Page 1 →1 The Role of Literature during the Cold War

The widespread adoption of satire as a medium for fictional expression stems from a number of factors that arose in both the United States and the Soviet Union during the years of the cold war. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have attempted to unravel the dynamics that altered the American and Soviet cultural landscapes so drastically between 1945 and 1991. Although they often differ greatly in their ideas about the means by which cultural phenomena influence artistic representations, scholars of the cold war generally agree that these two factors are part of a cause-and-effect cycle. Satirical literature reflects aspects of the culture(s) in which it is produced and subsequently aspires to bring about changes in that/those culture(s), an endeavor that in turn instigates new literary developments, and so on. Such notions concerning the relationship between literature and culture have attained especial (but not exclusive) credence among the New Historicist school of literary criticism. In Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999), Hayden White states his understanding of New Historicism: “[It] has advanced the notion of a cultural poetics and, by extension, a historical poetics as a means of identifying those aspects of historical sequences that conduce to the breaking, revision, or weakening of the dominant codes—social, political, cultural, psychological, and so on—prevailing at specific times and places in history. Whence their interest in what appears to be the emergent, episodic, anecdotal, contingent, exotic, abjected, or simply uncanny aspects of the historical Page 2 →record” (63). All of the cold war satires discussed in this study diverge from and often seek to undercut the aesthetic and political norms (that is, the “dominant codes”) of their time, which is why I have adopted White’s notion of a “historical poetics” to analyze them.

In my view a comparative historicist approach is essential to greater understanding of the nature of satirical fiction in an era during which control of language became a powerful (arguably, the primary) weapon for conducting the cold war, both domestically and internationally. Self-contradictory expressions such as “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” were commonplace in the governmental and military rhetoric of the United States and the Soviet Union, and the extreme propagandization of language during the cold war drastically destabilized the semantic and semiotic values of words. The formal and thematic qualities found in the satires that arise from this cultural context are directly linked to their creators’ distrust of language (sometimes including, in true postmodernist fashion, that of their own satires) in the post–World War II world.

Whether considered as the dawn of the “atomic age” or as the “first cold war,” the historical period following the Hiroshima- and Nagasaki–induced conclusion of World War II created a radically new cultural context in both the United States and the Soviet Union. E. B. White’s comments from the August 18, 1945, issue of the New Yorker clearly convey the unsettling sense that a new era has suddenly begun: “For the first time in our lives, we can feel the disturbing vibrations of complete human readjustment. Usually the vibrations are so faint as to go unnoticed. This time they are so strong that even the ending of a war is overshadowed” (108). White understood that the significant shift in the military balance of power was minimal compared with the necessary recalibration of cultural norms in the wake of the atomic bomb’s creation and use. During the late 1940s he advocated tirelessly for a unified “world government” as a pragmatic response to the state of global affairs in the nuclear era.

The intensifying political and military rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States was not the only source of “disturbing vibrations” resonating through the cultural landscape after 1945, though. Postwar literature about the Holocaust implicitly responds to Theodor Adorno’s oft-quoted assertion that it would be “barbaric” to continue to write poetry as though Auschwitz had never happened; a similar principle holds true for nuclear-themed literature after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As in the literature of the Holocaust, a transformation takes place over time in the language of fiction that attempts to come to terms with the significance of the atomic bomb. In both cases the emphasis shifts appreciably from largely mimetic (usually realistic or biographical) narratives toward more abstract representations. Whereas Holocaust literature serves primarily as a simultaneously reproachful and memorializing chronicle of a hitherto unimaginable atrocity from the past, Page 3 →the bulk of nuclear fiction speculates about a future global atrocity that could result from prevalent attitudes.

Lawrence L. Langer and Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi clarify the connection between works about the Holocaust and works about Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Langer writes in The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (1978) that the “Hiroshima bomb, perhaps even more than Auschwitz, changed the quality of war and hence the quality of life and of survival itself” (61). He expands this analysis in the introduction to Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (1995): “Language, of course, has its limitations; this is one of the first truths we hear about Holocaust writing. . . . The question we need to address, dispensing with excessive solemnity, is how words help us to imagine what reason rejects—a reality that makes the frail spirit cringe” (3–4). Applying this assessment of the potential of language to Holocaust texts, Langer writes that the “most compelling Holocaust writers reject the temptation to squeeze their themes into familiar premises: content and form, language and style, character and moral growth, suffering and spiritual identity, the tragic nature of existence—in short, all those literary ideas that normally sustain and nourish the creative effort” (6). In The Age of Atrocity, Langer posits the dilemma facing the post-Auschwitz / post-Hiroshima world in terms of a “disruption”: “With the disruption of a familiar moral universe, the individual must find ‘new’ reasons for living and ‘new’ ways of confronting the prospect of death introduced into reality by atrocity. Such disruption mars not only an ordered universe, but the identity of one’s self, one’s conception of where he fits and how (and why) he is to act as a human being in a dehumanized world” (62). Thus the “familiar premises” of literature are rendered “barbaric” in the sense that the “familiar moral universe” that they described has been revealed to be literally and figuratively atrocious.

Ezrahi uses a similar idiom of dehumanization in By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (1980) as part of a discussion of Saul Bellow’s work, stating that he “deplor[es] the threat to the self, the loss of identity, which both the Nazi and the nuclear forms of mass extermination represented” (177). Albert Einstein’s 1946 admonitions about the widespread failure to recognize the altered state of the postbomb world serve as yet another point of comparison: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled disaster” (quoted in Dewey 7). These comments all indicate the value of language — including fiction—as a medium in which to track how and why “modes of thinking” changed in response to events that established forms of reasoning cannot comprehend.

In essence the Holocaust generated literature aimed at making it impossible for its readers to forget what happened or to allow something similar to recur, whereas most early nuclear literature served as a warning to prevent the apocalyptic events it depicts from ever occurring. As Stanley Kubrick Page 4 →explained in describing his motivations for making Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963), “It was very important to deal with this problem dramatically because it’s the only social problem where there’s absolutely no chance for people to learn anything from experience” (quoted in Whitfield 219). The subversive satirists who wittingly or unwittingly followed Kubrick’s lead extended this task toward a general critique of the dehumanizing processes at work within the cold war.

