A New Russian comes in to buy a car. he tells the salesman he wants a gray Mercedes. The salesman finds for him exactly the car he wants, and the man pays for it right out of his pock- et. As he is about to leave, the salesman asks him, “Didn’t you buy a car just like this from us last week?”
“Oh, yes, I did,” replies the New Russian, “but the ashtray got full.”
As described by Anna Krylova in a 1999 essay on Russian subversion, laugh- ter, and jokes, New Russians (novie russkie) are “a post-Soviet sociocultural category widely used in contemporary Russia to refer, usually unflatteringly, to the group of people who have ‘made it’ under the new market-economy conditions” (261). Recent critical discussions of the New Russians have high- lighted both their “mythical” status and their precipitous slide (at least in their original form) into the dustbin of history.
Mark Lipovetsky’s essay, in a 2003 issue of Russian Review devoted to the
subject, begins by asking, “Are Those New Russians Real?” before ceding the question of their flesh-and-blood ontology to the social scientists and analyz- ing their very real presence in literary and cultural texts.1 Harley Balzer’s essay
in the same issue turns to their representation in ironic palekh boxes sold in
New Russians’ World stores (owned by Grigory Baltser, who also produced the parodic comics version of Anna Karenina, discussed below), and empha-
sizes the fact that “New Russians are very much a product of the state of mind of Russians who perceive themselves as losers in the [economic] transition” (19)—a role played by many in the intelligentsia. The thuggish, uncouth ar- rivistes therefore act as negative-attribute projections of those who sought to uphold humanist Russian values in the Soviet era, only to lose out eco- nomically to the barbarians with the collapse of the USSR. Emil Draitser’s sociological studies of the post-Soviet anekdot or joke take up this thread:
“The New Russians of the jokelore are really constructs of the popular wish that all of them were undeservedly wealthy in folkloric terms: stupid, ignorant, greedy, and immoral. These jokes give voice to popular resentment of the new economic realities of post-Soviet Russia. In them, the whole enterprise system is portrayed as criminal, exploitative, and humiliating for workers” (2001). And as Krylova adds: “New Russians are ridiculed for being illiterate, ignorant, and rude. The post- Soviet [joke-teller] implicitly counterpoises his/her civilized behavior, moderate spending habits, and erudition in history, geography, literature, theater, and music to the new beneficiaries of the post-Soviet economy, [who are seen as] narrow- minded and boorish” (261). What all these accounts (and others like them) have in common is the role desire plays for the producers and consumers of humor
lobbed in the direction of the “New Russians.” The thinking seems to go like this: “In a criminal new world, only thieves and morons will succeed, while the genuine Russian soul will languish; therefore if I have not flourished in these new circum- stances, it is only because I am too good for this world, while those other monsters in their Mercedes and Lear jets are, of course, corrupt.” It is the age-old Russian “little man,” helpless before all-powerful social forces and thus making a virtue of that helplessness.2
But this only tells part of the story; the snide jokes and sneering dismissals reveal more than mere contempt. For the desire expressed in humor about the New Russians reflects not only ill wishes toward them, but positive wishes to be
them: the masses and “cultured” intelligentsia (categories no less amorphous) see the brutish newcomers and feel a bloodcurdling rage—as well as envy. In a coun- try where the average monthly salary hovers around $5503 they, too, presumably,
would like to wear $10,000 suits; travel first-class to vacation spots all over the world; drive a Mercedes; keep a platoon of bodyguards; spend ten times the per capita yearly income on a bottle of wine; spend a fortune in a casino or over din- ner in a Japanese restaurant; cavort with $5,000 prostitutes; build enormous kot- tedzhi (country mansions) or live in a Rublyovka estate with its own helicopter
pad4—in other words, live the stereotype.
