Abstract
Emptiness is a key word in several post-Soviet Russian novels of the late 1990s. One can find it as well in Vladimir Makanin's “Underground” as in two novels written by Viktor Pelevin, “Generation ‘P’” and “Chapaev and Emptiness”. After the fall of Soviet power Pelevin's cynical hero from “Generation ‘P’” changes from literature into advertising business, and in his novel “Chapaev and Emptiness” the legendary Soviet Civil War hero Chapaev transforms into a preacher of quasi-Buddhist nothingness. Makanin's hero, the writer Petrovich, renounces of his profession in order to work as a watchman in shelters for the homeless. His self-abasement is in accordance with the tradition of kenoticism (derived from the Greek word kenós = empty) which played an important part in the history of Russian religious and cultural life. Criticizing the hypermoralism of classical Russian literature Makanin outlines a new image of the writer which is opposed to the Russian literary myth but still propagates moral and religious values. Pelevin's novels which reflect the relativism of postmodern poetics focus on another issue – the blurring of the difference between reality and illusion. In “Generation ‘P’”, mass media and advertising produce deceitful simulacra of reality and in “Chapaev and Emptiness” the deconstruction of Soviet mythology assumes the shape of a nightmare. Unsurprisingly, among the imagery of emptiness Malevich's famous “Black Square” including its numerous equivalents as black holes or all sorts of empty spaces is rather frequent in the three novels. Emptiness may be considered to be a characteristic trait of the atmosphere of the 1990s when Russians felt to live in a cultural vacuum somewhere between state economy and unbridled capitalism, between Soviet order and “post-slave” (Makanin) chaos.
Let us begin with a quote from Vladimir Makanin's novel Underground:
Chekhov aptly said that he had squeezed the slave out of himself drop by drop. But he also kept really quiet about what he had used to fill the emptiness that formed in place of the former drops. Words? Or his own un-slavish literature? It makes you wonder. (Writers are given to this. They're proud, besides. Myth-makers.) Really, though, our post-slave emptiness is being filled, alas, any old way. That's the tradeoff: you squeeze and squeeze it out of yourself, but all sorts of different things—from an assortment you don't control—push into your (post-slave) vacuums of emptiness from the outside. And it's not immediately that you observe the alien element in yourself (p. 80; my italics—H.G.).
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Further references to Underground are indicated by parenthesized page numbers in the text.
The novel has to do with the lot of a writer, Petrovich, who after the collapse of the communist regime leaves the underground of unofficial art and ends up in a completely different kind of underground—the dregs of post-Soviet society. Having lost the support system of his former existence (though it was a slavish one), he feels ungrounded. He perceives the unexpected freedom that fills him with terror as emptiness, and does not know how to fill his inner vacuum. One might compare Petrovich to a freed convict who has neither prospects for the future, any place to live, nor any point of reference in a dramatically changed world. Nor does he have any sort of profession, since, as distinct from Chekhov, Petrovich the author has rejected literary creativity as well.
Thrown off track, Petrovich does not seek salvation in literature: on the contrary, he rejects literary creativity to earn a living as a watchman for other peoples' apartments. I think we might compare this act with the kenotic figure of the self-derogated Christ as described by the Apostle Paul in Philippians (2:6–8):
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross.
The Greek word kenós means “empty,” and the verb that is used here in the New Testament, kenóo, means “to purge, empty, make nothing.” Russian culture distinguishes two variants of kenosis, one religious and another that applies more broadly to culture (see Bërtness, 1994; Goricheva, 1994). Emptiness (Greek kenótes) is a key word in Makanin's novel. Makanin's hero intentionally rids himself of the attributes of the writing profession and makes himself like simple people, participating in the coarseness and misery of their daily life, in crudeness and violence, in their unscrupulousness and amorality. Submitting himself to self-abasement, he identifies with the inhabitants of the dormitory he lives in, and fears losing his closeness with them:
Life without them—that's where my problem suddenly became apparent. Without these obtuse, stupid, traumatized, and poor little people, whose love I sucked in and absorbed just as naturally and imperceptibly as people suck in and absorb colorless oxygen while breathing air (p. 325; author's italics).