The cold war period is unusual in the way that both Russian and American literary cultures responded to the inherent novelty of the times. Whereas American literary expressions of the post–World War I zeitgeist generally adopted the “high” artistic forms associated with modernism (as with the fiction of the Lost Generation or the highly intellectual poetry of Eliot, Pound, and others), a substantial part of the initial literary response to the cold war occurred in “low” or “popular” forms such as science fiction and espionage thrillers. The vastly decreased cost of mass-producing books coupled with the burgeoning film and television industries assured greater opportunities for publishing and consuming literature in the decade after World War II than in the decade after World War I. The traditional university-educated and/or university-employed American literary elite began to engage extensively with cold war themes extensively in fiction only in the early 1960s, in the process drawing significantly on the “low” forms that came before. Whereas the initial responses generally engaged with the historical and political events of the early years of the cold war (or extrapolated the effects of such events into futures, usually utopian or dystopian ones),¹ the subversive satires that begin springing up in the early 1960s engage with the period in more oblique terms, critically examining the underlying philosophy and language that shaped the more visible historical and political domains.

Even though the later elite works have generally still become the canonical texts, the influence of popular culture is much more pronounced and direct because of this process of incorporation. Philip E. Simmons discusses the direct connection between mass culture and literature in his Deep Surfaces (1997):

With the vertiginous self-consciousness and skepticism that belong to the postmodern historical imagination, writers as different in style and approach as Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, Ishmael Reed, Don DeLillo, Nicholson Baker, and Bobbie Ann Mason not only write about the present while writing about the past, but construct histories of their own novelistic methods, of the conditions of their texts’ production, and of their own approach to representing the past. In these constructions, mass culture—particularly film, television, and the consumer culture built on advertising—shows up as a significant historical development Page 5 →in itself. Enabled by new technologies and multinational organizations of capital, mass culture has become the “cultural dominant”—the force field in which all forms of representation, including the novel, must operate. (1–2)

Simmons later includes literary forms such as science fiction and pulp magazines as part of “mass culture.” While Simmons does not directly associate the cold war with the transition of the “cultural dominant” from the elite to the masses, many factors his study claims as distinctly “postmodern” are ones I attribute primarily to that sociohistorical correlation. The combination of greater and faster media saturation, increased literacy among the general population, and the tremendous rhetorical and physical power unleashed by the development of the atomic bomb all contributed to the rapid development and entrenchment of a belief that the world was in a radically new era.

In the Soviet Union, the sense of living in a fundamentally changed world was initially delayed by Stalin’s continued rule. The rigorous state control over literature and the widespread annihilation of the intelligentsia during the “great terror” (yezhovshchina) of the late 1930s ensured that the post–World War II literary scene in the Soviet Union did not resemble that of the highly innovative 1920s in either its artistic or intellectual merit. Until Stalin’s death in 1953, the party’s control over literary form and content was relatively unquestioned and nearly complete. This situation improved somewhat during the Thaw (Ottepel’), a period of relaxed governmental control from roughly 1954 to 1963, but the relative candor of this time also contributed to discontent by continually providing reminders of how tenuous and restricted the new freedoms were.

Although token dissenting works such as Vladimir Dudintsev’s Ne khle-bom edinym (1956; Not by Bread Alone) and Yuri Bondarev’s Tishina (1962; Silence) were published and a number of previously outlawed writers were rehabilitated (either in reputation, if dead, or in person, if alive), the Thaw’s limitations were still exceedingly clear to authors who wished to criticize something other than the excesses of Stalin’s rule. The relaxation of censorship never expanded beyond a few politically expedient internal targets,² thereby allowing the party and its organs to retain full control over legal means of publication, especially from the end of the Thaw through glasnost. Thus the literary response, satirical or otherwise, to the cold war inevitably remained divided into official and unofficial branches. This phenomenon implicitly imparted political undertones to nearly all works of Russian literature, undertones that were defined by the extent to which a work sought and/or received official sanction. The generation of young writers who got their first glimpse of what was possible beyond Socialist Realism during the Thaw included Aksyonov, Dovlatov, Iskander, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Sasha Sokolov, Page 6 →Vladimir Voinovich, and Alexander Zinoviev, each of whom went on to produce subversive satirical works that were published outside the official literary organs of the Soviet Union.

According to many U.S. and Russian historians, the cold war reached its zenith during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The Soviet Union and the United States came into unprecedented direct conflict over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba as well as the United States’ deployment of missiles in Turkey.³ In his exhaustive political memoir/history Danger and Survival (1988), McGeorge Bundy, special assistant for national security affairs in President John F. Kennedy’s cabinet, maintains that this was the “most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age,” although he downplays the actual danger by stating that “the largest single factor that might have led to nuclear war—the readiness of one leader or another to regard that outcome as remotely acceptable—simply did not exist” (453). Whether or not this assertion is accurate, the resonating aftereffects on the collective psyche of Russian and American society demonstrate the power contained within the perceived threat of imminent total destruction.

The extreme anxiety engendered by the standoff in Cuba served as a stimulus for a literary response that followed closely behind. As Paul Boyer outlines in his two excellent cultural histories, By the Bomb’s Early Light (1985) and Fallout (1998), fictional works with nuclear themes were fairly commonplace before 1962. Most of these works, though, had been classified in the traditionally “low” literary category of science fiction and thus had flown under the critical establishment’s radar. Of the “familiar titles” of nuclear-themed fiction from the precrisis period listed by Albert E. Stone in his Literary Aftershocks, only the works of two British authors, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), generated any stir within critical circles.

Although the possibility of nuclear war had been the overt source of anxiety during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the satires that arose in its wake did not necessarily limit themselves just to criticizing the dangerous practices of nuclear brinksmanship; they also decried the underlying cultural forces that made such risky practices possible in the first place. The number of works of satirical fiction increased dramatically in the wake of the precrisis publication of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and the release of Dr. Strangelove in 1963. The eleven years immediately following the Cuban Missile Crisis witnessed the production and publication of the following works: Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963), Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Robert Coover’s The Origin of the Brunists (1966), Pynchon’s Page 7 →The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967) and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins (1971), Don DeLillo’s End Zone (1971), Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). All of these works of fiction, and many others like them, contain satirical elements that are part of a broad criticism of American cold war culture in toto in a period when a number of other factors (the Vietnam War, civil rights, and so on)⁴ led to a “sudden fading of the nuclear-weapons issue . . . whether as an activist cause, a cultural motif, or a topic of public discourse” (Boyer, Fallout 110). Whereas Boyer sees the years between 1963 and 1980 as the “Era of the Big Sleep”⁵ because of a “sharp decline in culturally expressed engagement with the issue [of nuclear war]” (Bomb’s Early Light 355), I contend that this decline, if it can be said to have happened, was far from a comfortable slumber.

