attimo di smarrimento. All'inizio fu flebile. Flebile e sorda. Poi fluì, rotolò dalle file piu lontane a quelle davanti. Rumore, rombo, mormorio, brusio, fruscio, quasi il fragore della risacca, e piu si faceva vicino al presidio, piu potente diventava. Il rumore e la tosse, il frastuono delle sedie e qualche grido isolato confluirono in un tutt'uno, e all'improvviso qualcuno cominciò a gridare: "Infamia! Infamia!" e tutti presi da crescente frenesia, urlavano, ululavano, fischiavano, battevano le mani, scalpicciavano con le gambe. Come cani sciolti dal guinzaglio, si erano eccitati alla possibilità di mordere e dilaniare la vittima che era stata gettata loro in pasto.
All'autore di queste righe e' capitato una volta di osservare un dramma avicolo. Una povera gallina crestata cadde casualmente in acqua. Per quanto strano sembri, non annegò, ma si inzuppò così tanto che perse tutte le piume fino all'ultima. Gli altri polli, al vederla con un aspetto tanto miserando, si scagliarono addosso all'infelice, quasi fossero rapaci nati. Dunque, anche in queste creature da niente ribollono grandi passioni e cova la disponibilità a finire a beccate il piu debole, proprio come facciamo noi. Si erano gettate sulla loro spiumata sorella con strida d'aquila, la beccavano e l'avrebbero uccisa, se non si fosse intromesso il padrone. La gallina venne separata dalle altre, e, passato un po' di tempo per far ricrescere le piume, fu accolta di nuovo nella famiglia dei polli.
C'è il pericolo che il lettore contemporaneo percepisca la scena appena descritta come esageratamente grottesca e, basandosi sulla logica, pensi: non può certo essere che decine di persone riunite insieme si mettano a parlare così! Pensate pure quello che volete, ma la gente di allora faceva proprio così, radunandosi a decine e a centinaia nei luoghi chiusi e a migliaia sulle piazze. E possibile che in mezzo a loro non se ne trovasse neanche uno normale che dicesse: ma, concittadini, che razza di assurdità state dicendo? Avete bisogno di andare tutti dritti in manicomio, e d'urgenza anche. Qualche volta se ne trovavano di tipi così. Ma i pazzi erano loro. Perché un uomo normale capisce che opporsi alla follia generale e' pericoloso e inutile, mentre e' ragionevole prendervi parte. Va anche osservato che alla gente, si sa, piace recitare, e molti si calano facilmente nel ruolo loro assegnato per paura o per la speranza di una degna ricompensa. Il lettore colto di oggi penserà che ormai non ci siano piu dei deficienti come quelli da noi descritti. Purtroppo l'autore non può essere d'accordo. Nell'umanità la quantità complessiva di meschinità e stupidita non aumenta né diminuisce, ma, per fortuna, non sempre e' richiesta in toto dall'epoca.
Per quello che l'autore ha potuto constatare in vita sua, la maggior parte delle persone, perfino quelle molto colte, non hanno né la sensazione né la nozione di vivere nella storia. La maggioranza pensa: sarà sempre tutto tale e quale a oggi. E se sotto ai loro occhi accade un avvenimento storico, lo considerano il risultato di una serie di malintesi concomitanti. E sembra sempre che tutto possa tornare come prima. Alcuni lo sperano, altri lo temono. Aglaja lo sperava, Subkin lo temeva, ed entrambi non capivano che la storia non torna indietro.
Michailovic Makarov, detto l'Ammiraglio, suddivide la nostra storia postrivoluzionaria nell'epoca del Terrore delle cantine (quando sotto Lenin si fucilava la gente negli scantinati della Ceka), in quella del grande Terrore (sotto Stalin), del Terrore nei limiti delle norme leniniste (sotto Chruscëv), del Terrore selettivo (sotto Breznev), del Terrore di passaggio (sotto Andropov, Cernenko e Gorbacëv) e del Terrore senza confini (il momento attuale). Uno qualsiasi condanna a morte un altro qualsiasi, per un motivo qualsiasi. La gente si fa fuori a vicenda con ogni mezzo possibile. Il massimo della resa e impunità totale.