The hero's new kenotic hypostasis is expressed via a change of his name. When he is addressed by his name and patronymic, he laughs and says, “it's just Petrovich now” (p. 475). We are presented with a writer without a surname who is casually addressed merely by his patronymic. The fate of his old “Underwood” brand typewriter is quite telling. Despite the fact that Petrovich has given up writing, he fastens the typewriter to the bunk in his dormitory room with a little metallic chain. He later sells it in order to buy food, but finally he nonetheless decides to buy back this “unnecessary” machine.
An important token of Petrovich's kenotic existence is his homelessness. In Soviet society every writer had his or her own place—a comfortable place on the upper floors in service of the state, or a less comfortable place in the cellar of independent underground artists. In a literal sense, Petrovich is deprived of a permanent place to live, and dwells at the bottom of society, working now in a dormitory, then in private apartments, then in some sort of storehouse. Ultimately, he is crowded out of the privatized apartment, and he resettles into a homeless shelter at Savelovskii Railroad Station. The space in which Petrovich moves is a model of society (Schuchart, 2004, pp. 50–59). The labyrinth of long corridors is reminiscent of the endless corridors of a “gigantic Russian dormitory” (p. 217), and the psychiatric ward in which Petrovich's artist brother Venya has dragged out his miserable existence since Soviet times is openly called “a little piece of the state” (p. 370). The homeless writer and alcoholic Venichka, hero of Venedikt Erofeev's famous 1973 novel Moscow to the End of the Line (Uffelmann, 2010, pp. 791–852), at whom a hint is undoubtedly being made, is in certain respects a prototype of Petrovich. The difference between the eras largely determines the characteristic features of the heroes: Venichka lives in Soviet times, and Petrovich in the post-Soviet era.
While Venya continues living at the “funny farm” because thirty years ago, when treating him, the doctors “took his ‘self’ for themselves” (p. 603), Petrovich has no refuge. Working in a storehouse somewhere in far-off Podmoskov'e leaves him with a particularly strong impression:
Copses, the edges of woods. And what emptiness! And at the same time, what a life of emptiness—a life of pure space as spaciousness, that is, serving as spaciousness. And even this endless green expanse was like a borrowing from eternity. An expanse as a quotation from eternity. In those days I was able to sense the idleness of the world: this also gave a hint of the future (pp. 111–112; my italics). And if your eyes, in deep hypnosis, strayed nonetheless from the horizon, they would immediately get buried in emptiness and in the hypnosis of another dimension: the end of the storehouse, which is not engaged in anything (and thus not sketched over with any abstractions). And it's amazing how contact with nobody's space enfeebles us (p. 112; my italics—H.G.).
In light of his profound experience of the emptiness of space and of the empty end of storehouse, Petrovich longs even more for the perpetual crowding of people in his former dormitory. Remarkably, the “aesthetics of the storehouse” (p. 111; author's italics) reveals features of abstract art. The significance of the storehouse and of the empty space surrounding it becomes clearer against the background of the special sort of emptiness that in the novel is tied to the name of Malevich and his Black Square. Hence we consider it appropriate to include a short digression here about this painting and certain of its interpretations in connection with the theme of emptiness.
In his observations about Malevich's square, Makanin's hero assumes that a person needs perspective, “a light at the end of the tunnel” (p. 76), in order to live. He sees the absence of light in the square as precisely the source of its entire “genius” effect. He realizes that the moon can be sensed somewhere behind the frame, but cannot be seen in the painting. “Herein lie both the power and the terror of the night, so vividly protruding out to us from the square black canvas” (p. 76). Hinting at light but simultaneously obscuring it, the Black Square signifies a “stop,” “a shock and a grandiose braking effect” (p. 76), and thereby occludes the future. In this sense it expresses the aesthetic of the long Soviet waiting line:
The absence of the future in the name of the present that has come to a halt—this is indeed the waiting line, its idea, this is the nirvana, in fact, of the one-and-only (possibly black) color (p. 76).