To his credit Boyer admits as much when he qualifies his remarks: “This is not to suggest that nuclear fear ceased to be a significant cultural force in these years. Robert Jay Lifton may well be right in his speculation that the denial of nuclear awareness . . . affects a culture as profoundly as acknowledging it does” (Bomb’s Early Light 355). In my view this is precisely the phenomenon that the writers mentioned above exposed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pynchon rather disconsolately hints at such a viewpoint in the introduction to Slow Learner (1984) in the process of explaining the themes of his 1959 story “Under the Rose”: “Our common nightmare The Bomb is in there too. It was bad enough in ’59 and is much worse now, as the level of danger has continued to grow. There was never anything subliminal about it, then or now. Except for that succession of the criminally insane who have enjoyed power since 1945, including the power to do something about it, most of the rest of us poor sheep have always been stuck with simple, standard fear. I think we have all tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about it to going crazy from it. Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is writing fiction about it—occasionally, as here, offset to a more colorful time and place” (18–19). Pynchon and other writers like him pointed out, among other things, the kinds of elaborate political and social manipulations that were involved in diminishing that “simple, standard” nuclear fear to levels that didn’t threaten pervasive dissatisfaction with either the system or its masters, all while still allowing anti-Communist popular sentiment to produce strong support, at least initially, for otherwise dubious policies like the Vietnam War. Boyer’s “Big Sleep” essentially represents a period of greater sublimation and abstraction in terms of the iconic vocabulary of cold war rhetoric, and this process is due, at least in part, to a concerted effort on the part of the Johnson and Nixon administrations in redirecting fear of Communism away from nuclear weapons (Johnson’s [in]famous “Daisy” campaign ad notwithstanding) Page 8 →and toward related issues fraught with less totalizing peril, such as preventing the spread of Communism into the Third World. By the mid- to late 1960s, the shoe-banging, missile-brandishing Soviet bogeyman that Khrushchev represented in the early 1960s took a back seat to the Vietcong soldier as the predominant symbol of the Red Menace.

Nuclear motifs disappeared in the United States only in their explicit forms during this period; however, implicit and/or metanarrative expressions of nuclear and related cold war themes remained consistent and perhaps even increased in number. Joseph Dewey addresses this issue in the introduction to his In a Dark Time (1990): “The apocalyptic temper emerged strongest in the very period Boyer dismisses. . . . However, the response did not undertake the direct treatment of doomsday scenarios, but instead dealt directly with how people adjust to life in perilous times” (48n18). Dewey’s qualified and insightful definition of “apocalyptic temper” in a post-Hiroshima context rejects many of the pejorative labels that have been applied by hostile critics to some of the most important cold war works: “The apocalyptic temper, then, brings more than . . . the joy of plotting. It is more than a collective paranoia, a defensive strategy affected by the scared against a terror that seems to spin wildly out of control. It is more than a sugar pill for those who in the dark moments seem to see the very beast itself slouching toward Bethlehem. It is more than simply supplying form to time, a shape when it seems most defiantly shapeless. It is supremely an act of the moral imagination, a gesture of confidence and even defiance that challenges its own assumptions that history is itself tracked toward endings” (15; emphasis added). His formulation of the apocalyptic perspective on the cold war allows for a proactive and politicized mode of fictional expression that overcomes both bleak defeatism and the temptation to replace one flawed utopian scheme with another: “When history, then, goes critical; when God seems withdrawn, or silent, or, even worse, casketed; when, as in this century, the finest instruments of our own technologies seem bent on destroying us; when night seems thickest and the earth itself an intricate absurdity, the apocalyptic temper refutes the bated breath of the cataclysmic imagination and the nonchalant breathlessness of the millennialist spirit. It refuses either simple annihilation or the simplistic spiral of inevitable progress to offer the oxymoron of humanity as a creature brave and timid” (15). Such refusal of “simple” or “simplistic” solutions echoes the notion of satirical subversion that Steven Weisenburger establishes in his Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980 (1995). Both Weisenburger and Dewey deny the existence of a single “proper” alternative in place of the systems they refute. More important, though, both schemes allow for wholesale dissent against norms without resulting in nihilism, meaninglessness, or hopelessness. For Dewey, the apocalyptic mode provides “reassurance that a dangerous present is fraught with as much hope as it is with danger” (15). Weisenburger, using a semiotic context, Page 9 →more abstractly claims that the works he analyzes in his book demonstrate that “no one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever really stripped of power over those messages that continually relocate one as sender, referent, and addressee” (6). Both modes of interpretation offer something more than cold comfort to readers, even as they acknowledge the grim potency of the debased and warped spirit of the nuclear age.

There are a number of significant problems with the literary histories of the cold war that have been published since the early 1980s. Not the least among these is an almost exclusive focus on American and, to a lesser extent, British works. This limited scope remains blind to a corresponding upsurge in “apocalyptic temper” in Russian literature in the late 1960s and 1970s. Aksyonov, Iskander, Voinovich, and Zinoviev, for example, all establish their dissident credentials during this period, primarily as a result of their satirical writings. Especially in the cases of Aksyonov and Voinovich, adoption of the subversive satirical mode represented a significant departure from their earlier, more ideologically acceptable forms of writing.⁶ Each of these writers criticized Soviet (and occasionally American) governmental policies that led to, resulted from, and perpetuated the dangerous strategic shell game of the cold war.

