“The Culture of Lies” by Dubravka Ugresic [Excerpt]

This fall, we’ll be reissuing Dubravka Ugresic’s The Culture of Lies, 

The death of the model

Leafing long ago through an anthology of science-fantasy stories, in which authors from many countries were represented, I stumbled across an unusual sentence; “I stayed at a girlfriend’s house till the small hours drinking ‘the best quality whisky.’” The sentence was inappropriate for the genre of SF, which does not as a rule go in for comparisons of this kind. Apart from that, I wondered, what kind of a hero stays at a girlfriend’s house until the small hours drinking, and in fact what is “the best quality whisky”? The author’s name seemed to confirm the “justification” of the sentence. The author was a Czech.

I taught contemporary Russian prose at an American university. In one lecture I talked about the Russian writer Yury Trifonov and his short story “The Exchange.” The Moscow intellectual in Trifonov’s story is in a dilemma: his wife persuades him to exchange his flat with his own dying mother so as to increase their living space. My American students could not begin to understand why the Russian writer should have wasted paper in describing an ordinary housing transaction. Secondly, my students could not grasp the essence of that housing transaction. Why didn’t that man from Moscow and his wife simply rent a larger apartment? Why did the old lady have to move in with them, if neither she nor they wanted it? And why use up so many pages soaked in moral suffering over such a trivial matter as . . . an apartment? And I found myself in an uncomfortable position: in contact with another culture, the text of a Russian writer who was at the time popular suddenly lost its literary value, and instead of a lecturer in literature I became an interpreter of Soviet daily life.

My American friends very much enjoyed the film by the Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica, When Father Was Away on Business. As there was a scene at the beginning of the film in which the father was reading a newspaper with a photograph of Stalin on which the father commented aloud, my friends quite correctly concluded that after that the father went “away on business, i.e., to prison.” It took a long time before I succeeded in explaining that the father, “a victim of the Stalinist regime,” had spent a few years in prison because of his warm commentary and apparent sympathy for Stalin, and not the opposite. And our discussion of the film turned into a lecture on post-war Yugoslav history.

Although it has been destroyed, the Berlin wall still exists. Westerners are still “Wessies,” Easterners are “Ossies,” and the term “Eastern Europe” is still in wide usage. The term is reinforced by books with Eastern Europe on the cover; it is used, as are all other concepts from the East-European dictionary, for the most part, by “Westerners.” “Eastern Europe”—a concept which is today completely emptied of its original geopolitical meaning—has not disappeared. The concept insists on a border and on difference, it suggests a world that is different from the Western one, a culture that is different from the Western one, an identity that is different from the Western one.

“Easterners,” of course, do not agree with a common appellation which so crudely eliminates cultural distinguishing features. Central Europeans will quite rightly insist on the fact that they are different from the so very “Eastern” Russians, and hesitate to accept into their midst the equally “Eastern” Bulgarians, Romanians, and Serbs. For their part, the Russians will regularly point to the example of Peter the Great and rightly demand their place in Europe. Western Europe, of course.

Why do “Westerners” keep assiduously shoving “Easterners” into “Eastern” Europe? And why, when “Easterners” pronounce the word “Europe,” do they usually imply its “Western” half, passing over their own as though it did not exist? Let us remember, the Berlin wall was pulled down exactly five years ago.

Different cultural traditions, different cultural centers and different creative individualities cannot, of course, be simply placed under the heading “Eastern Europe.” Let us try for a moment to accept the justly or unjustly established term without resistance and start from the assumption that the point at which the different cultures of Eastern Europe come together is the point at which they differ from Western Europe.

That point of difference is above all the ideological-political system (communism or socialism, according to taste), which prevailed for some decades in countries such as Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia (yes, Yugoslavia too), as well as in the former empire of the Soviet Union. That system stamped its mark on everyone and everything, including culture, whether it developed in time with ideological-political demands or in opposition to them. But no one denies that there were variations: for example, socialism of the Yugoslav type differed from the Soviet brand, and thanks, among other things, to that difference, Yugoslav culture and its mechanisms were different from Soviet culture. Within that common framework, Poland had its own story, as did Czechoslovakia, as did Hungary . . .