From this moment onward, Malevich's painting haunts Petrovich as a symbol of a closed-off perspective of the future. He sees the square of the darkened window before going to sleep (p. 90), and when expecting to see the train in the metro station he looks into the “tunnel-like jaw,” the square takes on cosmic dimensions for him: “You look, and nothing is there. A piece of darkness. A black hole. And a cautious (non-schizoid) contact with the cosmos” (p. 229). We find this interpretation of Malevich's work as a genius-laden anticipation of a twentieth century without perspective, an ugly eternity, in other authors as well. When Black Square was exhibited to a Russian audience in 1981, the artist Eduard Shteinberg 2 wrote that Malevich's painting was “an extreme God-forsaken-ness expressed through the means of art” (Shteinberg, 1992, p. 67): “Again, there is night and death in it…. And again the question—will there be a resurrection?” (Shteinberg, 1992, p. 68). Back in the 1970s, the historical avant-garde was subjected to shattering criticism on the part of the SotsArt artist Aleksandr Kosolapov, in the form of Malevich's paintings being reproduced on urinals, or by a change of the word “Marlboro” to “Malevich” on a depiction of a cigarette pack (Lipovetskii, 2008, p. 269).
The novel's abstract aesthetic of the storehouse brings to mind the artist Igor' Shtein, in whose works one can detect a hint of Eduard Shteinberg; Shteinberg's work, in turn, is indebted to Malevich's suprematism.
Tat'iana Tolstaia links Malevich's Black Square to Lev Tolstoi's famous “Arzamas terror,” that is, with the gloomy square room described in his “Notes of a Madman,” in which the writer experienced a terrifying fear of death. According to Tolstaia, Black Square originated as the result of a bargain with a devil who himself “suggested the simple formula of non-existence to the artist” (Tolstaia, 2007, p. 77). In her eyes Black Square is “one of the most terrifying events in art over the whole history of its existence” (Tolstaia, 2007, p. 76). She accuses Malevich of hanging his painting in the sacred red corner on purpose:
He called his work “an icon of our time.” Instead of “red,” there is black (zero color), instead of a face, a chasm (zero lines); instead of an icon—that is, a window upward, into the light, into eternal life—there is gloom, a chasm, a trapdoor into the infernal regions, eternal darkness (Tolstaia, 2007, p. 77).
The figure of an empty center in many literary works back in the 1920s and 1930s became “a manifestation of ruined transcendence,” embodying the tragic realization of “the impossibility of escaping beyond the boundaries of a catastrophic history” (Lipovetskii, 2008, p. 222).
Here one might mention the OBERIU Nothing aesthetic and the “rituals of the empty center” (Lipovetskii, 2008, p. 243) of 1970s and 1980s conceptualism (Hansen-Löve, 1997). An example of this might be Il'ia Kabakov's installation The Fly with Wings, for which the artist wrote an article entitled “About Emptiness.” Kabakov's emptiness (Epshtein, 2000, pp. 190–199) is tied to the space of Soviet nationhood, which is depicted as
a hole in the expanse, in the world, in the fabric of existence, which truly has its own location, contrapositions to the world as a reservoir of emptiness, and which carries out its terrifying business of emptiness in regards to the whole rest of the world—to draw it into itself, to extract its being and its vitality and, in the extreme, to plunge it into its own state of non-existence (Kabakov, 2002, p. 212).
These considerations about Black Square and about OBERIU and conceptualist ideas bear witness to the fact that, in twentieth-century Russian culture, there is a certain continuity in the conceptualization of the phenomenon of emptiness and in its numerous analogs in images. 3 These forms of emptiness are most often linked to the Soviet period of Russian history, with its perspectiveless eternity or (from a religious viewpoint) with a sense of the “God-forsaken-ness” of the twentieth century. The emptiness of Makanin's hero, on the contrary, reflects the specifically post-Soviet experience. It differs thereby from the other interpretations we have mentioned; nonetheless, it seems that one must not sever its worldview from this overall background.
Compare the Tret'iakov Gallery exhibit “Hostages of Emptiness: The Aesthetic of Empty Space and of the ‘Empty Canon’ in Russian Art from the XIX to the XXI Century” (Sept. 24, 2011–Nov. 13, 2011).
But let us return to the problem of literature and the writer Petrovich. It is linked to a motif of emptiness along a line of kenosis, since Makanin's hero rejects literature and in so doing aggravates his feeling of emptiness in the new society. Like many post-Soviet authors, Makanin's hero strives for liberation from the “hypermoralism” (Viktor Erofeev) of classical Russian literature. In his deconstruction of the literary myth, however, he does not part ways with literary tradition as easily as other post-modernists. It becomes evident that the target of his criticism is specifically the canonized aspect of the classics. He complains, for example, that many authors, when they describe a psychiatric ward, are secondary as compared to Chekhov; they have turned it into “a tiny sweet little legend that is conveyed from one mouth to another,” resulting in “a minty smell” (p. 150). Petrovich confesses that for a very long time, “RUSSIAN (with capital letters) literature, not even the texts themselves, nor their pedigree, but rather their specifically high-flown echo” (p. 190) represented moral authority for him as well.
