Have a Nice Funeral
Olesha died in 1960, and so he never had the chance to bring his horizontal hero to a post-Soviet resting place. That story would fall to others. One of the earlier examples is Lyudmila Ulitskaya's short novel The Funeral Party(1997), which complicates matters by taking place in New York rather than the former Soviet Union. The Funeral Party is about the last days of Alik, a Soviet emigre painter dying in his tiny New York apartment. Most of the narrative attention is devoted to the women attending to him --former and current loves, neighbors, and one almost stepdaughter. All of them except the neighbor are immigrants from the USSR, a country which, for them, has long been in a twilight state between life and death.
Since the early days of the USSR, emigration has been associated with notions of living death. The White emigres of Mikhail Bulgakov's play Flight may as well be living in a squalid version of the Tibetan Bardo; the heroine of Olesha's A List of Blessings is an actress whose flirtation with emigration is only redeemed in the end by a heroic, pro-Soviet martyrdom. In 1986, Soviet television aired The Russians Are Here, the 1983 American documentary about Russian emigres in New York, under the title "Byvshie" ("former people"), continuing the tradition of portraying emigration as a hellish afterlife.
Ulitskaya's ex-Soviet heroes, by contrast, are doing rather well. Alik and his fellow emigres have spent years in the States; “even their bodies changed their composition: the molecules of the New World entered their blood and replaced everything old from home" (90). The land of their birth “existed for them only in their dreams" (90-91). If their sense of self depended on Russia, it was primarily through negation, as "proof of the correctness" of their decision to leave:
Consciously or not, the news from Moscow about the growing stupidity, lack of talent and criminality of life there during these years provided the proof they needed. But none could have imagined that what was happening in that far-off place which they had all but erased from their lives would be so painful for them now It turned out that this country sat in their souls, their guts, and that whatever they thought about it—and they all thought different things—their links with it were unbreakable (90).
All the same, Alik, at least, kept close track of events in the Soviet Union. At the outbreak of the August Coup in 1991, he gloats, “I said something would happen before that treaty was signed," to which a new visitor from Moscow asks "What treaty?" (86-87). [1]
The Funeral Party is decidedly not about the fate of Russia; instead, it is a showcase for Ulitskaya's ability to create groups of characters who feel individual and real rather than symbolic or abstract. Nonetheless, she structures the eleventh chapter around the Coup; as soon as it is over (in Chapter 13), Alik's decline accelerates. He watches the statues being torn down, and the public funeral of the three men who died in the fighting, and starts to confuse the crowds on the television with the crowd of people outside his window. He only speaks briefly five more times before lapsing into unconsciousness and, eventually death.
Alik does not live long enough for the Soviet Union's official demise, but he does keep his wits about him long enough to see the most dramatic events that led to his homeland's end. Again, The Funeral Party is far more concerned with its characters as people than as allegorical figures, but the parallels between Alik's last days and the rapid decline of the USSR are easy to see. Each is shocking and (with the benefit of hindsight) inevitable, and each remains somewhat inexplicable. Alik's illness never gets a proper diagnosis, but he dies of a creeping paralysis that eventually stops his lungs and his heart. In life, Alik had been joyful, creative, and irrepressible, a man who, the narrator tells us, was capable of being at home just about anywhere. In The Funeral Party, Ulitskaya bids farewell not just to an individual man (who is the object of love and mourning) or even a country (which, at least here, is not), but to a relationship between the two. This is not the king's two bodies, but the ordinary man's unasked for connection to the country of his birth, For the emigre such as Alik, it was always there, leading a parallel life. And now it was dying along with him.
Note
[1] Alik is referring to the proposed new, more flexible Union treaty that would have converted the USSR into the Union of Sovereign States.