What is the distinguishing feature of “East European” literature, on which cultural texts can East Europeans justifiably stick the label “Made in Eastern Europe,” what is it that constitutes the East European copyright? For instance, if the English writer Julian Barnes can publish an “East European” novel (Porcupine, 1992), which could just as well have been an article of Bulgarian literary manufacture, does that mean that there is a model that can be copied? If there is such a model, what constitutes the unique nature of the original production? And, as we seek for the “Easternness” of East European culture, will we be unconsciously dealing in assumptions from an East European mindset constructed by “Westerners,” or the cultural reality which was, after all, built up by “Easterners” in the course of their socialist years?

Beside the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, there are souvenirs for sale: a little piece of the Berlin wall in a transparent plastic box, Russian fur hats with a red star, sickles and hammers, flags, medals. The souvenirs are not sold by Russian émigrés anymore, as we might at first have thought. I saw a Pakistani. The Pakistani standing in the place where the wall stood a short time ago selling cheap souvenirs of a vanished epoch is perhaps the most precise and condensed metaphor of the times in which we are living.

Any serious literary theoretician or historian of literature is reluctant to get involved in constructions on shaky ground. But nevertheless, perhaps one day someone will take on the cultural-commemorative task of building a more acceptable construct, an “anti-formative” model which will articulate the common features of the different cultures which functioned under the cupola of a more or less common ideological system.

“The character X is one of those typical East European characters . . .” I read these words recently in a literary review written by an American. I would not myself be able to say what constitutes a “typical East European character,” and nor, I assume, would the author of the review. But as an inhabitant of a former Central European (or East European or even South-East European, whatever) country, I do know something about disappearance: the disappearance of colors, smells, contact with objects and signs which surrounded us for years. What has disappeared, without doubt existed. But what it is that makes that special substance, that specific color, that particular smell, is as hard to explain as the substance, color and smell themselves. And all I can do is for a moment try to consider the matter from the point of view of the seller of literary souvenirs.

*

The first point which makes East European literary texts different from West European ones is the system of everyday life, “byt” (an untranslatable Russian word, which means a great deal more than its translation into any foreign language), everyday life imbued with an ideological system, with established habits, rituals, mechanisms, signs. Without an understanding of the system of everyday life, without recognition of its rules (and absurdity), but also its smells, tastes, and colors, many East European texts would be incomprehensible, as Trifonov’s short story was to my American students. In that sense, by changing their readers and cultural context, many texts will disappear like frescoes suddenly exposed to the air. The Russian writer Venyamin Yerofeyev’s short novel Moskva-Petushki is not a novel about a Russian alcoholic, it is far more than that, a novel of “byt” and about “byt,” a novel of untranslatable substance. But translated into the language of a different cultural climate, it is simply a novel about a Russian alcoholic.

In conjunction with the political system, literary everyday reality (the “byt” of literature) set up rituals which Western culture did not know. East European culture (in some places more, in some less, in some cases for a shorter time, in others longer) was characterized by a system of aesthetic and ideological rules. East European culture developed the phenomena of censorship, repression, self-censorship, special functions of literature and of the author; the phenomena of “samizdat” and “tamizdat,” alternative institutions (“drawing-room theatre,” “drawing-room exhibitions,” “drawing-room books”); the whole phenomenon of “alternative culture” altogether, that is the division into “official” and “parallel” (“alternative,” “other,” “underground”) culture, with the accompanying concept of “dissidence,” and connected with that . . . a long and rich “culture of exile.”

Literary life, therefore, was one of the fundamental specific features of East European culture; without knowing and understanding it, a reading of the texts which came into being in that cultural habitat will be at the very least impoverished. Because that kind of literary life determined far more than the destiny of writers. It determined also the thematic corpus (that whole specific thematic menu which characterizes East European texts!), literary forms and genres, language and style. The whole of East European culture is marked by a lengthy history of accepting the political regime, but also opposing it. In that sense it is a culture of hidden or open polemic, a culture of questioning the imposed models of thought, aesthetic and political, of cultural subversion, escapism, inner and outer exile.