Petrovich engages in an intense dialog with Dostoevskii. He throws down the gauntlet to Dostoevskii for having killed, with impunity—as opposed to Raskol'nikov—two people, one Caucasian and one informer, without his conscience forcing him to confess to the murders. He points out that since the times of Dostoevskii the dimensions of morality have changed. The mass repressions of the Stalin period are mentioned, when murder was not a personal act, but rather “within their jurisdiction” (p. 197). In Petrovich's opinion, people of his time cross the line of crime more easily than the hero of Crime and Punishment: “He goes across the line and back so simply—as if visiting. Like going to work and coming home afterwards” (p. 156). It seems to him that Dostoevskii's idea about a murderer's self-destruction has remained alive merely as “an artistic abstraction” (p. 198). In his eyes, literature as “classic” and “canon” operates in Russia merely as “an enormous autosuggestion,” as “a huge virus” (p. 198). But despite his criticism of the classic canon, Makanin's hero goes further than simply saying good-bye to the authoritative (capitalized) “Word” (pp. 334, 512), as proven by his ravings “about the wordless nighttime conscience” (p. 409; author's italics). He also asks himself, “What if, in our times, mankind really did learn to live without literature?” (p. 334).
The kenotic writer not only changes his name and gives up writing but also takes up a new profession by turning into a homeless watchman. Meanwhile Petrovich realizes that this watchman enjoys a peculiar “status” (p. 197) and represents a certain “mentality,” since he “[watches] on behalf of people and simultaneously watches out for people” (p. 562; author's italics). He is “the watchman and the floor's confessor” (p. 194) to whom the inhabitants of the dormitory come with a bottle of vodka to confess. He walks along the endless dark corridors of the dormitory and knows what is going on in the rooms. In so doing he participates in the poor life of the inhabitants, denigrating himself for the sake of solidarity with simple folk:
My “I” had already longed to live on its own, outside literature, yes, thank goodness, I told myself, yes, yes, go and take the bottle of vodka provided, sing with them, they (damn them!) really helped you today with their incidental and boorish “Who are you?”! (p. 194).
Since Petrovich enjoys the high prestige of a writer, a strange displacement occurs:
From that exact time, as soon as I told them my name and said that I'm the watchman, the people in the building started to consider me a writer. Go figure. Something in them (in their brains) has shifted. To them I looked like a Writer, I lived as a Writer. And that's with them knowing and seeing I hadn't written a single line. That wasn't necessary, as it turns out. (p. 197; author's italics).
What is concealed behind the watchman's profession? The novel's mention of a certain fact is not coincidental: the Soviet “lit-bosses” hired the writer Andrei Platonov as “a watchman and street sweeper” 4 (p. 40) on Tverskoi Boulevard. Watchman here signifies the kenosis of a great Russian writer, unacknowledged and demeaned in Soviet times. Furthermore, it seems that this word has a biblical undertone here. In the Old Testament, the figure of the watchman is frequently encountered. After his murder of Abel, Cain answers God's question as to where his brother is by saying, “I don't know. Am I a watchman for my brother?” (Genesis 4:9). Given the background fact that the novel's hero has killed two people with impunity, this phrase takes on a special meaning. In other books of the Old Testament, the watchman assumes the role of a prophet who is obligated to warn the people of future disasters. In Ezekiel 33:6, we read: “But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet to warn the people and the sword comes and takes the life of one of them, that man will be taken away because of his sin, but I will hold the watchman accountable for his blood.” Let us adduce one more quote that might be relevant to the dismal situation in which Makanin's hero finds himself. In it, the people ask the prophet, “‘Watchman! What is left of the night? Watchman? What is left of the night?’ The watchman replies, ‘Morning is coming, but also the night’” (Isaiah 21:11–12). It seems that biblical allusions shed light on various aspects of the new “profession” that the former writer has taken up.
