The Idiocy of Postapcalyptic Village Life

The Slynx takes place in a town built on the ruins of Moscow, now called Fyodor-Kuzmichsk after its paramount leader*. As a result of the Blast (Vzryv), most of the population is plagued by Consequences, mutations presumably caused by radiation. The few survivors of the pre-Blast world (known as the Oldeners, or Prezhnie) are virtually immortal – they can be killed by accident or violence, but otherwise they neither age nor die. The protagonist is Benedikt, who has the prestigious job of transcribing the few old books to survive the destruction of the old world. He would rather have been a more literal keeper of the flame – no one knows how to make a fire, so the person responsible for keeping a fire going is particularly respected. That the two choices are complementary is in itself significant.”

The world of The Slynx is a postapocalyptic variation on the feudal system in general, and the Russian feudal past in particular. The lowest order in Fyodor-Kuzmichsk (a name that is almost as ungainly in Russian as it is in English) are serfs, literally lorded over by the town’s masters. Kudeyar Kudeyarovich Kudeyarov, the “Head Saniturion” (Glavnyi Sanitar’), leads a law-enforcement organization redolent of both Stalin’s terror and Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina. Everyone in town is terrified of the legendary “slynx,” an animal whose Russian name is a combination of “lynx” and the equivalent of “Here kitty-kitty.” The lynx supposedly stalks the northern woods, but danger lurks much closer to home. Benedikt marries into Kudeyarov’s family and reluctantly helps him stage a coup, realizing too late that the Head Saniturion represents the greatest danger to his world.

Russian critics are divided as to whether or not The Slynx constitutes an “anti-utopia” (a term that, in Russian, is even broader than the much-misused “dystopia” in English). And with good reason: as Natalia Ivanova (2001) and Mark Lipovetsky (2001) argue, The Slynx is much more concerned with commenting on the Russian intelligentsia and traditional Russian logocentrism than it is in serving as a political cautionary tale. The temporal gap between The Slynx and the novel’s initial readers is the same as that posited by Zamyatin in We, but the functions of these two novels could not be more different (Clowes 2011: 37). Even an allegorical reading of The Slynx fails to point to any reasonably probable alarming future. Instead, The Slynx fits more comfortably within the broader genre that spawned both utopia and dystopia: satire.

“And yet the impulse to distance The Slynx from dystopia (or anti-utopia) is worthy of examination in and of itself. Reading The Slynx as a dystopia threatens the novel with its own distinct belatedness. Ironically for a book that posits a backwards-looking future, The Slynx as dystopia could easily be dismissed as a dissident relic of the Cold War and Soviet times: such classic dystopias as We and 1984 were nourished on the fear of a totalitarian threat, while Russian literature in the Yeltsin years had been taking a much-deserved rest from decades of ideological burdens. If we also recall that Tolstaya’s original inspiration for the novel was the Chernobyl disaster, then The Slynx is not just untimely; the book is quite simply overdue. Nor does appealing to the broader realm of science fiction help Tolstaya’s case. The semiliterate narration was prefigured by Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), while neither radiation-induced mutation nor an ignorant reverence for the printed page is remotely novel (cf. Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s 1960 A Canticle for Leibowitz). The mutations themselves cannot hold up to the slightest scrutiny, and the Oldeners’ immortality is utterly nonsensical, at least within a science fictional framework.

Such niggling complaints do Tolstaya an injustice, and that is precisely the point. Tolstaya teases her readers with familiar dystopian tropes, but refuses to make them add up to anything so simple. Both utopias and dystopias have a long-established epistemological masterplot that combines Plato’s Allegory of the Cave with the myth of Prometheus (Morson 1981: 88–90). Traveling to utopia is a journey to wisdom, and returning from utopia necessitates the often vain attempt to keep the flame of wisdom alive, bringing it back in the hopes of sharing it with others. Dystopia is also the story of the acquisition of wisdom, but with conspiratorial overtones: it is wisdom that is being deliberately hidden by a regime built on lies (or hoarded, like the stoker’s flames in The Slynx). Within the fictional framework, the wisdom acquired in utopia is usually experiential or discursive; that is, it can be transmitted dynamically, through demonstration or oral speech.

