596
PARTISAN REVIEW
Though Fukuyama and Siniavsky use different language, their vision
is the same: history coming to a spiritual dead end. That too can be a
source of literature and subject for it, but not for very long.
This does not mean in the least that important literature will cease
to come from Russia, only that literature will lose its importance. Under
the new dispensation, cultural archetypes will shift. As the ruble stabilizes
and the society normalizes, the image of the poet will lose its tragic and
heroic charisma. Societies are as ruthless as nature in producing what they
need. And what Russia needs now, and will need for a good while to
come, is sober citizens. Otherwise, the country will plunge back into
chaos, tyranny, and literature. It is not a heartening prospect - Russian
literature, that great lugubrious whale, accustomed to sounding the
depths, now beached on the postmodern shore where the continent of
history ends.
Yet hope is to be found in the unlikeliest places.
The New York
Times
of April 4, 1992 reported on the forthcoming trial of a Russian
serial killer, a fifty-six year-old man identified only as Citizen Ch. A fa–
ther, grandfather, and Communist Party member, he murdered through–
out the former Soviet Union, from Rostov on the Don where he lived
to Leningrad and Uzbekistan. There were more than fifty-three of his
victims, making it a world record and surpassing the American record of
thirty-seven. The article notes, "His weapons were a knife, his hands, and
his teeth, and after thirty minutes of pathological frenzy a blinded, torn,
and sexually mutilated corpse would be added to the growing list."
Unlike his American counterparts whose psyches were warped by
disturbances in the family romance, Citizen Ch. was deranged by history.
His brother had been abducted and eaten during Stalin's artificial famine
of the early 1930s, and has father, a POW captured by the Nazis, was
treated as a traitor when he returned to Russia. Born in 1936, Citizen
Ch. was born in the midst of the great terror. Citizen Ch. was a serial
killer in a society that had been ruled by the greatest serial killer of
all
time, Joseph Stalin. Citizen Ch. was a cannibal in a society that saw
three serious outbreaks of cannibalism during the twentieth century: dur–
ing the real famine of the early 1920s, during Stalin's fabricated famine of
the early 1930s, and during the nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad. At
its apogee, ten thousand people a day were dying in Leningrad, and hu–
man-flesh butcher shops were opened in apartments. As Nadezhda Man–
delstam wrote in
Hope
against
Hope:
Every section of the population has been through the terrible sickness
caused by the terror, and none has so far recovered, or become fit
again for normal civic life. It is an illness that is passed on to the next
