Goodbye, Brezhnev!, or, The Lenin Who Couldn't Die
Ulitskaya was not alone in linking the slow death of an aging character with the decline and fall of late socialism. But the emigre Alik, despite his emotional attachment to Russian culture, had little in the way of a lingering investment in the Soviet system. Two much more famous works would find greater drama and comedy in the symbiotic connection between a bedridden elder and a vanished second world: Wolfgang Becker's 2003 film Goodbye, Lenin! and Olga Slavnikova's 2001 novel The Man Who Couldn't Die (2001). The shared general conceit (a family's attempt to pretend that their socialist country never collapsed in order out of fear that the shock would kill their ailing parent/spouse) is a sore point for Slavnikova, who has publicly insisted that Becker stole her idea. Even if her accusation is unfounded, the coincidence is unfortunate, since, to the broader, non-Russsophone world, it puts Slavnikova in the position of the person who wrote a book "like Goodbye, Lenin!," though she published it two years earlier. [1]
Slavnikova's frustration is understandable. Her original idea ends up looking second-hand. Even worse, The Man Who Couldn't Die is unlikely ever to reach the popularity of Goodbye, Lenin!. Nor is it likely to be filmed, and not only because Becker's movie will always stand in the way. Slavnikova's novel is, like much of her work, more concerned with her characters inner worlds than anything else. Even though The Man Who Couldn't Die does have plotlines that go beyond the characters (a local election is at the heart of the story), the book pays much more attention to what is going on in the paralyzed old Alexei Afansievich's bed and in his wife's and stepdaughter's heads. To add insult to injury, a German work and a Russian work use the same conceit, but it is in Germany—Germany!—that the results are funny.
For what it's worth, I find Mark Lipovetsky's assessment of the situation convincing: “the metaphor juxtaposing physical immobility and being stuck in the past and/or awakening in a different country was too obvious to anybody living through the postsocialist transition not to become a common trope." As I hope the previous chapters have already shown, the post-Soviet imagination has produced a plethora of stories involving sudden time jumps and, as we will soon see, thriving twenty-first-century Soviet Unions. If we add in the late- and post-Soviet preoccupation with simulation and the unavoidable figure of Lenin slumbering in his tomb, the conceit of both works does start to look inevitable.
Goodbye, Lenin!, of course, is broadly postsocialist rather than specifically post-Soviet; it is a German film whose action takes place almost entirely in (the former) East Berlin. The film has the iconographic advantage of its Cold War border setting, with the Berlin Wall having divided the socialist East from the capitalist West. The Soviet Union is decentered, if not absent: where the protagonist's father abandoned his family and married a West German years ago, young Alex is in love with Lara, a Soviet nurse in the hospital that treats his mother, Christiane. Alex's sister, meanwhile, follows in her father's footsteps by getting involved with a West German man, with the crucial difference that these footsteps are far fewer: in her case, the West has come to her.
The romantic entanglements of Goodbye, Lenin! are one of the many things that show how crucial the setting is in each of the two stories, even if the now defunct political system was more or less the same. Germany has plenty of cities, but Goodbye, Lenin!is set in East Berlin not only to exploit the drama of the Berlin Wall, but to highlight the effect that proximity had always had: the West was accessible and relatively familiar in a way that could not possibly have been true for Slavnikova's characters, who make their home in the Urals. If they live in Slavnikova's native Yekaterinburg, their (internal) border is with Siberia-how much farther could they be? [2]
Notes
[1] The book would only appear in English in 2018.
[2] Yekaterinburg is often assumed to be part of Siberia by people living in the Western part of Russia. But never say that to someone from Yekaterinburg.