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The culture of socialist realism (which, if it were alive, would this year be celebrating its seventieth anniversary!), or the alternative culture which questions the official aesthetic-ideological assumptions, is at the same time what most clearly articulates the specific nature of the East European cultural model. Such texts are the core of the hypothetical model and they came into being precisely where the assumptions were most tenacious, in Russian literature and art. Artistic exploration of Soviet mythology which fashioned the consciousness of generations, the exploration of “byt,” the ideological-aesthetic habitat, is the field of the autonomous artistic phenomenon of “soc-art,” which came into being on the border between sociology, “archaeology,” and art, and was realized in texts which themselves eliminate the borders between art, literature, painting, theatre. In that sense, the entire ideological-aesthetic habitat is the artistic material of the “soc-art” artist: textbooks, readers, pioneer songs, posters, products of Soviet mass culture, language, political slogans, design (for instance, to confirm his idea that “the Soviet Union did not sell biscuits but ideas,” even the semiotician A. Zholkovsky took the wrapping of “October” biscuits as the object of his analysis). The most varied representatives, painters (Kabakov, Komar and Melamid, Bulatov and others), prose writers and poets (Sorokin, Prigov, and others) created an autonomous and unique artistic movement. The same type of “polit-art,” whose fundamental assumption is alienation from the ideological habitat and articulation of the socialist/communist collective unconscious, sprang up in other East European cultural centers as well (the films of Dušan Makavejev, the Slovene “Neue Slovenische Kunst” and the like).

*

Central Europe is an artificial construct (and at the same time the third point of difference) on which East European writers (Kundera, Konrad, Kiš, and others) articulate the essence of “Central Europeanness” in a rich corpus of works, in essays, novels, and stories. The creation of a cultural construct is conditioned above all by the cultural sovietization of the majority of the Eastern Bloc countries, and it came into being not only as the result of a search for the specific nature of their own cultural identity, but in part also out of a need to escape the narrow framework of small xenophobic national cultures, to discover the general, unifying cultural components of the small languages and small literatures of Central Europe, of all of those, that is, which shared “The same memories, the same problems and conflicts, the same common tradition” (Kundera).

The East European cultural model no longer exists, and it has still not been either constructed or articulated, because that may not be possible. The imagology of “Eastern Europe” is still kept alive by texts (films, painting, literature) which are more present than ever before on the “Western” market. The majority of those texts, however, came into being in a former age and give the impression of extinguished stars shining with their full brightness as they fall on a different cultural soil. East European artists and writers today are in fact selling souvenirs of a vanished culture. What kind of culture comes into being on the ruins of a system—and, in an age which likes cultural labels, will it be called “post-communist” or “post-totalitarian”? It is hard to say. The East European cultural dossier is in any case closed, whatever its contents mean and however it might be re-evaluated one day.

*

In a short note written in 1979, Danilo Kiš, the last “Yugoslav” writer, clearly stresses: “Because for the intellectual of this century, of this age of ours, there is only one test of the conscience, and there are only two subjects which if one fails them mean not only the loss of one year, but to lose the right to a (moral) voice once and for all: fascism and Stalinism.” Today I read this sentence, which sounded moralistic and severe some fifteen years ago, whose simple pamphletism did not fit with Kiš’s literary elegance; now I read it from a quite different perspective and with due respect. Danilo Kiš, who in his essays favors a Yugoslav cultural identity, a Central European cultural identity—who seems to have done so, conscious of the nationalistic, self-satisfied, provincial mentality of his own country, virtually as a program—would be astonished by the alarming speed with which cultural and moral regression has overwhelmed many former Yugoslav centers. The common cultural heritage—the works of Ivo Andrić, Miroslav Krleža, Meša Selimović, Danilo Kiš, which long ago articulated the assumptions of the reality confronting us today—this heritage is now dead, just as its authors are. The former Yugoslav cultural centers have sunk into a torpor of cultural autism, the air there is heavy not only with aggressive misery but with stupidity and banality “indestructible as a plastic bottle” (Kiš).

