Subject
Russian Novelist Aleksandr Prokhanov: Butterfly Collector
From
Date
Body
EDITOR'S note. For those of you who follow contemporary Russian
fiction.....
-----------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Corinne Scheiner" <cscheiner@ColoradoCollege.edu>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, August 25, 2002 1:05 PM
Subject: FW: NYTimes.com Article: Russian Novelist Scoffs at Post-Soviet
Leaders
> ---------------- Message requiring your approval (180
lines) ------------------
> Russian Novelist Scoffs at Post-Soviet Leaders
>
> August 25, 2002
> By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
>
>
> MOSCOW, Aug. 24 - Aleksandr Prokhanov edits an
> anti-Semitic, anti-Western, anticapitalist newspaper called
> Zavtra. He was visited by the Klansman David Duke, told the
> crowd at this year's Communist Party May Day rally that a
> new red revolution was about to sweep Russia and has
> defended a neo-fascist leader accused of plotting terrorist
> acts.
>
> But in recent months many Moscow intellectuals and
> mainstream readers have embraced his latest novel, which
> satirizes many of Russia's major figures of the last decade
> and accuses the government of a role in the apartment
> bombings that rocked the city in 1999 and led to the
> current war in Chechnya.
>
> The novel, titled "Mr. Hexagen" after the explosive the
> authorities say blew up the apartment buildings, has sold
> 60,000 copies since its publication in April - fewer than
> detective novels or Harry Potter, but an impressive best
> seller by Russian standards. Mr. Prokhanov won a
> prestigious new-book prize for the novel, which has taken
> on a new resonance since the recent apartment blast in
> Moscow, which officials attribute to a gas leak and most
> residents to a bomb.
>
> The acceptance by readers of Mr. Prokhanov's unsavory
> views, which are manifest in the novel, underscore the ugly
> undercurrents pulling at President Vladimir V. Putin's
> warming of relations with the West.
>
> Mr. Prokhanov's offbeat personality has increased the
> novel's mystique. He collects butterflies, speaks and
> writes in elaborate metaphors and promises seven more
> novels about the ruins of the Soviet empire.
>
> "Not dead ruins, but ruins full of souls, of demons," he
> said in an interview in his timeworn Zavtra office. "I am
> the last soldier of the empire. We are in an ark, floating
> in the flood toward Ararat."
>
> Prominent young critics call Mr. Prokhanov, 64, an antidote
> to boring post-Soviet, politically correct prose, a return
> to socially conscious classical Russian literature.
>
> "Looking back on my liberal past, I don't see anything but
> lies and shame," wrote Dmitri Olshansky, a critic in his
> 20's, in April in Vremya MN, a liberal daily. "True
> literature discusses only two themes: death and power."
>
> "The best Russian writer of 2002 is Aleksandr Prokhanov,"
> he said.
>
> The novel's main characters are barely disguised versions
> of the figures that dominated Russia in the 1990's, and the
> plot is like a nesting-doll - a conspiracy theory within a
> conspiracy theory.
>
> First published last fall as a small special edition of
> Zavtra, "Mr. Hexagen" exploded onto the scene after Ad
> Marginem, an intellectual publisher specializing in
> translations of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin,
> published it in a striking hardcover edition depicting
> Lenin's skull.
>
> Moving Together, a pro-Putin youth group that recently
> instigated pornography charges against Vladimir Sorokin,
> another Ad Marginem author, says no actions are planned
> against Mr. Prokhanov.
>
> "He is much less dangerous to Russian culture," said a
> spokesman for the group.
>
> In the novel, the character thought to resemble Boris N.
> Yeltsin, Little God, is portrayed as a bumbling drunk. He
> and his domineering, nymphomaniac daughter are manipulated
> by Jewish oligarchs controlled by former K.G.B. agents in
> league with the new world order.
>
> The Chosen One - Mr. Putin, readers assume - is brought to
> power by the apartment bombings staged by the corrupt
> special services. In some of the novel's weirder scenes, he
> resembles a dolphin and later turns into a ray of light,
> which some interpret as a hint that he may ultimately be
> part of a patriotic new order within the secret services.
>
> Mr. Prokhanov once tentatively supported Mr. Putin, but in
> a Russian newspaper interview last week the author called
> the president's policies "makeup that is put on a corpse in
> a morgue."
>
> The book's allegations coincide with charges about the 1999
> bombings and the Chechen war made by Boris A. Berezovsky,
> the financier who is now living in exile and the man
> thought to be the model for the novel's most evil oligarch.
>
>
> Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a liberal newspaper owned by Mr.
> Berezovsky, was the first mainstream publication to take
> note of the novel, causing rumors that he financed its
> promotion.
