Russia's satire problem

It is not inconceivable that future historians will read accounts of Russia’s recent history and assume that it was the work of some forgotten satirist: a political system that swung from fervent communism to rampant capitalism, a society with huge extremes of decadent wealth and abject poverty, and a ruling tandem that features a dancing president and a singing prime minister. Surprising then that today’s Russian satirists have failed to make a bigger impact on the international scene.

Many people will be familiar with books and plays from the 20th century’s ‘Golden Age’ of Russian satire. Writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov and Vladimir Mayakovsky were busy at work during this period pulling apart Soviet power structures to reveal the folly and brutality of what lay beneath the surface.

These authors themselves owed much to the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol. But the revolution of 1917 had thrown new and pressing threats on the literary community. Satire became a means of expressing and challenging not just an oppressive system but the trials of everyday life under it.

Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the number of recent additions to the canon suggests the genre continues to capture the imagination of Russian authors. Examples that have made it as far as international release include the work of Victor Pelevin (Homo Zapiens, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf) and Dmitry Bykov (Living Souls).

The question, then, is why, if satire remains a popular form among Russian novelists, does it seem to fail to excite international readers?

A large part of the problem these authors have faced is one of specificity. Writers such as Gogol and Bulgakov were responding to pan-European themes—even if the Russian example was extraordinary in its intensity and scale. Those attempting to satirise present-day Russia have tended to focus on discussing the peculiarities of its recent past and the bizarre stagnation of its present. In translation too much needs to be explained and the humour is lost amongst the detail.

As one critic notes of Bykov’s Living Souls, a lot of the humour of the novel “bases itself on cultural in-jokes which do not easily make sense to the casual western reader.” For example, one of the book’s central themes is the explosive tensions between various ethnic groupings within Russia. This is lovingly imagined by Bykov but never sketched clearly enough to provide an uninitiated reader with an understanding of the cultural reality.

Indeed neither Bykov nor Pelevin can resist mentioning the saga of the jailed Russian oligarch and oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, currently serving a second 14-year jail term for embezzlement and money laundering. While the former does so directly, in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf Pelevin chooses instead to reference the fictional company “kukis-yukis-yupsi-poops,” a thinly veiled allusion to the oil company Yukos previously owned by Khodorkovsky before its forced nationalisation in 2006.

While Pelevin is more successful in his satirical aims than Bykov, these cheap shots help to undermine his attacks. Nowhere in this book is he more incisive than when he breaks the power structures of Russian society into the “the oligarchy” and “the apparat” (Russian shorthand for the machinery of government) in order to show the vicious cycle of self-propagating corruption. Or as the author puts it “the former allow the latter to steal because the latter allow the former to thieve.”

These moments of insight are sadly all too brief and much of the discussion in these books tends towards exposition, struggling to follow through on some promising concepts. The lack of subtlety, however, would be forgivable if the books were more engaging and actually landed their punches more often than not.

At its most basic, the aim of great satire must be to draw human comedy from social trauma. Yet unless a reader can see the humanity behind the drama it is nearly impossible for them to be sympathetic to the characters’ struggles.

Perhaps only in abandoning stereotypes and focusing on the human characters who find themselves at the heart of the action will Russian satire regain its former acclaim.

Click here to read Jason Cowley's profile of Victor Pelevin