In contrast to the politically minded popular humor of the Soviet era, Krylova writes, “Jokes about the New Russians do not attempt to subvert the new post- Soviet symbolic order grounded on free-market and ‘independent individual’ . . . values. They suggest no alternatives to the current state of affairs, which is char- acterized by dramatic social polarization and inversion of social status. On the contrary, post-Soviet jokes demonstrate an enormous fascination with the lives of the ‘rich and ignorant’” (261). This fascination overcomes even what the anthro- pologist Caroline Humphrey calls the extraordinary success of Soviet propaganda against speculators, or people who profit by buying and selling commodities at a mark-up, without adding any value through their own labor. (This is the popular
presumption of how the New Russians accumulate wealth, at least those who are not full-fledged mafiosi, thieves, and embezzlers.) In spite of such beliefs, and prob- ably because of them, ordinary post-Soviet Russians insatiably fill their television screens, scandal sheets, and gossip talks with the lives of the idle rich.5
To sum up, humor about the New Russians invents and perpetuates a social type, an Other, despised for its success and “foreignness” to “Old Russian” val- ues. This type serves as a psychological defense mechanism, an ego-salve, for those who have “failed” in the new economy and who prefer disparagement of the new group to open admission that they themselves want, desire, covet what the new group has.
As one would expect, all these traits manifest themselves in the depiction of New Russians in post-Soviet Russian comics. But what I find striking is how many of those knee-jerk assumptions about the novie russkie (they are uncultured, vaguely “foreign,” and Other, lacking in a proper respect for tradition, crude, un- deserving of a place in Russian life) also apply to Russian cultural perceptions of comics themselves.
ARE KOMIKS “fuNNy”?
As in other national comics cultures, the very term “komiks” brings up unwanted connotations of humor and light-heartedness that get in the way of promoting it as a serious art form.6 Languages such as French (la bande dessinée), Spanish (his-
torieta, tebeo), Japanese (manga), and Italian (fumetti) sidestep this issue by ap- plying their own terms to the medium, but the Russian word’s derivation from the English “comics” brought along with it the same old “funny” cultural baggage,7 as
noted in chapter 4.
However, the peculiar modus operandi of komiks does have distinct ideological
consequences for its portrayal of the “mythic” New Russian—revealing it quite self-consciously, precisely and in ways no other medium can, as myth. Thus, ko-
miks serve as a valuable tool for unveiling the phantasmatic desire at the heart of humor aimed at/for New Russians.
In his semiotic approach to comics, Ole Frahm seeks to cut the Gordian knot of its “humorous” linguistic lineage, arguing for a double-entendre hermeneutics of the form: “Perhaps we have to take ‘comics’ literal [sic] and they really are com-
ic, komisch, funny and strange, entertaining and weird. In German komisch has
both these meanings. If something is komisch you can laugh at it and be puzzled
by it at the same time.” (This semantic shade of the word “comic,” as a synonym of “funny,” of course, also applies in English, and would carry its germ into the Rus- sian term “komiks” as well.) Furthermore, the two-headed nature of the medium has its parallel in the collusion of text and image to produce a unique kind of sig- nification; the “flattening” equalization of the visual and verbal, Frahm contends,
serves to destabilize any and all authoritative speech: “In comics the signs are ex- posed as signs. The images are exposed as panels in small frames. The words are exposed in speech balloons, in captions, as sound [effect]s. We have to read the
words but at the same time they are elements of the image” (my emphasis). Criti- cally, this referential/formal duality has the effect of making meaning in comics fundamentally ironic. “Truth” in this medium is always conditional, negotiated, in
dialogue between what we read/see and see/read.
Frahm brilliantly illustrates his point through a reading of the Jack Davis story “Bats in My Belfry!” (Tales from the Crypt, no. 24, EC Comics, 1951), which in-
volves the delightfully ludicrous transformation of the protagonist into a man- sized blood-sucking fiend. In the climactic panel, the hero (looking like a hairy Max Schreck with grotesque fangs and claws) widens his eyes at the reader and proclaims: “I’m a vampire bat!” (emphasis in original).
“What could be more ridiculous,” Frahm opines, “than showing a figure with pointed ears and teeth telling us that he is a vampire bat? We see it. We read it. It is banal. And yet, something else is happening in this simple repetition. To show the obvious twice is to produce a certain unheimlichkeit, a certain uncanniness. At first
glance this appears as just an explanation for people who do not know vampire bats. But in fact it stresses the unbelievable: the existence of vampire bats” (my em-
phasis). As with man-sized vampire bats, so with New Russians. Comics, Frahm notes, “mock the notion of an origin, of an original, that were to be signified by
the heterogeneous signs. They mock such notions by twice confirming the im- probable” (emphasis in original). The power to “confirm the improbable,” further- more, stems from the comic artist’s ability (like the caricaturist) to produce not strict adherence to what the “real world” looks like, but, paradoxically, to render a gross exaggeration or reworking of it that is still viscerally recognizable.8 Comics
avoid utter referentiality (like live-action film and photography never can) and add the heteroglossic attribute of textuality, making for a complex signifying sys- tem of juxtaposition that simultaneously creates and critiques stable meaning. We should bear this in mind as we examine the forcefully, often outrageously, “twice- confirmed” New Russians in the komiks representations to which we now turn.