In Croatia, for example, fragments of the totalitarian cultural past suddenly spring up as in a nightmare. Dusty quotations from the museum of totalitarianism appear on the cultural scene: state exhibitions which send us straight back to the time of socialist realism with the zeal of a new discovery;1 monuments, made long ago, then destroyed, to be immediately replaced by stylistically identical ones; projects emerge, the grotesque quality of which was confirmed long ago in the already forgotten days of totalitarianism; black and white texts of literary propaganda appear, although similar ones would have been considered a short time ago as a literary-museum rarity and mocked by critics; the occasional “state” writer springs up, a role which writers used to take on in the distant days of state culture;2 cultural phenomena are being revitalized which we believed belonged to the early childhood of communism and would remain there, in the museum; once again, like a persistent virus, the mechanisms of censorship, self-censorship, collective censorship, begin to function, familiar to us from the dusty “handbooks” of the culture of totalitarianism; projects of “national” culture and “spiritual renewal,” which we know from the yellowing pages of the “handbooks” of Nazism, reappear. A kind of amnesia prevails in the cultural scene, the participants themselves seem no longer to recognize either the scene or the meaning of the cultural symbols.

At this moment, the Croatian cultural scene is characterized by a kind of retrospective, fragmentary, referential totalitarianism. The Serbian cultural scene is dominated by a tendency which swings like a pendulum between two poles of the same thing: nationalistic populism and elitist intellectualistic neo-fascism.3 Nationalistic populism followed the growth of the concept of Greater Serbia and was a kind of introduction to the war. This second tendency has grown up in the course of the war, and its newly manufactured cultural concept serves to confirm and affirm the evil which has already been done.

Thinking that they are closing their doors only to their immediate neighbors, both cultural milieus are paying a heavy price—or so it seems from outside: today they receive visitors from their own provinces, from the ethno-museums and political museums of past epochs. At the same time both milieus warmly welcome cultural ghosts as a long awaited encounter with their own identity.

1 An amusing example is the exhibition of works by the Croatian sculptor Kruno Bošnjak “People for all Croatian times” (Zagreb, 1992). The sculptor cast seven bronze figures of people “to whom it was given,” as it said in the catalogue, “to help the thousand-year dream become reality.” The dream of creating the Croatian state was helped by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher, Alois Mock, Pope John Paul II, Franjo Tudjman, and an unknown Croatian soldier with a child in his arms.

2 “Ivan Aralica wrote what he wrote as though he were with me every day, and I have not seen him once in these last two years,” are the words of President Franjo Tudjman. The Croatian President went on to recommend that everyone should write like Aralica, the Croatian “state” writer.

3 The journal Naše idejé (Our Ideas, June 1993) describes a conception that opposes the virtues of eternal Europe to “The new world order,” that is to say, I quote: it opposes faith to rationalism; the primacy of the spirit over matter, to materialism; the rule of order to disorder and anarchy conceived of as “freedom”; idealism to sensualism; love of power to a search for wealth; the hierarchy of authority as opposed to equality; discipline to “laissez faire”; respect of authority and the elder to parliamentarism; aristocracy, the rule of the élite and the nobility to plutocracy and the rule of the wealthy; stability to constant oscillation; the cult of duty as opposed to the search for happiness; society as an organic whole to society as a collection of individuals; the state as harmonizing social strata to class struggle; the restoration of authority to liberalism and the tyranny of human rights; the ideal of knighthood and faith to systematic hypocrisy; the cult of military virtues to the cult of bourgeois values; the open affirmation of war and conquest to pacifism; military and political expansion to economic expansion; the impulse of prosperity and strength to decadence; the absolute will to biological fertility to birth control; the absolute will to power to the voluntary rejection of European hegemony; and so on and so forth . . .

This political and cultural mish-mash becomes clearer in the context of the whole journal in which the former fascist movements in Europe (German, Romanian, and the Serbian Chetnik movement) are unambiguously affirmed; which prints texts by the classic spokesmen of fascism alongside texts by contemporary Russian and Serbian neo-fascist thinkers. The ideas quoted are endorsed through their contributions to the journal by a substantial number of public figures (film directors, painters, writers). They are all participating in the process of creating a new combination of the prevailing politics and culture, a combination in which Russo-Serbian Orthodoxy is mixed up with militaristic exhibitionism, monarchism, cheap folklorism, fascism, aesthetics, and the aestheticization of evil, something which for the time being has the narrow title of the “new Serbian right.” Let us in addition point out that the “left” does not exist, and the “ideas” referred to have their origin in the bloody reality of Bosnia.