Postmodernist Moscow in the Prose of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin
19
increasing his masculine power in his relationship with women. This
building is one of the most striking examples of Stalinist architecture. It
can be argued, therefore, that Petrusˇevskaja’s text implies that the prag-
matic and rationalised system of space associated with Stalinism collapsed
and gave way to the sense of freedom and indeterminacy, since her prota-
gonist’s masculinity and rationalism are laughed away.
Given this type of analysis, it is possible to view Petrusˇevskaja’s and
Pelevin’s image of Moscow in the light of the urban theory of a ‘soft’ city
as developed in Jonathan Raban’s book “Soft City”. He argues that it is not
simply that urban life has become more superficial and oriented towards
consumption and seduction through images in the context of late capita-
lism, but that the city in itself is an imaginary space. Raban writes: “Cities,
unlike villages and towns, are plastic by nature. We mould them in our
images: they in turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to
impose a personal form on them. In this sense, it seems to me that living
in a city is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe
the particular relation between man and material that exists in the con-
tinual creative play of urban living” (Raban 1974, 10). Raban explains that
the basic dynamic of urban life derives from the fact that we live in close
proximity to strangers. The interactions with strangers and unexpected
encounters with them in public places and transport make us see city life
as a manifestation of theatricality. The experience of cities becomes a pro-
cess of acting and perceiving ourselves as actors. Raban’s preposition pro-
vides us with a useful tool to explain the ironic detachment and estrange-
ment found in the fiction of Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin, who convey post-
modernity as a certain way of experiencing space. Theorists of postmo-
dernity such as Jencks and Rorty understand it not primarily as a style or
method of representation but as a certain mood or way of perception of
life
2
. Yet both Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin warn their readers that there is
always a danger of dissolving one’s identity through the play of represen-
tations because the inhabitant of the postmodern city is no longer a sub-
ject apart from his or her performances. Their narratives that feature post-
Soviet Moscow suggest that the border between self and city has become
fluid. As was demonstrated above, Petrusˇevskaja’s and Pelevin’s vision of
urban space as imaginary in a deconstructive sense of the term is closely
linked to the representation of a decentred subject which can neither
fully identify with nor fully dissociate from the signs which constitute the
city. These important signs are entwined in their narratives with numer-
ous Moscow locations with which these authors identify themselves but
2
See, for example, Rorty’s reference to postmodernism as “the new philosophical
world-view” in Rorty 1997 and Jencks’s description of postmodern sensibility in
Jencks and Kropf 1997, 10f.
20
Alexandra Smith
also from which they become estranged. A list of such locations would in-
clude Tverskoj Boulevard, Moscow University, Gorkij Theatre, Ostan-
kino, Clean Ponds, Garden Ring, the Pusˇkin and Griboedov monuments,
Pusˇkin Square, Intourist hotels, TV companies, publishing houses, in-
dustrial outskirts, lavatories, crowded flats, mental hospitals, buses, toy
shops, restaurants, and cinema halls. The theatrical and even cinematogra-
phic nature of their imaginary ‘soft’ city is also evident in many titles they
chose for their novels and stories, including Pelevin’s “The Blue Lantern”,
“The Tambourine of the Upper World”, “Cµapaev and Void”, “Mid-Game”,
and “Crystal World”; and Petrusˇevskaja’s “The Ball of a Last Person”, “Little
Sorceress: A Novel for Puppets”, “Waterloo Bridge”, “Happy End”, “Me-
dea”, and “Cinderella’s Path”.
In light of the above-mentioned comparisons of the writing of Petru-
sˇevskaja and Pelevin with pop-art, it can be also added that their image of
Moscow appears to be ephemeral, transient and provisional. Both authors
use historical events and names in a strictly contemporary way, trying to
re-define them, or more precisely – to animate them in an entertaining
manner, reducing Moscow’s historical space to the format of an animated
comic book. Such book is similar to other types of pop-culture. If in sculp-
ture, for example, pop sensibility was expressed in brightly coloured plastic
shapes, pop paintings were often used for producing commercial ad-
vertisements and comic books associated with being sexy, glamorous and
young. Yet the image becomes depersonalised through reproduction. As
one critic points out, “What often seems to interest the pop painter is the
fact that the object is depersonalised, typical rather than individual – the
device of the monotonously repeated identical image” (Lucie-Smith in
Stangos 1991, 235). This is why both Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin inscribe
the most reproduced visual ‘snaps’ of Moscow, which they revive through
presenting them from an unusual perspective. By referring to the past,
Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin pay tribute to events and places from the past
and to the past itself, yet their fairy-tale like narratives are firmly placed in
the present.
Furthermore, their fiction has a youthful look and appeal, making, for
example, the Barbie doll, a cult object for young females in Russia, turn
into an enlightening figure in Petrusˇevskaja’s narrative. Cµapaev, a model
of masculinity for young males in the Soviet period and Perestrojka, is
used by Pelevin to communicate new metaphysical ideas to his readers.
Sof’ja Pavlovna, an appropriated character from Cµernysˇevskij’s instructive
novel “What Is To Be Done?” (which was studied in Soviet schools as part
of education in utopia) becomes an advocate of new truths. These char-
acters are both parodied and admired by Petrusˇevskaja and Pelevin. They
are used as tools of estrangement taken from one imaginary Moscow to