anna KaRenIna by leo tolstoy
And furthermore. Comics must not be confused with literature. It is not only inaccurate, but completely false to consider comics an abridged retelling of a literary work. yes, there are comics based on famous literary texts, including anna Karenina, War
and peace, “The Queen of Spades,” etc. At first I was annoyed by
such things, but then I realized: “It’s humor!” When an artist takes a world masterpiece and transplants it in a comic, he is in effect
creating a parody of the masterpiece. It should not be consideered a translation or a transposition, but an entirely new work, created by the artist using a universally-known literary model. The cover should bear the name not of the author of the literary text, but the name of the artist. And civilized readers and viewers will recog- nize the literary heroes, they will recognize them and laugh. So such things should be approached with a healthy sense of humor. I would not include them in a required school curriculum, however, and not because they are insulting to the great writers, but because of the limited time allotted to literature in the educational system.
— I R I N A A R Z A M S T S E vA ( Q u O T E D I N M A K S I M O vA : 7 9 )
On the other hand, there does indeed exist a means by which to kill off a great literary heritage, and it is this: beastly seriousness. That cheerless, sullen veneration with which the jubilees of classics are celebrated, in which the classics are discussed, and through which the classics are taught in schools. This is where the real blas- phemy takes place—in schools, where not only the desire to reread Tolstoy’s novel, but even to ponder doing so, is fatally stamped out.
— vA I L
The truth is, we just didn’t have the money for a film, so we made a comic book.
— M E T E L I T S A ( Q u O T E D I N B O LT I A N S K A I A )
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, a graphic-novel adaptation of the nineteenth-cen-
tury classic, appeared in 2000 to considerable scandal. Written by Katya Metelit- sa, with art by Valery Kachayev and Igor Sapozhkov, and produced by Baltser of New Russians’ World, the ninety-page hardcover (priced in the $25 range, out of reach to average Russians) restages the well-known plot in Moscow circa 2000, complete with cell phones, coke snorted from atop credit cards, Mercedes, sushi bars, strip clubs, Bart Simpson, and a heroine the Guardian newspaper called a
morphine-addicted Russian version of Lara Croft. This Anna was New Russian down to her crudely rendered Versace suits and Victoria’s Secret lingerie.9
Critical discussions of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy focused on its “shocking” komiks format. Some, like Tolstoy’s great-grandsons, berated the medium itself as
inherently “beneath” consideration as true literature. “I was shocked. Then I tried but failed to see the funny side,” said Vladimir Tolstoy. “I can’t believe that this is a serious project. I hope that our children will not start studying literature using this kind of material,” said Ilya Tolstoy (Yablokova).10
Such a reaction in the wider culture was not surprising. But the book also met with disdain among many in the Russian komiks scene, which saw it first and foremost as a crass publicity stunt and not a “serious” work of real comics (which of course would not exclude a humorous treatment). As Zaslavsky told me: “The whole thing was calculated to produce a scandal. . . . It was hard for me to support this venture, the Anna Karenina book, since one could call it the
most commercial of comics work. It was made for cynically commercial reasons: it was a very expensive book by Russian standards, and only a few people who could afford it bought it. . . . But the mass media is always looking for a story, and this was a good story: is it right to make comics out of Tolstoy?” (Zaslavsky 2004). Metelitsa did nothing to change such perceptions. Appearing on a radio talk show in January 2001, she declared, “We just wanted to make money. We made a beautiful, striking commercial publication, that looks like a slide film” (Boltianskaia). The book’s publication, and that of its follow-up (Pikovaia Dama by Alex Pushkin, 2002), were thus quite blatantly calculated as épatage. Metelitsa’s
own lack of previous experience with comic art,11 her well-publicized denigrations
of the medium, and the perceived “crudeness” of the product (despite its French album-style package) endeared the book’s creators to neither the literary elite nor the komiks subculture.
