Ольга Славникова: The Man Who Couldn't Die

The peculiarity of the Russian situation lies in the fact that the entire society, from Putin to the last pawn, in an equal degree bears a sense of ressentiment. For Putin, ressentiment stems from the lack of acknowledgment for Russia and him personally as equal and respectable players in the world arena; for the pawn, it stems from a sense of helplessness before police, government officials, judges, and bandits. I think that the ressentiment-based fantasies of those in power at a certain point came into resonance with the ressentiment-based fantasies of ordinary people. And the world began to transform. The Ukrainian affair appeared to be a noble war against imaginary fascists. Russia’s isolation—its re-establishment in the rank of superpower and the plummeting of the economy—the growth of wealth and happiness. [2] Mikhail Iampolsky, “V strane pobedivshego resentimenta,” Colta.ru , October 6, 2014, http://www.colta.ru/articles/specials/4887 .

Slavnikova wrote her novel in the very beginning of the Putin era, in 2000–2001, but the atmosphere of ressentiment that she captures allows us to detect seeds of the future resonance between “ordinary people” and post-Soviet authorities. The novel’s plot develops along two parallel lines. One follows the meager life of a family fully dependent on the pension of its patriarch—the paralyzed and bedridden Alexei Afanasievich. The other traces the semilegal and outright illegal schemes and tricks accompanying elections in a small industrial town—probably somewhere in the Urals, but, actually, anywhere in Russia. As is clear from today’s perspective, these two plotlines diagnose two major sources of social malaise indicative of post-Soviet ressentiment: nostalgia for the Soviet past and popular revulsion toward democracy and democratic procedures.

Marina, the stepdaughter of the bedridden veteran and a journalist trying to win herself a place among the new power elite, connects both plotlines within the novel. But this link is almost mechanical; Slavnikova’s rich metaphors and leitmotifs establish much deeper connections between these two dimensions of the story.

Each of the three central characters in The Man Who Couldn’t Die has their own web of leitmotifs; taken together, they manifest the existential, rather than the political or psychological, “taste” of the post-Soviet nineties. Nina Alexandrovna, Marina’s mother and Alexei’s wife, is shell-shocked by life under capitalism and perceives everything outside the walls of her home as a chaotic confusion of phantoms and chimeras. She lives as if sleepwalking, and even the people she sees on the street look “blurred and slightly translucent.” Although her daughter, Marina, is much savvier about the new ways, she also perceives people as being “like shapeless specters.” Despite all her futile efforts to gain a stable and decently paid position as a journalist, she remains alienated from reality. The metaphors surrounding her variegate the motif of the void: “She was surrounded by a strange, lifeless emptiness”; “The world around her was surprisingly empty”; “ ‘There definitely isn’t going to be any money today. Beyond that, I don’t know,’ Marina said in a raspy, muffled voice into the nearest microphone, feeling an emptiness behind her”; “The emptiness before her was infinite, and she could only wade into it further and overcome the familiar resistance of a dimension without qualities”; etc.

Lost in the fog of ressentiment-bound nonreality, Nina and Marina join efforts to create—ostensibly for the paralyzed Alexei but in fact for themselves—a comforting illusion of Soviet “stability,” of things remaining unchanged forever under the portrait of Leonid Brezhnev (whose tenure in power exceeded Stalin’s but was shorter than Putin’s). Despite its obvious cheesiness (“It’s a prop right out of a Hollywood movie about Soviet life”), this home spectacle has a tangible effect on its participants. Alexei acquires a visible similarity to Brezhnev, growing into a symbol of the past era himself: “It turned out that Alexei Afanasievich had always been the creator and center of Soviet reality, which he’d managed to hold onto a little longer; and now this reality, squeezed to the size of their standard-issue living space, retained its permanence, inasmuch as its pillar had not disappeared.” The force of her stepfather’s “encapsulated time” helps Marina realize that nostalgia for the predictable monotony of Brezhnev’s Stagnation has already emerged as a powerful and wildly popular political force among the post-Soviet “electorate”: “Apofeozov’s chief opponent in the true elections… was, of course, not Krugal but Leonid Ilich Brezhnev.” Furthermore, while trying to strengthen her loyalty to the election campaign, Marina “voluntarily made herself the heart of the paralyzed era, the heroine of a Soviet film; in retrospect, she almost came to love the Young Communists and her fictional Party membership.”

The novel’s subtitle is a reference to a famous Socialist Realist novella from 1946 about a wartime pilot who continues to fly despite losing both legs to amputation after a battle injury. Marian Schwartz has translated this phrase as “The Tale of an Authentic Human Being” rather than “A Tale of the Real Man.” I can understand her choice—the epithet “authentic” ( dopodlinnyi ) and its derivatives frequently appear in the Russian original of the novel in association with the paralyzed veteran. Even Brezhnev’s portrait becomes more authentic in his proximity: “the general secretary, whose death had here been reversed and whose longevity had become a natural feature that only kept increasing, had somehow borrowed an authenticity from Alexei Afanasievich that Brezhnev himself had never possessed.”

Seemingly resonating with her characters, Slavnikova does not spare the satirical details in her depiction of post-Soviet public life—and especially of the elections—as a parade of clumsy simulacra. In a particularly hilarious scene, a charlatan named Professor Kuznetsov runs a “healing” séance in support of an election candidate. (I have a strong suspicion that Slavnikova wrote this scene “from nature”—a certain Kuznetsov enjoyed incredible popularity in the Ekaterinburg of the 1990s for selling various torture devices, such as clusters of small but very sharp plastic nails intended for standing or even lying upon—promising to heal all ailments and pains.) However, despite its “factographic” nature, this episode reads like a paraphrase of Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous séance of black magic from The Master and Margarita : the same barrage of lies and illusions, the same willingness of the audience to accept any phantasm for truth. Slavnikova’s explanation of the impact of these illusions is different, but the tone she adopts in this section is recognizably Bulgakov’s:

Professor Kuznetsov’s experiments (his female patients, after spending time with him in the hotel, returned covered in gooseflesh, as if they’d been rolled in semolina, and for a while would express themselves exclusively in verse) promised each person not only longevity and an extended youth but in essence the rescinding of their past life. Each could now start over, from childhood if they liked, which is what happened with many.

Unsurprisingly, against the background of post-Soviet political chimeras and childish phantasms, the Soviet past starts looking more real, more trustworthy than the current reality. But this is what people want to see, this is exactly how the optics of ressentiment works. Slavnikova’s text goes beyond this optical illusion. She tries to expose the nature of this “authenticity.”

What is so authentic about Alexei Afanasievich? His wartime past? It is embodied in the image of the noose made of strong silk rope with which he strangled a large number of German soldiers during his night raids. He carries this noose around his neck like a cross and never washes it, so that “the scout had a raw red stripe on the back of his neck, where the filthy noose rubbed his spine…In damp weather, Alexei Afanasievich would itch terribly from that crude mark forever after.” Alexei preserves the skill of re-creating his deadly noose out of any string as the last reflex of his paralyzed body.