In fact, Platonov lived on Tverskoi Boulevard but this turned out to be a legend.
The motif of the fisherman, which arises rather unexpectedly in the novel, is also an evident reference to the Bible. The first time, it comes up in the episode with the unknown woman crying in the metro, whom Petrovich wants to comfort for completely unselfish reasons. Without doubt, this is an allusion to the Gospels, in which the apostles are called “fishermen of people” (Mark 1:17). In Makanin's work, however, the semantic scope of this motif is expanded. The fisherman of women is transformed into a fisherman of the future:
Of course, if it weren't for the counterweight of our past (which we use to explain ourselves to ourselves), we simply wouldn't hold on to a single strong feeling in ourselves. We'd simply fall to pieces. We'd explode. But why not just balance the past with the future? Why not just assume that a part of our feelings (encoded in an image) is advancing on us from the future, outright. […] And in this acceptance of hunches about the future, our past, I think, isn't worth a damn, we're freed from the past. We start from scratch. We're fishermen (p. 60).
On the one hand, these words are applicable to the crisis-laden situation of a man who is wavering between the past and the future, and, on the other, they are a testimony of hope for the hero's possible openness with respect to the future.
The replacement of the writer with a “watchman” and a “fisherman” signifies a break with the “high” literary tradition, since it expresses a kenotic demotion of the litterateur's profession and of the status of literature in society. This is exactly what lies at the heart of Petrovich's conversations with the rich businessman, Loviannikov, who is a speculator with the privatized apartments. For appearance's sake he signs over an apartment to Petrovich, but he actually deceives him. Hence the writer is again left without an apartment; this, of course, has a symbolic meaning. The fact that Loviannikov's surname contains a suggestion of the word “fisherman” (Russian lovec) can be understood in the sense that he is an adroit “fisherman of the future” who has recognized the sign of the times. He warns Petrovich: “Most of all, Petrovich, be more careful. Things nowadays, you know, are all different – it's a beautiful, but a troubled time” (p. 520). Loviannikov makes a distinction between the “literary” generation and the generation of “politicians and businessmen” (p. 512). According to Petrovich's observation, the literary generation is already dying out. At the same time that underground artists were wearing “simple little sweaters,” the heroes of the present had a completely different, “prophetic” (p. 513) look:
They wear suits, with a necktie, with radio phones screeching in their pockets, and they talk about their own secrets—about business, about cash-in-hand, about share prices and the taxes that strangled them (p. 513).
The subtitle of Makanin's novel refers ironically to Lermontov's Hero of Our Time. According to Loviannikov, however, the “superfluous man” Petrovich is the hero of an already bygone time. For his part, Petrovich considers the businessman Loviannikov to be the hero of “Your time,” since he aspires to a new age.
The hero of Viktor Pelevin's novel Generation “P” (first edition 1999), former litterateur Vavilen Tatarskii, studied in the Literary Institute. As distinct from Petrovich in Underground, however, after the fall of Soviet power he becomes—in accordance with the carnivalesque relativism of postmodern poetics—an unbridled cynic. He changes literature into an advertising business and sees the task of the “copywriter” and “creator” as that of “adapting Western advertising concepts to the mentality of the Russian consumer” (p. 33). 5 His first name, Vavilen, is a composite of elements from ‘Vasilii (Aksenov)’ and ‘Vladimir Il'ich Lenin.’ However, he retroactively explains it by citing his father's enthusiasm for the myth of ancient Babylon; subsequently, he completely transitions to being called Vova or Vladimir. Thus the changes of the hero's name in this novel obviously reflect the transition from the Soviet era to the post-Soviet one.
Further references to Generation “P” (edition of 2000) are given as parenthesized page number references within the text.
Like Petrovich, Tatarskii also finds that the slave has not been completely squeezed out of him. However, as distinct from Makanin's hero, he comes to the pessimistic conclusion
that the slave in the soul of the Soviet person is not concentrated in any one particular region, but rather colors everything that happens in its hazy expanses in tones of a sluggish mental peritonitis, and hence there exists no possibility whatsoever of squeezing out this slave drop-by-drop without damaging valuable properties of the soul (pp. 52–53).
Also connected to Chekhov is the idea used for an advertising poster for the chain of Gap stores: the poster depicts Chekhov's bare skinny legs in the form of an hourglass. The slogan on the poster (which is in English) reads thus:
Russia was always notorious for the gap between culture and civilization: now there is no more culture: no more civilization: the only thing that remains is the gap: the way they see you (p. 85).