Explicit instances of nuclear themes are scarce in both official and unofficial Russian literature—certainly far less common than in American fiction. In his Red Stars: Political Aspects of Soviet Science Fiction (1985), Patrick L. McGuire points out that while “after-the-bomb stories had been appearing in western science fiction since a time when the atomic bomb was itself fiction . . . no post-1920s Soviet story deals with the theme directly” (59). In fact McGuire lists only two novels that feature post-nuclear-war settings at all, Obitaemyi ostrov (1969; Prisoners of Power) by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and Posledniaia voina (1970; The Last War) by Kirill Bulychev. In 1989 Vladimir Gakov and Paul Brians published a more extensive bibliography in the journal Science-Fiction Studies that lists fifty cold war–era Russian works “depicting nuclear war or its aftermath” (67) and another fifteen works that deal with the threat of nuclear war. Even with Gakov and Brians’s expanded list—prefaced with the compilers’ acknowledgment that “the theme has hardly been a popular one in the Soviet Union” and that the works they list are “for the most part . . . not major contributions to fiction” (67)—the number of Soviet texts explicitly engaging with nuclear issues is minuscule in comparison to the frequency with which this topos occurs in American science fiction.⁷ Overt references to nuclear weapons occasionally cropped up in novels by dissident and/or émigré writers,⁸ but such novels were generally written with little or no hope (or intention) of being published in the Soviet Union.

Rosalind J. Marsh also mentions the “tenuous” presence of nuclear themes in postwar Soviet literature in her Soviet Fiction since Stalin: Soviet Politics and Literature (1986).⁹ Yet the scattered works she includes are never more Page 10 →than tangentially concerned with nuclear issues. Marsh attributes the general lack of nuclear themes in Soviet literature both to “a special military censorship [that] vetted all literary references to nuclear research” and to “the ambiguous Soviet position [on nuclear weapons], which can be defined as the combination of an avowedly defensive policy with an offensive posture” (195). Because ambiguous policies are inherently difficult to depict in an ideologically “correct” manner, most writers avoided altogether the possible pitfalls associated with the nuclear issue.

The immensely different relationship between the “average” citizen and the atomic bomb in the Soviet Union as opposed to the United States also helps explain the disparity in fictional representations of the bomb. First, the Soviet Union had no history of using its nuclear weapons in combat, thus sparing its citizenry the kind of moral dilemma that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings represented.¹⁰ In fact the Soviet Union and allied Communist organizations worldwide sponsored a campaign to outlaw atomic bombs entirely in the years immediately following the end of World War II. Although the Soviet Union was covertly working to produce its own bomb at the time, the pursuit of this policy was both good propaganda and a win-win political position: “If by chance the United States agreed to a paper ban without inspectors, Russia might feel a little more secure; meanwhile, provoking disgust toward atomic bombs would teach the world to despise the Americans who owned them” (Weart, Nuclear Fear 117–18).

Second, the quick onset of the cold war allowed Soviet authorities to claim moral superiority in the conflict by claiming that their own nuclear policies were simply a reaction to the demonstrated aggressive stance of the United States. Published opinion polls that showed the American public favoring the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War served only to bolster this feeling and led to a rapid acceleration of weapons development and stockpiling on both sides (Boyer, Fallout 36–38).¹¹ In its early years, Soviet propagandists found it easy to justify the nuclear arms race as both a source of pride for the achievement of Soviet science and as defense of the Soviet motherland against American nuclear belligerence (a position that was predictably mirrored in American pronuclear, anti-Soviet propaganda). After the Cuban Missile Crisis, this tone moderated to the point that Soviet government official Mikhail Suslov openly stated in 1963 that in the case of nuclear war “the question of the victory of socialism would no longer arise for entire peoples, as they would have disappeared from the earth” (quoted in Weart, Nuclear Fear 238). Suslov and other Soviet officials who voiced similar opinions were careful to note that this was not the case for the Soviet Union; in keeping with Marxist-Leninist historical determinism, the governmental stance consistently, and irrationally, remained that nuclear combat would be regrettable but that the Soviet Union would survive and prevail.

Page 11 →Third, Soviet nuclear policy was part of general governmental policy and therefore virtually sacrosanct from criticism. This was somewhat less the case during the comparatively liberal years of the Thaw, but even then, the freedom to disapprove was generally limited to particular elements of nuclear policy rather than complete opposition. After Khrushchev’s faction seized power from Molotov’s comparatively more reactionary one in the wake of Stalin’s death, the Soviet leadership advocated a purely defensive nuclear policy in public, even if that defensive posture did occasionally lead to serious “misunderstandings” like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Official Soviet policy from 1962 onward generally acknowledged the unprecedented destructiveness of nuclear war but maintained that the results would ultimately resemble “a radioactive Second World War, with large areas of their nation scorched yet once again struggling to victory” (Weart, Nuclear Fear 239). The repeated hard lessons of how to prevail despite the destruction of entire cities (as with Moscow in the Napoleonic Wars or Stalingrad in World War II) helped provide the Soviets with a propagandistic model for perseverance even in the face of the nuclear threat.

Finally the Soviet public had almost no visible antinuclear movement from which to take its example. There were few public figures who could parallel J. Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, or Leo Szilard, knowledgeable scientists who openly decried the risks of nuclear proliferation in the United States after 1945.¹² The physicist Andrei Sakharov, who was both the “father” of the Soviet atomic bomb and perhaps the most celebrated Soviet dissident, played this role as much as anyone could. His efforts were largely behind the scenes, frequently in the form of letters urging Khrushchev to stop atomic testing because of the dangers of radioactive fallout.¹³ He also produced an article in 1957 for the popular magazine Sovetskii soiuz (Soviet Union) in which he outlined the biological effects of fallout from bomb tests. This article was contextualized in such a way as to criticize continued nuclear testing by the United States, which had already suffered international embarrassment in 1954, when radioactive fallout from the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test killed a Japanese fisherman, but Sakharov’s unseen efforts to lobby Khrushchev make it clear that this propagandistic intention was not his. What small measure of public effect Sakharov’s nuclear dissent had enjoyed, though, effectively ended in 1964 when Khrushchev was deposed in favor of the hard-line government of Leonid Brezhnev. From that point on, Sakharov’s increasingly broad-ranging calls for peace, political reform, and nuclear disarmament were published and disseminated purely through unofficial channels and earned him the government’s extreme ire.