Per lui, Anna Karenina, Padri e figli, I fratelli Karamazov, I fratelli Serapione erano "non male". Per la verità, esisteva anche un giudizio ancora più alto: "Tutt'alto che brutto", ma questo era riferito a Guerra e pace, Le anime morte, L'Eugenio Onegin, l'Iliade, La divina commedia e, mi pare, nient'altro. A essere precisi, lui aveva quattro giudizi per tutto ciò che si può leggere: "Tutt'altro che brutto", "Non male", "Niente da dire", "Così così"; il quinto era per quello che non valeva la pena leggere, neanche se pioveva: "Sotto i tacchi". A questa quinta categoria era riconducibile tutta la letteratura sovietica, salvo Il placido Don, gran parte della letteratura contemporanea occidentale e Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Era sempre stata una comunista convinta, una dirigente di partito, aveva sempre creduto nel potere sovietico e nel popolo sovietico. Credeva nella devozione del popolo agli ideali comunisti, nella sua salute morale e nella sua incorrittibilità. E nello stesso tempo non dubitava che ciascun signgolo membro di quello stesso popolo per un biglietto da cinque, e tanto più per uno da dieci, si sarebbe venduto il corpo per intero, l'anima, la patria, il popolo e gli ideali comunisti. Se avesse letto in qualche romanzo o racconto che un funzionario immaginato da uno scrittore avesse preso una bustarella da un utente, lei avrebbe immediatamente scritto alla redazione un'irata nota di protesta. Calunnia della nostra realtà. I nostri lavoratori sovietici non prendono bustarelle e l'autore di simili assurde elucubrazioni va punito con la massima severità. Ma nella vita reale non le venive neanche in mente che un impiegato sovietico, semplice o importante, trascurasse l'opportunità di intascarsi quello che davano o non desse quello che chiedevano.
Certamente le è capitato di andare in campagna. Se ha notato, in ogni villaggio c'è un scemo e un saggio. Un contadino qualsiasi. La sua testolina sta tutta in un pugno e anche il cervello non sarà un granché. Ma lui pensa in modo chiaro e sensato, sulla scorta di quello che sa della vita e della propria esperienza personale. Ed è questo che le consiglio di fare. Il cervello umano si distingue non solo per le dimensioni, ma anche per il modo con cui si appropria del materiale che apprende. Semplificando, il cervello può essere considerato come un magazzino, un mulino o un laboratorio chimico. Un magazzino può essere molto capiente, ingombro di molti oggetti, ma più oggetti ci sono , più è difficile sistemarli. Il mulino è in grado di macinare solo quello che vi si versa dentro. Può anche essere piccolo e primitivo, ma se il grano è buono, ne farà una farina niente male. Se si prende invece un mulino grande, moderno, con buone macine e vagli ideali, e ci si mette dentro del grano scadente, non si tirerà fuori niente di buono. Il cervello più raffinato è quello creativo: il laboratorio chimico. Ci si mette dentro quello che si vuole e ne esce qualcosa di completamene nuovo, una sintesi. È così che funziona tutto: il sapere, la memoria, la capacità di pensieri originali. Un cervello del genere si incontra raramente, è raro anche in chi ha la testa grossa.
[...] "L'umanità ha ormai già espresso tante idee intelligentissime, e allora... non abbiamo più bisogno di niente? Ma per qualche motivo io lei siamo siamo qui a pensare e non a scambiarci citazioni. Per quanto, mi creda, anch'io ne ho moltissime in testa. E ce ne sono di molto brillanti. Con alcune di esse posso sostenere il mio pensiero. Ma non si può sostituire un pensiero originale con delle citazioni". "Perché?" chiesi io. "Perché ogni pensiero vale qualcosa solo quando è nato nella testa di una persona concreta, in circostanze concrete, sulla base di un'esperienza personale e come risultato di una riflessione personale" [...].