The slogan reveals a punning allusion to the age-old Russian discussion about Russia as a “gap” in the development of European culture, a discussion that was begun as early as Chaadaev. The use of a famous quotation by Tiutchev alludes to the same thing; Tatarskii quotes it in a de-familiarizing way as an advertising slogan:
You can't understand Russia with your mind, you can only believe in Russia. “Smirnoff” (p. 77)
The motif of the gap and emptiness unfolds in the novel in connection with post-Soviet mass media. An empty bottle reminds Tatarskii “about the used-up ideology of communism, the senselessness of historical bloodbaths, and the overall crisis of the Russian idea” (p. 100). But following behind the emptiness of Soviet “eternity” is the emptiness of post-Soviet reality, which is examined in the novel in the form of a treatise about television.
Television creates a simulacrum of reality, a state of “collective non-existence,” a “castle in the air, the foundation of which is an abyss” (pp. 105–106). Consequently, the human subject disappears. Homo sapiens is transformed into Homo Zapiens (the new species name comes from the English word zap):
The situation of modern mankind is not simply deplorable—one might say that it is absent, since mankind practically doesn't exist. There exists nothing at which you could point and say, “There, that's what Homo Zapiens is.” HZ is simply the residual luminescence of the phosphor of a soul asleep; it is a film about the filming of another film, shown on a television in an empty house (p. 107).
The type of primitive contemporary consumer, Oranus (in Russian, rotozhopa), a creature without emotions or intentions, “swallows and expels emptiness” (p. 111). Similarly, a television screen in Pelevin's novel Chapaev and Emptiness is defined as “a tiny transparent window in the pipe of a spiritual garbage chute” (Pelevin, 1999, p. 188). The magic of advertising on the screen produces a false identity for Oranus, an illusory structure “that has no center” (p. 114). The ubiquitous advertising garbage that Oranus swallows and expels is perhaps reminiscent of the apprehension that the hero of Underground has that his post-slave emptiness is being filled “any old way” and that “all sorts of different things—from an assortment you don't control—push into your (post-slave) vacuums of emptiness from the outside” (Makanin, 2008, p. 80).
When Tatarskii is under the influence of narcotics, it seems to him that the television screen is transformed “into something like an enormous vagina, into the black center of which the wind sucked in has flown with a ringing whistle” (p. 257). For a better understanding of the essence of television, “three Buddhist methods of watching television” (p. 269) are recommended. One must first watch the screen with the sound turned off, then with the sound turned on but the picture tuned out, and finally with the television turned off altogether. “If one were to watch television this way for ten years in a row for at least an hour a day, one could understand the nature of television” (p. 270). The result is a parody of McLuhan's famous saying, “The medium is the message.” Pelevin's hero ends up in a post-Soviet world in which a complete derealization of reality occurs by the means advertising and mass media. For the emptied person who has lost his or her identity, there remains only a hallucinatory escape into a mirage of Mesopotamian and Babylonian myths.
In Pelevin's novel Chapaev and Emptiness (first edition 1996), the psychopathological symptoms of a character are described: he suffers from hallucinations and states of depersonalization and derealization. The psychosis is, of course, not only personal but social. Central to the novel is the Soviet myth about Chapaev, including all manner of the humorous variants of its from oral folklore. The former St. Petersburg avant-garde figure Petr Pustota (‘Peter Emptiness’) is appointed political commissar to the legendary hero of the Civil War. The nighttime meetings and discussions between Pustota and Chapaev take place in a post-Soviet era psychiatric clinic. On principle, the differences between present and past, between reality and dreaming, are blurred in the novel. One proof of this is the ironic etymology of the Russian word mir (‘world’), presented as supposedly connected with the word mirage. The theme of extreme “Kantist” idealism in the perception of reality is played up rather obtrusively in the novel. The world figures as a dream, illusion, or nightmare, as a “collective visualization”: “Everything we see is in our consciousness” (p. 156). 6 Unsurprisingly, the word emptiness is a central idea of the novel, which has already been made clear by the surname of the main character.
Further references to Chapaev and Emptiness are given as parenthesized page number references within the text.
