Linksmas pragaras: grotesko poetika trijuose vėlyvojo tarybmečio prozos kūriniuose | Merry hell: poetics of the grotesque in three works of fiction of the late Soviet period

Abstract

The grotesque as a means of representing high social tensions and contradictions and as a tool of aesthetic subversion played an important role in the Soviet literature from its start. After the Second World War, the genre flourished throughout the Eastern Bloc. That it remained current throughout the region until the 1990s is shown by a comparison of three novels from that period, – one from Russia, one from Poland, and one from Lithuania: the phantasmagorical works of fiction Moskva-Petushki by Venedikt Erofeev, Mala Apokalipsa by Tadeusz Konwicki, and Vilniaus Pokeris by Ričardas Gavelis. I try to show that grotesque succeeded in being a satire of the late socialist world and at the same time conveyed the menacing aspect of it. They reveal it as an absurd age that carries the seeds of its demise within itself.I analyze in depth three interconnected themes of a grotesque origin. Firstly, I pick out the theme of entropy and (self) destruction. The writers make use of the topos of the journey to the land of the dead, in which the contemporary society is revealed as in the novels; the motive of self-destruction is conveyed by the alcoholism of the isolated protagonists, most brilliantly in Erofeev’s story. Thus, the writers argue indirectly with the notion of M. Bakhtin that grotesque is a product of the collective optimistic “body of the people”. Secondly, it is the eccentric narrative perspective sub specie morti, represented by what one can call a narrative oxymoron: all three texts are narrated in the first person by characters that are already dead. This otherworldly point of view enables authors to transpose the dimensions of normality and to produce a harsh satire of the socialist state and society. Thirdly, it is the theme of the elusive identity and distorted reality. I maintain that this notion is not so much an influence of Western postmodernism as it is commonly explained, but, on the one hand, it is a traditional menippean motif, and, on the other hand, results from the ideocratic nature of the Soviet regime. In conditions of the ideological monopoly, every fact and interpretation came to be understood as fallacious and usurping, and the only possible position was clinging to the relativity of truth and absurdity of reality.