Dystopian wisdom tends to require access to static media that are better suited to preservation – in particular, books. This focus on preservation is something dystopias share with postapocalyptic fiction more broadly (since catastrophe all but obliterates history). Hence the reverence for the printed word, raised almost to the level of fetish: the illuminated manuscripts of A Canticle for Leibowitz; the lost book containing the word “I” in Ayn Rand’s Anthem; the complete works of Shakespeare in Brave New World; Goldstein’s admittedly falsified counterrevolutionary tract in 1984; and virtually every book ever printed in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Dystopias are an extended plea on behalf of the printed word, while utopias are books to end all books.

The Slynx revisits the book-as-fetish only to interrogate it. Previous dystopias essentially treat old books as taboo: the fact that they are forbidden elevates them to virtually totemic power. Books also leave room for optimism, raising the possibility that postapocalyptic survivors might learn from them and rebuild the best of the past. In other words, postapocalyptic dystopias can recapitulate the power and danger that books usually get only through the apparatus of censorship. In The Slynx, all books are banned, but in both senses of this polysemous word; they are too dangerous to be entrusted to ordinary people in their homes, but too precious to be damaged, destroyed, or entirely forgotten (Agamben 1998: 28). When the inhabitants of Fyodor-Kuzmichsk fear the presumably radioactive danger of “Oldenprint” books, Tolstaya is subverting the traditional prometheanism that the book embodies for the dystopian tradition: the light these books bring may well be deadly.

Like Zamyatin’s We (My, 1921), The Slynx repeatedly refers to its own status as text, but in a much less direct fashion than D-504’s journal.6 The book’s chapter titles come from old-fashioned pronunciations of all the letters in the Russian alphabet (including those removed by the Soviet orthography reform of 1917–18). In form, The Slynx is a bukvar’, a book used to teach children the alphabet, and, by extension, literacy. Benedikt himself is repeatedly accused of illiteracy by the “Dissident” Lev Lvovich, in terms that recall the novel’s form: “You don’t know your ABCs”; “You haven’t learned the alphabet of life. Of life, do you hear me?” Benedikt is appalled: “Do you know how many books I’ve read? How many I’ve copied?” But Lev Lvovich is unrelenting, and hurls an accusation that crystallizes the role books have acquired in post-Blast Moscow: “You don’t really know how to read, books are of no use to you. They’re just empty page-turning, a collection of letters” (Tolstaya 2003: 227).

Books can be preserved for future generations, but the preservation only pays off if one assumes that they will reach an audience who can understand them. One of the most familiar clichés of Russian book reviews asks whether a book “will find its reader.” Transposed into the terms of The Slynx, that question becomes: can the book be truly understood as something other than mere words? Will the future reader have the intellect, spirit, and context to do something with it, other than protect or destroy it? These are not abstract questions for Tolstaya, or for her own post-Soviet milieu. The Soviet Union, which prided itself on reading more than any other country, had yielded to a Russian Federation that changed the status of reading forever.7 On the one hand, more books were in circulation, but most of them were the sort that intellectuals could not take seriously; meanwhile, “serious” books were published in ever smaller print runs, with competition from mass-market books (not to mention film, television, the internet, and gaming) diminishing the chances that such a book could make a difference.

The Slynx reproduces the idolatry of a logocentric, book-worshipping culture; even Pushkin is reduced to a literal wooden idol. The surviving Oldeners speak the language of the Soviet intelligentsia, and their endless preoccupation with completely irrelevant concerns (party cards, dissidence, whether or not “the West will come to our aid”) renders them laughable. Lev Lvovich’s accusations against Benedikt are completely on target: after gaining unfettered access to Oldenprint books, all Benedikt wants to do is alphabetize them, resulting in a pages-long list of titles and authors whose humor and pathos come from their senseless juxtaposition. Like post-Soviet Russia, Fyodor-Kuzmichsk turns out to be awash with books, but these books can do no good for anyone. Scriptures here are not sacred; instead, they are the textual equivalent of the golden calf. The books are taboo, in Freud’s sense of the term: objects of both worship and terror, they are the final form taken by the unexamined elitism of the intelligentsia: the repression of all culture.

Note

*This post is based on my article “Dystopias and Catastrophe Tales after Chernobyl.” Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky (eds.). Russian Literature since 1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 86-103