Ultime parole
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Beffandomi di me stesso e del mio delirio notturno, mi girai indietro con la stupida intenzione di cnvincermi ancora una volta che tutto era come avrebbe dovuto essere. Il piedistallo s vedeva ancora. La parte inferiore annegava nella nebbia e perciò la parte in alto sembrava staccata da terra, come se levitasse. E sopra il piedistallo, da un grumo di nebbia e, forse, dalla mia immaginazione sconvolta, si era venuta a formare una figura. Dalla forma vagamente umana. Mi seguiva con lo sguardo, ridacchiava e scuoteva la mano destra sollevata in alto.
From Vladimir Voinovich, one of the great satirists of contemporary Russian literature, comes a new comic novel about the absurdity of politics and the place of the individual in the sweep of human events. Monumental Propaganda, Voinovich’s first novel in twelve years, centers on Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, a true believer in Stalin, who finds herself bewildered and beleaguered in the relative openness of the Khrushchev era. She believes her greatest achievement was to have browbeaten her community into building an iron statue of the supreme leader, which she moves into her apartment after his death. And despite the ebb and flow of political ideology in her provincial town, she stubbornly, and at all costs, centers her life on her private icon. Voinovich’s humanely comic vision has never been sharper than it is in this hilarious but deeply moving tale–equally all-seeing about Stalinism, the era of Khrushchev, and glasnost in the final years of Soviet rule. TheNew York Times Book Reviewcalled his classic work,The Life & Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, “a masterpiece of a new form–socialist surrealism . . . the SovietCatch-22written by a latter-day Gogol." InMonumental Propagandawe have the welcome return of a truly singular voice in world literature.
Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina is a middle-aged partisan and Communist Party member when the novel begins in 1957. During the “Great Patriotic War” (i.e., the Second World War), she led a unit that was twice decorated. She and her husband, a fellow partisan, together blew up a German power station. Thing is, her husband was still inside the power station when Aglaya pushed the plunger. But that’s how she is: there’s a job to be done, and nothing gets in her way. After the war she goes home to Dolgov, where she quickly rises in the ranks of the Party nomenklatura. She arranged to have a statue of Stalin made and erected in the town square: the monumental propaganda of the title. Revkina gives the dedicatory speech at the unveiling and “She managed to convey in a few words the idea of the exceptional usefulness and necessity, especially in our days, of all forms of propaganda, and in particular of large-scale, monumental visual propaganda designed to endure through the ages. The monument, she said, which had been erected despite the opposition of our enemies, would stand here for thousands of years, inspiring future builders of communism to new feats of heroism.”
Compliant after a few days of torture, Klaus Felsen, a successful German factory owner, is cashiered into the SS. His job is critical – purchasing or poaching wolfram, a particular metal need by the Reich, with Lisbon as his base of operations. More importantly, the port city is the source of wolfram. The greedy fingers of the nefarious past reach out to corrupt the future, where Inspector Coelho has barely begun gathering information for the case of the murdered girl.
Stalin’s hold on the imagination of certain Soviets (and even, to this day, of certain Russians) is known in Russian, as the human-rights activist Sergei Kovalyov (a contemporary of Sakharov and, like him, a scientist) wrote, as “derzhavnost, that is, the view of the state as a highly valuable mystical being that every citizen and society as a whole must serve.” The “slave mentality,” Kovalyov said, still exists from tsarist days: “the Gulag still exists” in the people’s “willingness to accept propaganda and lies, and in its indifference to the fate of its fellow citizens or to the crimes and transgressions including those committed by the state.” Voinovich’s novel was originally published in Russian in 2002 and, like so many ostensibly historical accounts, is meant to resonate with the present: it serves as a kind of allegory of the present in its recounting of the crimes of the past. The eerie thing about Monumental Propaganda is that its allegorical power is not limited to the current Russian kleptocracy: it serves as a critique of the mystique of power and propaganda in the U.S., as well. If, for instance, and following the aphorism of Marx found in Das Capital, “religion might have been regarded as opium for the people, it nonetheless contributed a lot of money to the budget.” The right-wing kleptocracy that currently controls the U.S. is in direct parallel, with its massive lies and its lifetime incarceration without charge, to the rule of Stalin. “Marxist-Leninists,” after all, “were good Marxists, kind people,” just as are Christian fundamentalists. “They wanted to establish a good life on earth for good people and a bad life for bad people…. And therefore they killed bad people” and, if practical, “they left the good people alive.”
