Bulgakov’s Ghost

by: Emily Parker

Over the past year, dozens of activists have been arrested in Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on dissent. The blogger Aleksei A. Navalny, a prominent opposition figure who is on trial as of this writing, faces a possible sentence of 10 years. Nonprofit groups that receive financing from abroad are now required by law to identify themselves as “foreign agents.” The need for a robust literary outcry would seem as great as ever. But what has happened to Russia’s famous tradition of dissident literature — and to its readers?


A former Soviet dissident, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, told me books once gave him air to breathe. Yet now that he can find any book he wants, he hardly reads at all. Books, he explained, no longer have the power to change his vision of the world. I heard a similar sentiment from Dmitry Ravinskij, a senior researcher at the National Library of Russia, whom I met in a cozy St. Petersburg cafe. Ravinskij, born in 1950, has white curly hair and a gently sorrowful expression. He described seeing hopelessness in today’s Russia, a point sadly illustrated when, in the midst of our conversation, someone lifted my wallet from my shoulder bag.
Ravinskij’s mood brightened when he talked about reading back in the days of the Soviet Union. “The publication of ‘The Master and Margarita’ was a great event in the life of my generation,” he told me. Though Mikhail Bulgakov’s work was written in the 1930s it wasn’t published until 1966, when the magazine Moscow began serializing it. Its satirical portrait of Stalinist Russia veered far from the usual state-sanctioned material.

In a 2002 Bomb magazine interview, the novelist Victor Pelevin, author of “Generation P,” said it’s impossible to explain Bulgakov’s effect to those who didn’t live through Soviet times. “ ‘The Master and Margarita’ didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet, yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things.”

Bulgakov’s work helped people recognize one another. “Many people began to speak by sentences from this novel. It was a language,” Ravinskij told me. “There were people who had read ‘The Master and Margarita,’ and people who had not read ‘The Master and Margarita.’ It was two different groups. It was a cultural difference, and at some point it became a political difference.”

Ravinskij also read books that were secretly written and circulated (known as samizdat) and especially prohibited works that were published abroad (known as tamizdat). In 1983, one of his friends informed on him for reading a forbidden book, and he lost his teaching job.

Yet today Ravinskij no longer reads serious literature. “Reading for me is not as fascinating as when I would read a forbidden book at 2 a.m. because I have to return it in the morning,” he explained. Nor is literature a central focus of the new generation of dissidents. Since late 2011, tens of thousands of Russians have taken to the streets to protest the Putin government. Aleksei Navalny told me in 2011 that he read a lot. Yet when I asked if any particular book had influenced his thinking, he said there was nothing in particular. Rather, newspapers were what moved him, as did the first television shows of the post-Soviet era.

While radio and newspapers today are more open than state-controlled television, in recent years the Internet has been the most free space in Russia. Now authorities may be clamping down. Still, just as “The Master and Margarita” once did, the Internet has already helped create a community with its own shared language and understanding.

Oleg Kashin, a journalist and opposition activist, told me that rather than books, “the Internet is more important for the opposition and for society in general.” Authors still make statements, but not necessarily through their work. Kashin pointed to the novelist Mikhail Shishkin, who in March refused to attend BookExpo America because he didn’t want to represent a “criminal regime.” “This declaration generated such a number of articles and responses on social media,” Kashin said. “Not one of his books caused as big a stir as Shishkin’s small comment.”

Recent protests, largely organized via social media, have tended to be diverse and decentralized. The novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya told me in an e-mail that last year’s demonstrations included “anarchists, fascists, the National Bolsheviks, Communists, right, left, democrats, monarchists and other most exotic groups.” Once again, it is through their protests, rather than the written word alone, that writers are making themselves heard. Last year, 12 writers led a march around Moscow. Participants included the crime writer Grigory Chkhartishvili, who writes under the name Boris Akunin, and the poet Dmitry Bykov.


Ulitskaya said it’s “hard to imagine any one book that could unite this Noah’s ark.” Yet there are still novels that inspire the opposition. Yury Saprykin, a journalist and opposition activist, points to the work of Ulitskaya, Eduard Limonov and Zakhar Prilepin. Another common point of reference is Pelevin, who satirizes post-Soviet Russia’s consumer culture. In a blog post titled “Purely Pelevin,” Navalny documented how someone took the logo of his Web site RosPil, which tracks government corruption, and put it on a chocolate label. Vladimir Sorokin’s “Day of the Oprichnik” is also cited by critics of the Kremlin. The novel, set in 2028, takes place in a Russia that has become a high-tech surveillance state ruled by wandering thugs.

Yet this new wave seems to have little in common with dissident classics like “The Gulag Archipelago,” whose bleakly realistic depiction of Soviet labor camps helped shatter illusions about Communism. In contrast, Pelevin and Sorokin couch their critiques in dystopic satires. Such books don’t deal with “ethical choices or moral problems,” Saprykin, the opposition activist, said — nor do they offer a road map for resistance. The journalist Katya Parkhomenko added that these novelists “do not fight or struggle; they just invent a world which somehow reminds us of ourselves.” Perhaps it’s as the novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya says: a writer can change reality, “but the reality also changes the writer.”

The experience of reading has seemingly changed as well: “I remember in the late Brezhnev era riding the metro and reading the forbidden ‘1984,’ ” Sorokin told me. “It was an unforgettable feeling, Orwell’s characters were sitting all around me! I was raising my head and looking around, as if to confirm the text: here it is, here it is!” “1984” may not have the same impact today, but in other ways, Sorokin says, the past is not dead. “Most nauseating is the smell of Soviet stagnation that increasingly wafts from the Kremlin. It is that same smell that led to the collapse of the country in 1991. It appears that history will repeat itself.”

Russia may need good protest literature more than ever, according to Sorokin. “Especially at these times, one wants for a writer to sit down, take a steel quill pen and, dipping it in his left hand, write a great novel in blood.”

But then, would Russia’s opposition even read it? The journalist Maxim Trudolyubov, editorial page editor at the Russian business daily Vedomosti, told me plainly: “Books are for adults, revolution is for the young.”

from: NY Times