The assertion is made that “the Russian people understood long ago that life is a dream” (p. 134). Remarkably, an analog of the Black Square from Makanin's Underground also appears in Pelevin's novel—a Russian “conceptual icon from the beginning of the century” (p. 178) in the form of the word God stencil-printed in black letters on coarse paper. This painting, ascribed to the avant-garde artist David Burliuk, is placed higher than Andrei Rublev's Trinity precisely because of the empty bands left from the stencil:
A person starts looking at this word, moves from the outward appearance of the idea toward the visible form, and he suddenly notices the empty places that are not filled with anything—and right there, in that “nowhere,” is the only possibility of encountering what these enormous ugly letters are endeavoring to point to, because the word God points to what it is impossible to point to (p. 179).
Like Burliuk's letters, any word can be understood as a container whose value depends on “how much emptiness it can hold” (p. 179). True, the black twentieth-century icons by Burliuk and Malevich are different: in Underground, the Black Square is ascribed a negative meaning as the symbol of a marked-out future, while Burliuk's black letters in Pelevin hint in a more neutral fashion at an apophatic concept of God. A hint of a speculative Nowhere and Nothing appears often in the framework of Pelevin's curious “Buddhism.” Therefore, it is no surprise that Pustota's Japanese interlocutor points out that there is no such emptiness in European art, and that “the same emptiness that gapes in the depths of the Japanese soul also gapes in the depths of the Russian soul” (p. 180). On the basis of this similarity, the Japanese man suggests—as a counterweight to the influence of Western culture—an alchemic marriage of Russia and the East.
Pustota's chats with “Teacher” Chapaev in the psychiatric ward touch mainly on the theme of the illusoriness of the real world. Life, in Chapaev's opinion, is an uninterrupted dream. When a person awakes from one nightmare, he simply transitions from one dream to another. Pustota's nightmare about the mythical hero of Soviet simplicity constantly intersects with the nightmare about his current existence in an insane asylum. The novel can thus be read as an agonizing—and unsuccessful—attempt to escape from Soviet nightmares. Since there is no escape from the cycle of dreams, what can he do? Chapaev advises Pustota to “write down his nightmares” (p. 250). But even an escape into literature is called into doubt, because the meaning of the letters and words wears away with time and proves to be extremely fragile:
Literature, art—all of this was the fussy insects that used to fly over the last armful of hay in the universe. Who, I thought, would read the description of my dreams? … The pen, the notebook, and everyone who might read the symbols left on the paper were now simply multicolored sparks and flames that appeared, disappeared, and reappeared (p. 322).
As with Makanin, emptiness for Pelevin has a wide spectrum of meanings. With respect to Pelevin, an opinion has been floated that emptiness in his novels removes the boundaries of time and space and thus forms the ether that gives the author maximal freedom to embody his characters (Bogdanova, Kibal'nik, & Safronova, 2008, p. 128). But this assessment takes only the formal aspect of this device into account. What sort of content-related functions does emptiness fulfill for Pelevin? In Generation “P,” it is a characteristic of the post-Soviet world of advertising and mass media that transforms a person into an empty shell without an identity. In Chapaev and Emptiness, it signifies the indistinguishability of dream and reality, that is, an extreme degree of derealization of reality. Besides this, there is a suggestion of the “eternal” problem of the “gap” in Russian culture (Epshtein, 2000, pp. 91–95) that supposedly brings it close to the thinking of the East.
For Makanin, emptiness signifies the cultural and ethical vacuum of an artist in the post-Soviet society of the 1990s, a vacuum that finds expression in the kenotic and paradoxical figure of a writer without writing. Deprived of his place in society, he turns into a homeless watchman. The multilayered metaphor of the watchmen reveals the author's attempt to overcome this vacuum and the quest for a new function for the writer and literature in post-Soviet society.
In the work of both these authors, there is an accent on parting ways with the literature-centeredness of Russian culture. Given this, it is surprising that Chekhov's remark about the necessity of squeezing the slave out of oneself drop-by-drop still occupies a prominent place for both the authors. Another feature common to both the authors is remarkable: their reference to the “black icons” of avant-garde art that supposedly anticipate the future emptiness of the twentieth century. No matter how much both authors might quarrel with cultural tradition, it obviously provides certain reference points in the post-Soviet situation notwithstanding.