>
> But the novel's prose is built on anti-Semitism and
> Stalinist nostalgia that no real liberal could swallow. At
> an elaborate Kremlin banquet of caviar, partridge and
> tongue, the Berezovsky character says that Jews will take
> power and ship all sick Russians to the Arctic.
>
> "And we'll start to take the blood and organs of the
> healthy and sell them to medical centers in Israel,
> satisfying the nostalgic feelings of Jews who have come
> from Russia," he says before downing Champagne.
>
> Some are taken with the novel's phantasmagoric prose, some
> think it is a joke, others call it a dangerous
> postmodernist game.
>
> "They have crossed the line, not Prokhanov, but the elite,"
> said Aleksandr Arkhangelsky, a deputy editor of Izvestia
> and a literary critic who has denounced the book. "Some
> people have started to treat the U.S.S.R. as an element of
> style than can be separated from blood. From my point of
> view, relativism has led to this."
>
> As a Soviet military correspondent, Mr. Prokhanov traveled
> the cold-war era "proxy war" circuit from Afghanistan to
> Nicaragua, writing novels and collecting butterflies. One
> literary critic called him "the songbird of the General
> Staff."
>
> Now he draws comparisons to Dostoyevsky, Kipling, Hunter S.
> Thompson and - for his butterfly fetish - to Vladimir
> Nabokov.
>
> A trendy art critic organized a recent exhibit of
> neon-colored village scenes painted by Mr. Prokhanov, who
> was interviewed and posed with his butterflies for a recent
> Russian edition of Playboy.
>
> "What amazed us in this novel is it shows how Russia loved
> capitalism in the 1990's," said Aleksandr Ivanov, the
> director of Ad Marginem. "There was adolescent joy over
> supermarkets, Coca-Cola, foie gras, and Beaujolais. It was
> puppy love. It was very banal."
>
> "Prokhanov shows the death of this politics of the 1990's,"
> Mr. Ivanov said. "He is a real necrophiliac."
>
> Mikhail Kotomin, Ad Marginem's chief editor, compares Mr.
> Prokhanov with Tolstoy and calls his Zavtra editorials
> "poetry in prose."
>
> "Prokhanov has the energy of social hatred," said Mr.
> Kotomin, 25. "After reading the novel, when you see a
> Mercedes you want to throw stones at it."
>
>
>
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/25/international/europe/25RUSS.html?ex=103130
5
> 436&ei=1&en=9e39490793f75532
>
>
>
>
fiction.....
-----------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Corinne Scheiner" <cscheiner@ColoradoCollege.edu>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, August 25, 2002 1:05 PM
Subject: FW: NYTimes.com Article: Russian Novelist Scoffs at Post-Soviet
Leaders
> ---------------- Message requiring your approval (180
lines) ------------------
> Russian Novelist Scoffs at Post-Soviet Leaders
>
> August 25, 2002
> By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
>
>
> MOSCOW, Aug. 24 - Aleksandr Prokhanov edits an
> anti-Semitic, anti-Western, anticapitalist newspaper called
> Zavtra. He was visited by the Klansman David Duke, told the
> crowd at this year's Communist Party May Day rally that a
> new red revolution was about to sweep Russia and has
> defended a neo-fascist leader accused of plotting terrorist
> acts.
>
> But in recent months many Moscow intellectuals and
> mainstream readers have embraced his latest novel, which
> satirizes many of Russia's major figures of the last decade
> and accuses the government of a role in the apartment
> bombings that rocked the city in 1999 and led to the
> current war in Chechnya.
>
> The novel, titled "Mr. Hexagen" after the explosive the
> authorities say blew up the apartment buildings, has sold
> 60,000 copies since its publication in April - fewer than
> detective novels or Harry Potter, but an impressive best
> seller by Russian standards. Mr. Prokhanov won a
> prestigious new-book prize for the novel, which has taken
> on a new resonance since the recent apartment blast in
> Moscow, which officials attribute to a gas leak and most
> residents to a bomb.
>
> The acceptance by readers of Mr. Prokhanov's unsavory
> views, which are manifest in the novel, underscore the ugly
> undercurrents pulling at President Vladimir V. Putin's
> warming of relations with the West.
>
> Mr. Prokhanov's offbeat personality has increased the
> novel's mystique. He collects butterflies, speaks and
> writes in elaborate metaphors and promises seven more
> novels about the ruins of the Soviet empire.
>
> "Not dead ruins, but ruins full of souls, of demons," he
> said in an interview in his timeworn Zavtra office. "I am
> the last soldier of the empire. We are in an ark, floating
> in the flood toward Ararat."
>
> Prominent young critics call Mr. Prokhanov, 64, an antidote
> to boring post-Soviet, politically correct prose, a return
> to socially conscious classical Russian literature.
