A central topic in the language debates is the handling of the recent past, in particular the Soviet linguistic legacy. An important dimension to this legacy is newspeak, the official, mainly political, language culture of the Soviet period, prevalent in genres such as the newspaper editorial or political speech, as well as in a great variety of official documents and forms of spoken verbal interaction (Weiss 1986). As we saw in Chapter 1, the late 1990s and early years of the new millennium saw the publication of a number of books – scholarly as well as popular – on Soviet language culture. The implications and broader dimensions of the Soviet linguistic legacy are also thematised in works of fiction, in particular by authors with links to the conceptualist art movement, such as Vladimir Sorokin, Evgenii Popov, Dmitrii Prigov and Viktor Erofeev. In this chapter we shall take a closer look at two of these writers, Popov and Sorokin, and see how their prose writing confronts, in quite different ways, the linguistic legacies of the past.

EVGENII POPOV: CONCEPTUALISM AND BEYOND

Evgenii Popov is a writer with literary and linguistic feet in two worlds, the recent Soviet past – above all the 1960s and 1970s – and then late and post-Soviet Russia. Popov studied and started to write in the 1960s, but became famous through the so-called Metropol’ affair: together with Viktor Erofeev, Andrei Bitov, Vasilii Aksenov and Fasil Iskander, Popov edited a compilation (entitled Metropol’) of short texts, including those by a number of officially unpublishable Russian writers, which created a literary scandal in 1979. The collection, originally prepared in only twelve typewritten copies of samizdat, was eventually published abroad (Aksenov et al. 1979), while Popov and Erofeev were expelled from the Union of Writers (Porter 1994: 26–30). In the early 1980s Popov continued to write, but could not be published. With the dramatic shift in the political climate during perestroika, however, he was readmitted to the Union of Writers in 1988, became a founding member of the Moscow PEN Club and has been widely published in Russia since the late 1980s.

Popov's fictional world is saturated with allusions creating a complex mixture of absurdity, irony and parody. He often juxtaposes texts from different times or genres, while his combination of styles, texts and languages triggers the reader's powers of association and reflection.