Sakharov remained a relatively isolated figure, however, in his campaign to recontain the nuclear genie that he had previously helped set free. Outright antinuclear activism like that conducted in the United States by SANE Page 12 →(National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) and the Council for a Livable World would have been considered treasonous in the Soviet Union from the mid-1960s up to the glasnost era. Marsh notes that even though a “horrified reaction to nuclear weapons” was commonplace in the Soviet Union throughout the cold war, “at no time . . . has protest in the USSR approached the proportions of the CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] marches in Britain” (195). In short, state control of all discourse concerning nuclear weapons seems to have been designed to minimize their effect on everyday Soviet life.

This assessment does not imply that the Soviet people were ignorant or dismissive of the imminent threat of nuclear war. Weart summarizes the attitude of the Soviet populace toward the bomb:

The belief that Soviet society would survive, as it had survived the Second World War, was still ritually invoked in military circles, but it was now [in the early 1980s] largely discredited among the public. A group of American psychiatrists who managed to poll some Soviet adolescents found them heavily concerned with the threat of global doom. Only 3 percent said that they and their families would survive a war, compared with 16 percent of a comparable sample of American students. . . . The Soviet civil defense program tried harder than ever, but its posters and textbooks, seen everywhere, offered precisely the same uncanny picture: a desert of rubble, through which somber figures moved, the few survivors shrouded in rubberized protective clothing and wearing gas masks, like a spectral procession commemorating the triumph of death. (Nuclear Fear 379–80)

Simply put, the atomic bomb was a palpable source of psychological stress for the average Russian, but one for which there were few, if any, outlets for relief. Since literary and other artistic expressions of the often dour fatalism engendered by the ever-present nuclear threat were not permitted during most of the cold war, the bomb provided fewer metaphors for life (and death) in Russian culture and literature than it did in the United States.

The paucity of atomic bomb–related metaphors in the Soviet cultural idiom points toward another common problem in the extant literary criticism about the cold war: a perhaps understandable but nevertheless problematic tendency to overemphasize the role of nuclear war in defining the cold war. Admittedly the cold war was the first period in human history in which the threat of nuclear war existed, but that threat has not disappeared along with the cold war, even if it has been lessened or altered appreciably. At least for the first few decades of their existence, nuclear weapons were intrinsically related to the cold war. As more states joined the nuclear fraternity and as the oversimplified black-and-white political divisions of the 1950s disintegrated, nuclear weapons ceased to be solely a subset of issues related to the cold war.

Page 13 →The primacy of nuclear weapons in the politics of the cold war also fails to define an absolute relationship between the two. The fact that the two superpowers repeatedly came into nonnuclear military conflict with one another—usually by proxy—over the course of more than forty years indicates that the cold war did not inevitably have a nuclear resolution, only the potential for one. The acknowledged military policy of both countries from the mid-1960s onward was shaped largely by the “escalation ladder thesis: war could and must be kept below the level of all-out destruction” (Weart, Nuclear Fear 379). Although the specter of the two countries’ respective nuclear arsenals certainly hovered over the process (especially after the formulation and adoption of such policies as Mutual Assured Destruction), not all foreign policy decisions during the period were made with nuclear concerns exclusively or even foremost in mind.¹⁴ Furthermore many issues unrelated or at most indirectly related to nuclear weapons (like the surveillance/detention of private citizens, trends toward technocracy, creation of sizable covert entities, growth and expansion of the military-industrial complex, economic globalization, and so on) stem from governmental and societal responses to stimuli intrinsic to the cold war.

Thus it is possible to speak of literary works dealing with cold war issues only tangentially related to nuclear issues. The neo-Stalinist domestic policies of the Brezhnev regime in large measure responded to the perceived weakening of Soviet power under Khrushchev. Since the balance of power during the cold war was chiefly predicated on the credibility of both the military arsenals and the political influence of its participants, any perceived damage to Soviet prestige, and the steps taken to repair such damage, implicitly became a cold war issue. The fact that Brezhnev’s nuclear policy during the détente of the early and mid-1970s continued and even expanded Khrushchev’s somewhat ambiguously conciliatory post-Cuba rhetorical stance serves to further demonstrate the potential autonomy of cold war issues from nuclear ones. As Marsh notes, “The USSR always regarded détente as a relationship of both cooperation and conflict: while agreeing that co-operation in such areas as arms control and trade was mutually beneficial, the Soviet leaders never contemplated changing their political system or modifying their foreign policy” (199). Thus détente was intended to reduce the nuclear danger of the cold war but had no bearing on the ideological struggle between the capitalist West and the Communist East, as shown by both sides’ continued military support for warring satellite states.

Many of the Russian works included in this study, especially those written during the zastoi (stagnation) period of the mid-1970s, concern themselves with social and cultural deformations that result from this kind of duplicity. For most of these writers, the retreat from the Thaw concurrently signaled the end of any remaining belief that Communism could be modified to produce the positive ends that it promised. Their disillusioned works subverted Page 14 →not only Stalinism (as the most influential works of the Thaw had) but also Soviet Communism in general, frequently as part of a universal rejection of rigidly ideological value systems. Because the cold war was expressly “fought” in defense of such systems, this brand of subversion takes on a character particular to this historical period, much as the subversive critiques of the kind of knee-jerk nationalism that had previously led to World War I—such as Wilfrid Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920), Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Schweik (1921–23), and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)—were distinct products of that earlier time, despite numerous formal and tonal similarities with the works I will be analyzing herein.

I do not wish to overcompensate by downplaying the role of nuclear weapons in the cold war, either as a geopolitical conflict or as a literary milieu. My aim, rather, is to point out that there are ways of discussing the cold war that do not focus exclusively on the bomb, a position that has at times dominated the critical discourse. This study uses “cold war” broadly as an adjective to include consideration of cultural and especially linguistic issues relating to totalitarianism, control of information, technological innovation (nuclear weapons and other developments), sociological and/or psychological changes in cultures and/or individuals, and so on that arise especially during this period.¹⁵