And yet Anna functions very much along the lines of Frahm’s “double enten-
dre” visual/verbal hermeneutics of comics to deconstruct both the “sacrosanct” status of Russian novelistic high culture as well the “New Russian” myth. It does this through a relentless aesthetics of parodic “contamination”; as with Kujundz- ic’s McDonald’s menu, the virus of Western pop culture “infects,” “degrades,” and overwhelms the linguistic registers of Tolstoy’s text, turning it into the prose equivalent of “Dvoinoi Mak.” The visual layer, meanwhile, is a colorful pastiche of late twentieth-century Pop signifiers, including logos, brands, films, fashion, dishes, and much else.
The book’s cover, rendered in “metallic” blue with faux rivet holes, echoes that of Madonna’s 1992 softcore porn book, Sex. The title, in “glistening” red, white,
and blue, appears in the “exciting” font of a movie blockbuster or superhero com- ic. It pictures Anna’s face as she, in a dream, flees the train that will destroy her. The whole magazine-size ensemble, together with the New Russians’ World “winged bull” logo, resembles a high school student’s cheap spiral notebook, complete with “weathered” look and nubile model.
From the first page, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy subverts the original text
not only by “dumbing it down”—setting only short snippets of description in cap- tions or dialogue in balloons—but by inserting an immediate English translation as well (approximating the Soviet experience of watching a foreign film with an- noying “synchronous translation” voiceover). Metelitsa makes reading the komiks even more “crude” and irritating than need be; space is scarce on the comics panel,
so having to say everything twice forces the writer into even more of a staccato-like
style than would otherwise be necessary (this effect, of course, is precisely what she is trying to achieve: anglicizing the all-but-paraphrased lines of Tolstoy will only further aggravate the “serious-minded” lover of Russian classics).
To make things worse, those English translations are often inaccurate, occa- sionally missing, stylistically infelicitous, and/or intentionally misspelled. Just one of many instances: when Anna forlornly calls out her son’s name, “Seryozha! Miliy!” (“Seryozha! Sweety!”) the English counterpart reads, “Seryozha! Sweaty!”
[sic] (47). In addition, Metelitsa casually breaks the rules for comics grammar: a
line of Stiva’s is followed by the attribution, “declared Stepan Arkad’evich” (16), even though with word balloons no attribution is needed (since the balloon’s tail is supposed to point to the character delivering the dialogue, as this one does). The English equivalent does not carry the attribution.
Metelitsa does violence even to Tolstoy’s epigraph. The well-known biblical quote “Vengeance is mine, I will repay” is here, in the Russian text, credited to Alexander Pushkin! The English translation accurately attributes it to Romans 12:19 (though one can trace the verse back to the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy 32:35). This cavalier stance toward the quotation is meant to provoke an appalled
6.1. Levin marvels at the excesses of post-Soviet Russia in Anna Karenina
double-take in “serious” readers, a shrug in the ignorant who may not know or care about scripture, and a knowing wink in those inclined to appreciate the joke (not unlike Quentin Tarantino’s epigraph to Kill Bill Vol. 1: “Revenge is a dish best
served cold.”—Old Klingon Proverb).12
Finally, the style of lettering in Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy itself bears an
oddly “dual” quality. Like many mainstream comics works of the computer age, its lettering is done with software, not by hand, giving the speech balloons a “me- chanical” quality.13 But the font was clearly produced by scanning in letters that
had been written by hand; they therefore look both amateurish and consistent.
Furthermore, the font does not provide bold versions of the letters, so particular words do not receive emphasis; this further gives the text a dully repetitive, unin- teresting look. (In cases where characters are shouting—“Bravo, Vronsky!”—the letters are simply reproduced at a larger font size.) To complicate things further, Kachayev/Sapozhkov do make use of hand-drawn sound effects (also very crude looking): “driiing!” for a cell phone; “tr-r-r” for Karenin cracking his knuckles;
“bakh” for various pistols going off; “brrrooom” for an automobile. But these too
seem pro forma, evincing none of the text/image dynamism of, say, Soviet propa- ganda posters of the 1920s. Someone interested in making graphically striking,
6.2. “John Travolta” as Vronsky, a stuffed bunny as Anna’s son in