Post by Bozur on Dec 23, 2007 15:41:41 GMT -5
The Saturday Profile
The Tortured Voice of Russia’s Lost Generation
James Hill for The New York Times
"They said, forget about all the heroes, forget about the entire cultural heritage, forget about everything." Sergei Minaev
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By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
Published: December 22, 2007
MOSCOW
WITH a perpetual 5 o’clock shadow, a penchant for Paul Smith suits and a partnership in a company that imports high-end spirits and fine wines, 32-year-old Sergei Minaev would seem to be the picture of post-Soviet success.
But as he holds forth, quaffing Italian mineral water and chain smoking at Cantinetta Antinori, an elite Tuscan-style restaurant that is a favorite of Moscow celebrities and oligarchs, he sounds more like a tortured Russian soul with a well-shod foot in the Soviet past.
“We are people cut in half,” he says. “We lived v sovke,” he explains, using derogatory slang for the Soviet era. “Then in the 1990s they drastically changed everything. They said, O.K., now we’re watching another channel. We’re not watching this one anymore.
“They said, forget about all the heroes, forget about the entire cultural heritage, forget about everything. We’ve changed the picture. Now survive.
“It’s like throwing house pets into the forest. And naturally, those who survived lived through a lot, and that’s why now they’re being broken. There’s a huge stratum of people who didn’t notice that anything changed. They simply moved from kitchens to clubs and spent all these years in a haze, and now they’ve woken up to find it’s 1984 again.”
Mr. Minaev is not just an overly introspective Russian yuppie, or a new style of dissident. He is a best-selling author whose two novels, first published on the Web, have now sold nearly a million copies in book form, almost unheard of in post-Soviet Russia for anything but mysteries.
“Dukhless,” the half-Russian, half-English, title of his 2006 breakthrough book, translates as “soulless” and stands as an epitaph for his generation. It chronicles a young Muscovite’s descent into a life of nightclubs, drugs and sexual promiscuity as he yearns for and pushes away true love and wrestles with the meaning of it all, including, not least, ghosts of the Communist past.
“To the generation born in 1970 to 1976, so promising and so full of prospects, whose start was so bright and whose life was so thoughtlessly wasted,” writes the book’s protagonist, “may our dreams of a bright future, where everything was supposed to be different ... R.I.P.”
“Media Sapiens,” his second novel, which was published this year in two parts, features another timely character, a political operative who works for the highest bidder — sometimes the Kremlin, sometimes the opposition — and is a student of the propaganda techniques of Goebbels. It features eerily prescient echoes of Russia’s current political situation and condemns the media manipulation of the modern age.
IN Russia, “Dukhless” (pronounced DOOCH-lyus) is still discussed on talk shows and in bookstores, a cultural landmark along the lines of Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” (which Mr. Minaev said he would like to have translated into Russian). While Mr. Minaev’s work is looked down upon by Moscow’s chattering classes — who deride it as crass, stream-of-consciousness Internet prose — it has also drawn considerable critical praise.
The writer Vasily Aksyonov compared Mr. Minaev’s disaffected leading characters to classic antiheroes portrayed in 19th-century works by Pushkin and Lermontov. “Minaev’s hero is a superfluous man,” Mr. Aksyonov told the Russian edition of Rolling Stone magazine. “He’s done well in business, but nothing satisfies him. In fact, he’s a typical Russian hero. He doesn’t understand what he needs and walks around in agony.”
Mr. Minaev is not coy about the autobiographical nature of “Dukhless.”
“Everything in ‘Dukhless’ is true,” he said. “The prostitutes, the drugs, it’s all true.”
Growing up, Mr. Minaev seemed content to follow a more conventional path. He was born into a good Soviet family, his mother an archivist and his father an engineer, although they were hardly Communist believers, he said.
“My parents are what is known as Russian intelligentsia,” he said, adding that these days he prefers the traditional pastime of the Russian intelligentsia, staying home and talking. “Now, I don’t go out at all, except for exceptional cases.” As a boy he joined the red-scarved Young Pioneers, who swore allegiance to Lenin and the Soviet state, though he says he, like tens of millions of other youngsters, did so out of inertia, not conviction. “No one was Communist then,” he said.
Just before he would have joined Komsomol, the youth league that was a ticket to a respectable life under Communism, the Soviet Union collapsed, turning his world upside down.