In the introduction to Fables of Subversion, Weisenburger posits that satire in twentieth-century American literature works “in crucial opposition to the generative satires of a Pope or Twain . . . it functions to subvert hierarchies of value and to reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own” (3). He furthermore states that “narrative satire is a major form through which the postmodern writer interrogates and subverts authority” (6). And finally he affirms that “the concept of a degenerative satire can begin to map the landscape of contemporary American fiction in meaningful new ways, tracing lines of descent and differentiation that were previously fuzzy and indistinct” (3). I agree with him in this regard, but I also believe that one can glean a further level of meaning—the most important one, in my view—from these American “subversive satires” by comparing them with their Russian contemporaries. In my view the strictly American focus of Weisenburger’s study creates an inherent limit to understanding the development of what he repeatedly and explicitly defines as a “postmodern” form of satire. While the aesthetic and philosophical concepts associated with postmodernism, which can also be rather “fuzzy and indistinct” at times, are doubtlessly germane to discussion of writers such as Pynchon, Coover, and Barth, I also believe that using the broader international context of the cold war as an interpretive lens provides even greater insight into a sustained collaborative (if not necessarily organized) effort at satirical subversion of the dominant political and cultural Page 15 →forces of the age on a global scale. Literary postmodernism’s thoroughgoing drive to perceive, to expose, and frequently to undermine “master narratives” by scrutinizing how, why, and by whom they were constructed is a direct result of living in an era whose geopolitics, as George Orwell pointed out in the late 1940s, demanded belief in patent untruths, absurdities, and contradictions.

There are a host of formal and thematic similarities—including but not limited to depictions of processes that intentionally and clandestinely deform language, especially political language; depictions of science and technology being misused to serve political ends; “serial” and “systemic” dystopias, in which all seeming alternatives for social organization have catastrophic results; and depiction of the fabrication, literal and figurative, of history—among the works of satirical fiction written by Russian and American authors during the four decades after World War II. The ideological insularity of the two postwar superpowers restricts the likelihood that these correspondences stem from direct literary influence. Writers in Russia have had relatively free access to the works of their American contemporaries for only a few brief periods of the last two centuries. The few copies of illicit books smuggled into the Soviet Union during the cold war were irregularly circulated at great risk among an underground intelligentsia in a reverse form of tamizdat. Although Russian works were only occasionally subject to formal U.S. censorship, the availability and translation of Russian writers in the West from 1945 to 1990 was nevertheless heavily slanted toward those writers whose ideas fit, or could be made to fit, with the dominant anti-Soviet sentiment in the United States. As a result many of the writers this study examines have not gained a wide American audience, in part because they cast their satirical glance not only at the Soviet Union but often also at the West or at the world as a whole. With only a few exceptions, if their works have been published at all it is in relatively small English-language editions dwarfed by the massive printings of works by unambiguously anti-Soviet writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn or seemingly apolitical writers like Boris Pasternak.

Yet the striking parallels between Russian and American satirical fiction during the latter half of the twentieth century stem first and foremost from the historically unique geopolitical situation of the cold war and its ever-present threat of complete nuclear annihilation. Satire in an age as filled with potential peril as the cold war provides a clear means by which to fulfill the simultaneously confrontational, analytical, and dissenting role that John Gery attributes to Gertrude Stein in the epigraph to this chapter. Weisenburger suggests a similar intention in the following passage: “If these fables of subversion can be said to target anything, it is fiction making, the very strategies of dissimulation by which the nuclear age seeks to mask its violent being” (19). Weisenburger stops short of articulating the explicit philosophical connection between this satirical mode and the deformed mentality produced when leaders ask people, among other things, to “stop worrying and love the Page 16 →Bomb,” but the historical role of Russian satire offers a model for extending his work in this manner.

In the opening section of her Contemporary Russian Satire (1995), Karen L. Ryan-Hayes affirms a number of Weisenburger’s positions concerning the nature of satire (even as she engages in some of the “formalist” critique of satire against which he rails) in explicating Russian satire’s idiosyncrasies: “While Western literary traditions have often deemphasized the didactic function of satire and viewed it as a forum for oppositionist commentary and mockery, Russian and Soviet criticism has emphasized the reformative nature of the mode” (3). She also claims (correctly, I believe) that the altered nature of satire produced under the threat of stringent censorship or even more severe official reprisal importantly distinguishes the development of Russian and especially Soviet satirical writing from that of the West. The government-approved satire produced under the watchful eye of the state (via the Writers’ Union) functioned almost exclusively to “reform” in a strictly normative manner, usually in such a way as to denigrate “counterrevolutionary” elements in society. Such satire served to reinforce, and if necessary refurbish, the moral and political example of the original Bolshevik revolutionaries, especially Lenin. This basic intent remained the same whether the target of satire was the ineffectual NEP (New Economic Policy) of the 1920s, the “rootless cosmopolitans” of the 1930s, or the “Stalinist excesses” (as Khrushchev’s famous phrase put it) that were briefly fair game for writers to criticize, albeit within defined limits, during the Thaw.

Satire of a somewhat less prescribed nature had appeared with some frequency in the earliest years of the Soviet Union. The decade between the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921 and the establishment of the Writers’ Union witnessed the publication of a wealth of openly satirical works such as Mikhail Bulgakov’s collection of short stories Diavoliada (1925; Diaboliad), several collections of stories by Mikhail Zoshchenko, Yuri Olesha’s novella Zavist’ (1927; Envy), Il’f and Petrov’s novel Dvenadsat’ stul’ev (1928; The Twelve Chairs), and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s plays Klop (1928; The Bedbug) and Bania (1929; The Bathhouse). All of these works brought some measure of official censure to their authors for ideological waywardness. Even though the bulk of these works treated their subject matter wholly in keeping with the mainstream ideology of the time, their normative function was not fully achieved in the eyes of the official critics. Either they were too broad in satirical scope (that is, their targets included both ideologically correct and incorrect subject matter) or they were not explicit enough in their support for the Marxist-Leninist view of progress (that is, they failed to assert positively that Soviet Communism was the desirable—as well as the dialectically inevitable—way of the future).¹⁶

Mayakovsky’s plays were critical of—among other things—the growing Soviet bureaucracy and the NEP, and his fervent support for the Bolshevik Page 17 →Revolution did not shield him from a backlash by the Communist Party leadership. Both Zoshchenko and Bulgakov also brought the wrath of the government down upon themselves for criticizing the NEP.¹⁷ Olesha’s Envy satirizes overly positivistic Marxism-Leninism and the runaway bureaucracy even as it critiques the Russian intelligentsia for wavering in its commitment to the revolution. As Janet Tucker writes, “In Envy, we see that, having once gained control, revolutionaries have turned into their former nemesis, the autocracy; they are the new power structure. . . . Envy should therefore be considered anti-Soviet instead of anti-revolutionary” (20). Bulgakov’s story “The Fatal Eggs” (in Diaboliad) contains a mild satirical critique of state interference in science. He revisited this theme more outspokenly in his satirical novel Sobach’e serdtse (The Heart of a Dog), which remained unpublished in the Soviet Union from its completion in 1925 until 1987.