>
> "Looking back on my liberal past, I don't see anything but
> lies and shame," wrote Dmitri Olshansky, a critic in his
> 20's, in April in Vremya MN, a liberal daily. "True
> literature discusses only two themes: death and power."
>
> "The best Russian writer of 2002 is Aleksandr Prokhanov,"
> he said.
>
> The novel's main characters are barely disguised versions
> of the figures that dominated Russia in the 1990's, and the
> plot is like a nesting-doll - a conspiracy theory within a
> conspiracy theory.
>
> First published last fall as a small special edition of
> Zavtra, "Mr. Hexagen" exploded onto the scene after Ad
> Marginem, an intellectual publisher specializing in
> translations of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin,
> published it in a striking hardcover edition depicting
> Lenin's skull.
>
> Moving Together, a pro-Putin youth group that recently
> instigated pornography charges against Vladimir Sorokin,
> another Ad Marginem author, says no actions are planned
> against Mr. Prokhanov.
>
> "He is much less dangerous to Russian culture," said a
> spokesman for the group.
>
> In the novel, the character thought to resemble Boris N.
> Yeltsin, Little God, is portrayed as a bumbling drunk. He
> and his domineering, nymphomaniac daughter are manipulated
> by Jewish oligarchs controlled by former K.G.B. agents in
> league with the new world order.
>
> The Chosen One - Mr. Putin, readers assume - is brought to
> power by the apartment bombings staged by the corrupt
> special services. In some of the novel's weirder scenes, he
> resembles a dolphin and later turns into a ray of light,
> which some interpret as a hint that he may ultimately be
> part of a patriotic new order within the secret services.
>
> Mr. Prokhanov once tentatively supported Mr. Putin, but in
> a Russian newspaper interview last week the author called
> the president's policies "makeup that is put on a corpse in
> a morgue."
>
> The book's allegations coincide with charges about the 1999
> bombings and the Chechen war made by Boris A. Berezovsky,
> the financier who is now living in exile and the man
> thought to be the model for the novel's most evil oligarch.
>
>
> Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a liberal newspaper owned by Mr.
> Berezovsky, was the first mainstream publication to take
> note of the novel, causing rumors that he financed its
> promotion.
>
> But the novel's prose is built on anti-Semitism and
> Stalinist nostalgia that no real liberal could swallow. At
> an elaborate Kremlin banquet of caviar, partridge and
> tongue, the Berezovsky character says that Jews will take
> power and ship all sick Russians to the Arctic.
>
> "And we'll start to take the blood and organs of the
> healthy and sell them to medical centers in Israel,
> satisfying the nostalgic feelings of Jews who have come
> from Russia," he says before downing Champagne.
>
> Some are taken with the novel's phantasmagoric prose, some
> think it is a joke, others call it a dangerous
> postmodernist game.
>
> "They have crossed the line, not Prokhanov, but the elite,"
> said Aleksandr Arkhangelsky, a deputy editor of Izvestia
> and a literary critic who has denounced the book. "Some
> people have started to treat the U.S.S.R. as an element of
> style than can be separated from blood. From my point of
> view, relativism has led to this."
>
> As a Soviet military correspondent, Mr. Prokhanov traveled
> the cold-war era "proxy war" circuit from Afghanistan to
> Nicaragua, writing novels and collecting butterflies. One
> literary critic called him "the songbird of the General
> Staff."
>
> Now he draws comparisons to Dostoyevsky, Kipling, Hunter S.
> Thompson and - for his butterfly fetish - to Vladimir
> Nabokov.
>
> A trendy art critic organized a recent exhibit of
> neon-colored village scenes painted by Mr. Prokhanov, who
> was interviewed and posed with his butterflies for a recent
> Russian edition of Playboy.
>
> "What amazed us in this novel is it shows how Russia loved
> capitalism in the 1990's," said Aleksandr Ivanov, the
> director of Ad Marginem. "There was adolescent joy over
> supermarkets, Coca-Cola, foie gras, and Beaujolais. It was
> puppy love. It was very banal."
>
> "Prokhanov shows the death of this politics of the 1990's,"
> Mr. Ivanov said. "He is a real necrophiliac."
>
> Mikhail Kotomin, Ad Marginem's chief editor, compares Mr.
> Prokhanov with Tolstoy and calls his Zavtra editorials
> "poetry in prose."
>
> "Prokhanov has the energy of social hatred," said Mr.
> Kotomin, 25. "After reading the novel, when you see a
> Mercedes you want to throw stones at it."
>
>
>
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/25/international/europe/25RUSS.html?ex=103130
5
> 436&ei=1&en=9e39490793f75532
>
>
>
>