“It’s as if in the United States, for example, they said that everything has changed, that Roosevelt and Franklin are no longer the right political figures, everything they did was horrible and revolting, and we have a new ideology here now, let’s quickly get used to it,” he said.
In college in the early 1990s, Mr. Minaev studied the Third Reich, with a focus on the history of propaganda. That led him, inevitably, to Goebbels.
“From the point of view of mass propaganda and advertising, I think there’s been nothing new since the time of Goebbels,” Mr. Minaev said. “The modern world is absolutely fascist. Men must look like this, this and this. Women must look like this, this and this. All who are not within these bounds must strive for them or be losers.”
The nightclub world no longer holds any attractions for him.
“I hate the glorification of this way of life,” he said. “It’s revolting to me.”
The divorced father of a 5-year-old girl, Mr. Minaev is by turns cynical and sentimental. In one breath he dismisses modern Russian love as a disposable commodity. “‘I love you,’ has turned into ‘What’s up?’” he said. But then his voice cracks at the mention of sick or starving children.
Mr. Minaev said he turned to writing to save himself from the deep depression he had fallen into during the time he chronicled in “Dukhless.”
“The crisis of the hero was my crisis,” he said.
HE has been accused of being a Kremlin plant, part of a plot to discredit Western corporate culture and values and, not coincidentally, Russia’s political opposition. Skeptics also point to his friendship with Konstantin Rykov, a young pro-Kremlin Internet and glossy-magazine magnate.
Mr. Minaev scoffs at the conspiracy theories, proclaiming total disenchantment with modern politics. “It’s all a big farce, a big vaudeville,” he said.
But President Vladimir V. Putin does make several cameo appearances in “Dukhless” and “Media Sapiens,” and Mr. Minaev calls Mr. Putin the only “competent politician who has appeared here in the last 16 years.”
But even that glimmer of light is lost in Mr. Minaev’s dystopian depiction of contemporary Russian politics.
In “Media Sapiens,” a wealthy thug named Nikita lays out his vision of Russian politics:
“‘It’s all simple,’ says Nikita, as he tosses some sushi into his mouth. ‘The main thing here is to set it up like a good thriller, with special effects and a great set. The main thing is to show off, to have a good picture. On the whole, the people don’t really care who is president here, do they?’”
www.nytimes.com/
The Tortured Voice of Russia’s Lost Generation
James Hill for The New York Times
"They said, forget about all the heroes, forget about the entire cultural heritage, forget about everything." Sergei Minaev
Article Tools Sponsored By
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
Published: December 22, 2007
MOSCOW
WITH a perpetual 5 o’clock shadow, a penchant for Paul Smith suits and a partnership in a company that imports high-end spirits and fine wines, 32-year-old Sergei Minaev would seem to be the picture of post-Soviet success.
But as he holds forth, quaffing Italian mineral water and chain smoking at Cantinetta Antinori, an elite Tuscan-style restaurant that is a favorite of Moscow celebrities and oligarchs, he sounds more like a tortured Russian soul with a well-shod foot in the Soviet past.
“We are people cut in half,” he says. “We lived v sovke,” he explains, using derogatory slang for the Soviet era. “Then in the 1990s they drastically changed everything. They said, O.K., now we’re watching another channel. We’re not watching this one anymore.
“They said, forget about all the heroes, forget about the entire cultural heritage, forget about everything. We’ve changed the picture. Now survive.
“It’s like throwing house pets into the forest. And naturally, those who survived lived through a lot, and that’s why now they’re being broken. There’s a huge stratum of people who didn’t notice that anything changed. They simply moved from kitchens to clubs and spent all these years in a haze, and now they’ve woken up to find it’s 1984 again.”
Mr. Minaev is not just an overly introspective Russian yuppie, or a new style of dissident. He is a best-selling author whose two novels, first published on the Web, have now sold nearly a million copies in book form, almost unheard of in post-Soviet Russia for anything but mysteries.
“Dukhless,” the half-Russian, half-English, title of his 2006 breakthrough book, translates as “soulless” and stands as an epitaph for his generation. It chronicles a young Muscovite’s descent into a life of nightclubs, drugs and sexual promiscuity as he yearns for and pushes away true love and wrestles with the meaning of it all, including, not least, ghosts of the Communist past.
“To the generation born in 1970 to 1976, so promising and so full of prospects, whose start was so bright and whose life was so thoughtlessly wasted,” writes the book’s protagonist, “may our dreams of a bright future, where everything was supposed to be different ... R.I.P.”