Even though most Americans think the war in Iraq a bad idea, and that George W. Bush is destroying the U.S. economy, they nevertheless believe in the man and thus happily maintain that there was a connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam. As Katha Pollit recently wrote in The Nation, Americans have been sprinkled with “fear [not fairy!] dust.” We lack the courage of our common-sense convictions. We believe the lies because to not do so would result in cognitive dissonance. To avoid the insanity of cognitive dissonance, we have gone insane with fear—of terrorism, for sure, but the old bugaboos are still around: drugs, homosexuals, pagans… Why would Bush or Stalin lie about these dangers? They are the heroes of the state! After all, “a normal person understands that it’s dangerous and pointless to oppose universal insanity, and rational to participate in it. It should also be noted that people are all actors, and many of them easily adapt to the role written for them out of fear or in hopes of a worthwhile reward. The enlightened modern-day reader thinks that half-wits such as those we have described no longer exist. The author is unfortunately unable to agree. The sum total of viciousness and stupidity in humanity neither increases nor decreases….”
If this all sounds like a dark and pessimistic assessment of the state of things, and of states in general well—it is! But Monumental Propaganda is gloomy in the way that only a fine Russian novel can be: it laughs and dances in the midst of the Gulag or on its way to the gas chamber.
Stalin’s statue, like the man himself, took a fall. Power changed hands, and the “cult of personality” of Stalin was denounced. The statue, one morning, is dragged down from its pedestal. Aglaya Stepanovna is horrified, and bribes the worker charged with removing the idol to bring it to her apartment. And there it lives until Aglaya Stepanovna’s death decades later, in a tiny Soviet apartment. And “lives” is the right word for, farcically, the statue seems to be alive. Its eyes follow Aglaya Stepanovna and display approval (or not) for her actions. Middle-aged when the book begins, by halfway through (in the 1960s), Aglaya Stepanovna attracts a lover. But “I can’t with him here,” she tells her erstwhile boyfriend. Why not? the man cries, “It’s nothing but an inanimate object, cast iron, a piece of monumental propaganda, that’s all.” But, of course, it’s not just a hunk of scrap metal; it’s a personification of derzhavnost, of the mystical power of the state. For Aglaya Stepanovna “the most powerful manifestations of love and hate are quite indistinguishable from each other.”
But, of course, it’s not just a hunk of scrap metal; it’s a personification of derzhavnost, of the mystical power of the state. For Aglaya Stepanovna “the most powerful manifestations of love and hate are quite indistinguishable from each other.”
One type of derzhavnost replaces another. Another character, known as the Admiral (who thinks that “an abundance of poets is a sign of a people’s savagery”), “used to divide… post-October Revolution history into the eras of Cellar Terrorism (under Lenin, when they shot people in the cellars…), the Great Terror (under Stalin), Terror Within the Limits of Leninist Norms (under Khrushchev), Selective Terror (under Brezhnev), Transitional Terror (under Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev) and Terror Unlimited (the present time).” Ah—so that’s where we are, in the era of Terror Unlimited. Osama bin Laden is ever the great demon; never mind that he’s chained to a dialysis machine and must, therefore, be in the care of some nation (Ours? Theirs? Is there a difference, and does it matter?), he is now a brand name and terror is branded on our souls. Stalin, Bush, Osama (pick one) “is our idol” a character says in the 1990s. Monumental Propaganda “does not belong to the genre of crime fiction, being no more than a truthful reflection of our criminal social reality…” It is a brilliant novel—“so brilliant that at first they wanted to award him a doctorate for it, but then they gave him five years in exile instead.”
Ably translated by Andrew Bromfield, who has also brought us the brilliant Victor Pelevin and Boris Akunin, Monumental Propaganda is both funny and frightening, in the way that so many of the new Russian novels are. It comes highly recommended to those interested not only in Russia, but in the current state of the world as well.
Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book ( )