As I said in my review of Sasha Sokolov’s Школа для дураков (A School for Fools), Sokolov was bowled over by Aksyonov’s Затоваренная бочкотара (translated by Joel Wilkinson as Surplussed Barrelware) when he was just beginning to write, so I followed up my reading of Bitov’s Жизнь в ветреную погоду (Life in Windy Weather; see this post) by tackling the Aksyonov, which I read years ago with minimal comprehension. As with the Bitov, I’m really glad I returned to it, both because it shed new light on Sokolov and because I now fully realize why it was such an event in Soviet literature. To give you the basic idea of what it’s about, I’ll quote the summary in Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos, by Mark Lipovetsky and Eliot Borenstein:
The plot of this story is extremely simple. The driver Volodya Teleskopov is bringing empty barrels (the “surplussed barrelware” of the story’s title) to Koryazhsk, the regional center. Along the way he is joined by Gleb Shustikov, a marine; Irina Valentinova, a schoolteacher; Vadim Afanasievich Drozhinin, a scholar; the retired activist Mochenkin; and others. During their travels, strange things happen to them: All of them have lyrical dreams about a “Good Person,” and all of them grow strangely attached to one another and to the barrelware, without which they cannot even imagine their lives. So when the bureaucrats in Koryazhsk refuse to accept the empty barrels, the group decides to continue their journey with their beloved barrelware, only now they have no apparent destination whatsoever. […]
The absence of a mimetic dimension completely transforms the utopian discourse itself. Utopia always considers its own possible application to reality. In Aksyonov’s novel, the presence of “reality” itself seems problematic. In Aksyonov’s hands, the Soviet utopia turns into a kind of children’s fairy tale. The barrelware becomes a magical being, leading the unlikely traveling companions to the magic kingdom; in his letter to his girlfriend, Volodya Teleskopov writes: “Simka, you want the truth? I don’t know when we’ll see each other again, because we go not where we want to go but where our dear barrelware wants us to go. Understand?” […]
[Aksyonov] basically removes the spell of the Soviet utopian myth by transforming it into belles lettres rather than a “reflection of life.” In this case, the text obeys only the laws of literary play.
But not only is it a subversive deconstruction of Soviet myth, it’s an encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet cultural references: poetry from Pushkin and Lermontov to doggerel chastushki, music from Mozart to pop hits and Gulag songs (I was astonished when an entire stanza of «Этап на Север, срока огромные» was quoted — how did that get past the censors in 1968?), and all sorts of Soviet realia that I had to have explained to me by Yuri Shcheglov’s «Затоваренная бочкотара» Василия Аксенова: Комментарий. If you understand the references in this novella, you basically understand the mentality of Aksyonov’s generation.
So what did Sokolov get from it? Beyond the invigorating “you mean you can do that?” effect, there are all sorts of details, like the unpunctuated monologues, the sexualization of teachers (Aksyonov’s flirty geography teacher Irina Seleznyova becomes Sokolov’s biology teacher Vera Arkadyevna, who goes with young men to their apartments and lets them do what they will with her), and the river that “runs through Russia” at the end of the Aksyonov, which could have suggested the river Lethe that may or may not exist in Sokolov; there are butterfly nets in both; even the unusual word земснаряд ‘suction dredge, dredging barge,’ which I have encountered only twice in my reading, occurs in these two texts. In general, there’s what Shcheglov calls “all these fantasies, dreams, doubles, mirror reflections, and excursions into zaum [всех этих фантазий, снов, двойников, зеркальных отражений, экскурсов в заумь], which Sokolov drew freely from. But the main thing is that they’re both superb modernist works that will repay your investment in them; I have only seen Google snippets of the Wilkinson translation of Surplussed Barrelware, but it seems all right, and it has good annotations. Give it a try!
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