“Media Sapiens,” his second novel, which was published this year in two parts, features another timely character, a political operative who works for the highest bidder — sometimes the Kremlin, sometimes the opposition — and is a student of the propaganda techniques of Goebbels. It features eerily prescient echoes of Russia’s current political situation and condemns the media manipulation of the modern age.
IN Russia, “Dukhless” (pronounced DOOCH-lyus) is still discussed on talk shows and in bookstores, a cultural landmark along the lines of Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” (which Mr. Minaev said he would like to have translated into Russian). While Mr. Minaev’s work is looked down upon by Moscow’s chattering classes — who deride it as crass, stream-of-consciousness Internet prose — it has also drawn considerable critical praise.
The writer Vasily Aksyonov compared Mr. Minaev’s disaffected leading characters to classic antiheroes portrayed in 19th-century works by Pushkin and Lermontov. “Minaev’s hero is a superfluous man,” Mr. Aksyonov told the Russian edition of Rolling Stone magazine. “He’s done well in business, but nothing satisfies him. In fact, he’s a typical Russian hero. He doesn’t understand what he needs and walks around in agony.”
Mr. Minaev is not coy about the autobiographical nature of “Dukhless.”
“Everything in ‘Dukhless’ is true,” he said. “The prostitutes, the drugs, it’s all true.”
Growing up, Mr. Minaev seemed content to follow a more conventional path. He was born into a good Soviet family, his mother an archivist and his father an engineer, although they were hardly Communist believers, he said.
“My parents are what is known as Russian intelligentsia,” he said, adding that these days he prefers the traditional pastime of the Russian intelligentsia, staying home and talking. “Now, I don’t go out at all, except for exceptional cases.” As a boy he joined the red-scarved Young Pioneers, who swore allegiance to Lenin and the Soviet state, though he says he, like tens of millions of other youngsters, did so out of inertia, not conviction. “No one was Communist then,” he said.
Just before he would have joined Komsomol, the youth league that was a ticket to a respectable life under Communism, the Soviet Union collapsed, turning his world upside down.
“It’s as if in the United States, for example, they said that everything has changed, that Roosevelt and Franklin are no longer the right political figures, everything they did was horrible and revolting, and we have a new ideology here now, let’s quickly get used to it,” he said.
In college in the early 1990s, Mr. Minaev studied the Third Reich, with a focus on the history of propaganda. That led him, inevitably, to Goebbels.
“From the point of view of mass propaganda and advertising, I think there’s been nothing new since the time of Goebbels,” Mr. Minaev said. “The modern world is absolutely fascist. Men must look like this, this and this. Women must look like this, this and this. All who are not within these bounds must strive for them or be losers.”
The nightclub world no longer holds any attractions for him.
“I hate the glorification of this way of life,” he said. “It’s revolting to me.”
The divorced father of a 5-year-old girl, Mr. Minaev is by turns cynical and sentimental. In one breath he dismisses modern Russian love as a disposable commodity. “‘I love you,’ has turned into ‘What’s up?’” he said. But then his voice cracks at the mention of sick or starving children.
Mr. Minaev said he turned to writing to save himself from the deep depression he had fallen into during the time he chronicled in “Dukhless.”
“The crisis of the hero was my crisis,” he said.
HE has been accused of being a Kremlin plant, part of a plot to discredit Western corporate culture and values and, not coincidentally, Russia’s political opposition. Skeptics also point to his friendship with Konstantin Rykov, a young pro-Kremlin Internet and glossy-magazine magnate.
Mr. Minaev scoffs at the conspiracy theories, proclaiming total disenchantment with modern politics. “It’s all a big farce, a big vaudeville,” he said.
But President Vladimir V. Putin does make several cameo appearances in “Dukhless” and “Media Sapiens,” and Mr. Minaev calls Mr. Putin the only “competent politician who has appeared here in the last 16 years.”
But even that glimmer of light is lost in Mr. Minaev’s dystopian depiction of contemporary Russian politics.
In “Media Sapiens,” a wealthy thug named Nikita lays out his vision of Russian politics:
“‘It’s all simple,’ says Nikita, as he tosses some sushi into his mouth. ‘The main thing here is to set it up like a good thriller, with special effects and a great set. The main thing is to show off, to have a good picture. On the whole, the people don’t really care who is president here, do they?’”
www.nytimes.com/