Even though all of the works listed above (with the exception of The Heart of a Dog) were approved by the official literary organs of the state, they were all subject to suppression and/or substantial revision during the more stringent era of Socialist Realism that followed Stalin’s rise to power. As the 1920s progressed, the relatively collegial attitude toward non-Communist writers who accepted the revolution or were at least sympathetic to it (known as poputchiki or “fellow travelers”) changed dramatically. The more lenient view espoused by Trotsky and the critic Aleksandr Voronsky was replaced by the venomous denunciations of such “bourgeois” holdovers by the hard-line journal Oktiabr’ (October), RAPP (Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei [the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers]) and other staunchly Communist groups.

Satirists were especially susceptible to censure during this time of backlash because their works were easily, yet often incorrectly, categorized as direct attacks on the principles of the revolution and the Soviet Union. As a result of this heightened ideological vigilance, virtually all satire legally published in the Soviet Union from 1932 until the mid-1980s corresponded to the “reformative” and “normative” mode designed to bring readers back in line with Soviet ideology.¹⁸ Satire that threatened to subvert that ideology was inherently limited to samizdat or tamizdat publication.

In American literature the official source of judgment concerning the place of satire is not rooted so much in governmental machinations¹⁹ as in the iconic status of certain literary critics or schools of thought. Many formalist critics dismissed satire as either a “dead” form describing only the works of such past practitioners as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope or as a “low” or “vulgar” form. If considered at all, it was generally only as an archaic discursive mode derived from Greek and Roman literature. Even Gilbert Highet views it as something of an artifact of bygone ages in his landmark 1962 book The Anatomy of Satire. Despite mentioning a few relatively minor contemporary satirists (such as Mary McCarthy), Highet’s work leaves the Page 18 →reader with the clear impression that satire is almost entirely the domain of Juvenal, Aristophanes, Pope, Swift, and Voltaire. Highet’s book opens, in fact, by stating that “satire is not the greatest type of literature” and that “it cannot, in spite of the ambitious claims of one of its masters [that is, Juvenal], rival tragic drama and epic poetry” (3). According to Highet, satire may make brief appearances in contemporary literature, but its heyday has definitely passed, a view that not only reflected but also bolstered the dominant critical attitude of the time.

Starting in the early 1970s, such critics as Leon Guilhamet, Jerome Klinkowitz, Linda Hutcheon, and others began to discuss satire, especially contemporary satire, in a new way, focusing on not only its narrative-destabilizing metafictional qualities but also its potential for political and cultural activism. Weisenburger adapts the works of these predecessors in identifying the subversive tendency in twentieth-century American satire. Weisenburger does not define subversion simply as making a target or set of targets seem absurd via satirical derision but as a wholesale exposure of destructive and insidious cultural forces. In this way he claims a greater power for subversion than its simple definition—that is, sabotage or rebellion—implies. His form of subversion is implicitly critical of all modern ideologies, even those that rebel against or undermine the status quo, as being consciously constructed fictions that aspire impossibly (or pretend) to be more or less absolute truths.

Weisenburger’s study owes a notable debt to Hutcheon’s Poetics of Postmodernism (1988). In that book Hutcheon articulated a definition of postmodernist literature that remains compelling two decades later. More immediately germane to this study is her definition of “historiographic metafiction,” a subset of postmodernist literature to which almost all cold war subversive satire—Russian and American—inherently belongs. In terms of its opposition to what Jean-François Lyotard and others categorized as “master narratives,” Hutcheon claims that postmodernism “is characterized by energy derived from the rethinking of the value of multiplicity and provisionality; in actual practice, it does not seem to be defined by any potentially paralyzing opposition between making and unmaking. . . . Postmodernist discourses—both theoretical and practical—need the very myths and conventions they contest and reduce; they do not necessarily come to terms with either order or disorder, but question both in terms of each other. The myths and conventions exist for a reason, and postmodernism investigates that reason. The postmodern impulse is not to seek any total vision. It merely questions. If it finds such a vision, it questions how, in fact, it made it” (48). More specifically Hutcheon argues that historiographic metafiction is “willing to draw upon any signifying practices it can find operative in a society. It wants to challenge those discourses and yet to use them, even to milk them for all they are worth” (133). This dual intent allows historiographic metafictions to first reveal the means of their own construction and then to disrupt them, thereby destabilizing any Page 19 →ideological potentialities found therein: “[The postmodern novel] begins by creating and centering a world . . . and then contesting it. Historiographic metafictions are not ‘ideological novels’ in Susan Suleiman’s sense of the word: they do not ‘seek, through the vehicle of fiction to convince their readers of the “correctness” of a particular way of interpreting the world.’ Instead they make their readers question their own (and by implication others’) interpretations. They are more ‘romans à hypothèse’ than ‘romans à thèse’” (180). This unwillingness to provide a fixed substitute truth to replace the contested one(s) is precisely what has opened postmodernism up to being labeled a “nihilistic” or “empty” worldview by its detractors, a charge that echoes in Rorty’s laments about the lack of “hope” in Pynchon, Silko, et al. Such a pejorative characterization is in my view a vestige of the moralistically binary worldviews that have predominated in the West since the Enlightenment, and the validity of such worldviews are intrinsically called into question by postmodernist philosophies.

Even though Hutcheon’s approach does not directly engage with critical theories of satire,²⁰ her work still succinctly and compellingly delineates the subversively humanist and inherently nonbinary (or perhaps transbinary) intentions underlying most cold war satirical fiction, as her brief commentary on Ishmael Reed illustrates:

Those in power control history. The marginal and ex-centric, however, can contest that power, even as they remain within its purvey. Ishmael Reed’s “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” [in Mumbo Jumbo] reveals these power relations in both history and language. But in several ways, he reveals the inside-ness of his insider-outsider marginalized position. On the one hand, he offers another totalizing system to counter that of white western culture: that of voodoo. And, on the other hand, he appears to believe strongly in certain humanist concepts, such as the ultimately free individual artist in opposition to the political forces of oppression. This is the kind of self-implicated yet challenging critique of humanism, however, that is typical of postmodernism. The position of black Americans has worked to make them especially aware of those political and social consequences of art, but they are still part of American society. (197–98)

This passage articulates precisely why I believe that subversive satire is not a dejected response but a strident affirmation of a need for a new worldview in the face of extreme circumstances resulting from pervasive ideological entrenchment. Given their utterly marginalized position vis-à-vis institutional power, both Russian and American subversive satirists find potency instead through their skill at creating and interpreting texts. They call, much as Kennan did in 1992, for a thorough and honest reexamination not only of how and why we arrived at the historical juncture of the cold war but also, and Page 20 →more important, how and why we think we arrived there and who is ultimately responsible for conveying that conception to us: “Historiographic metafiction . . . demands of the reader not only the recognition of textualized traces of the literary and historical past but also the awareness of what has been done—through irony—to those traces. The reader is forced to acknowledge not only the inevitable textuality of our knowledge of the past, but also both the value and the limitation of the inescapably discursive form of that knowledge” (Hutcheon 127).

A great deal of the critical work produced on satire in the past fifty years centers on the debate about whether satire is a mode or a genre. The modal school of thought sees satire as a method that can be used in any particular genre to create an atmosphere of ridicule that would normally not exist within the conventions of that genre. Using this line of reasoning, Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) achieves a satirical effect because of the modal application of satirical elements onto the existing semantic framework of the well-defined genre of the Arthurian romance, with its recognizable characters, setting, plots, themes, and language. The satiric mode transforms (or deforms) the meanings usually carried by a particular genre conveying an alternate satirical meaning in its place. For the modal critics, satire is generally the formal equivalent of an adjective in traditional grammar: abstract at best or meaningless at worst without a genre/noun—the picaresque novel, the epic poem, the legal drama, and so on—to modify.

On the other hand, those critics who contend that satire exists sui generis argue that the didactic role of satire forms an expectation of meaning and content regarding the satirical text itself. Such expectations hold true among satires in general, even when their outward form seems to be that of another genre. The genre itself may be perceived as being variable because the cultural norms from which individual satires arise are not consistent,²¹ but the underlying techniques and tropes remain essentially the same even as the superficial form mutates. Brian A. Connery and Kirk Combe refer to this process in their introduction to Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism (1995) as “satire’s insistence on its historical specificity, its torrential references to the peculiarities of the particular individuals in the society that it represents” (4). John R. Clark puts this “historical specificity” into an explicitly linguistic context, claiming that satirists are “vigilantes of crapulous usage and abusage” who are “perennially sensitized to auditioning and preserving the languages of Babel. They will never forgive the vocabulary of fools, the punctuation of profligates, the syntax of disorder or disgrace” (21). Although satire may thus be forced to “inhabit the forms of other genres” (Connery and Combe 5), it is defined as a genre of its own by virtue of the consistency Page 21 →of its basic and necessary technique of making meaning—in the form of critical commentary—through the tension between thesis and antithesis, or “straight” reading and satirical subtext (6, 11).

Leon Guilhamet’s Satire and the Transformation of Genre (1987) attempts to mediate between these two camps of satire theorists. For Guilhamet, modal satire occurs largely as a distinction from the comic mode: “The basic difference between the satiric and the comic is that the satiric reinterprets the ridiculous in an ethical light. The satiric employs comic techniques of ridicule, but discovers harm and even evil in the ridiculous. The ridiculous that is proper to satire cannot be reconciled to the good at the conclusion of a comic plot” (8). He goes on to write that this form of satire is readily apparent but insufficient for the more expansive generic understanding of satire: “The essential integrants of generic satire are a combination of modal satire and variable rhetorical and generic structures which are borrowed and deformed. The dynamic of satire transforms these components into a new generic identity” (11). His emphasis on the “borrow[ing] and deform[ing]” of “rhetorical and generic structures” is what makes this definition especially valuable for my discussion of cold war satire, since many of these works explicitly appropriate and deform the nonfictional “genres” of cold war rhetoric, including political speeches, mass-media journalism, legislative and judicial deliberations, and a host of others.

Weisenburger crystallizes the utility of this approach when he notes that it “treats narrative fictions as manifestations of intertextuality or ‘dialogism’ in the Bakhtinian sense, thus as counterpositionings not only of different voices in the narrative itself but also of anterior texts and the codified elements of language and culture in general” (11). He additionally claims that this “approach coincides with the provisional definition . . . [of] degenerative satire as a form for interrogating and subverting codified knowledge and revealing it as a dissimulation of violence” (11–12). Weisenburger expands the parodic aspect of satire to include not only formal distortions of literary models but also thematic ridicule of social, political, psychological, linguistic, or philosophical knowledge and/or behavior—anything that can be reduced to “elements of language and culture” of some sort. In doing so, he again echoes Hutcheon, who argues that historiographic metafiction’s “self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs . . . is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (5). She later describes the process by which postmodernist literature intertextually destabilizes the certainty of the past in order to stimulate a less constrained deliberation on received textual knowledge: “Postmodern intertextuality is a formal manifestation of both a desire to close a gap between present and past of the reader and a desire to rewrite the past in a new context. It is not a modernist desire to order the present through the past or to make the present look spare in contrast to the richness of the past. It is not attempt to void or avoid Page 22 →history. Instead, it directly confronts the past of literature—and of historiography, for it too derives from other texts (documents). It uses and abuses those intertextual echoes, inscribing their powerful allusions and then subverting that power through irony. In all, there is little of the modernist sense of a unique, symbolic, visionary ‘work of art’; there are only texts, already written ones” (118). The dual process of interrogation and revelation that Weisenburger and Hutcheon (among others) identify is in my view the fundamental intention that links most cold war satire, whether Russian or American. As the later chapters of this book will show, what follows on that initial process not surprisingly varies from author to author, including calls for a return to a form of seemingly abandoned traditional values; exhortations to greater compassion or better judgment; rational arguments against the continuation of particular behaviors, policies, and so on; vociferous appeals for immediate political and/or social reform; incitements to rise up and overthrow the status quo by force; and sometimes just a cri de coeur that asks us collectively to step away from the brink of self-destruction for a moment.