Page 205 →Notes

Introduction

1. This time frame is not intended to suggest that nuclear anxieties existed only during the years in which both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed the capacity to explode a nuclear weapon. Clearly the fear of Nazi Germany developing the bomb helped spur the Manhattan Project and concern over “rogue states” possessing the bomb still guides American foreign policy. The span indicated here simply represents the boundaries of the most intense and relatively sustained period of public nuclear anxiety.
2. Yelstin’s own long career as a devoted Communist was largely ignored, for example, a process that would be largely repeated with former KGB officer Vladimir Putin a decade later.
3. Especially noteworthy writers in this category include Chingiz Aitmatov, Anna Akhmatova, Isaak Babel, Olga Berggolts, Yuli Daniel, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Evgenia Ginzburg, Vassily Grossman, Ilya Il’f, Fazil Iskander, Osip Mandelshtam, Bulat Okudzhava, Yuri Olesha, Boris Pasternak, Boris Pilnyak, and Mikhail Zoshchenko. The degree to which these writers identified themselves as non-Russians varies widely, though. Akhmatova’s Ukrainian background (her given name was Anna Gorenko) is hardly evident in her writing, for example, whereas Aitmatov’s Kirghiz identity and Babel’s Jewishness are intrinsic to their respective works.
4. For the sake of brevity, I will hereafter refer to this organization simply as the Writers’ Union.

1. The Role of Literature during the Cold War

1. For more on this initial response, see Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky, and Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War.
2. It should also be noted that the merits of the Thaw itself were far from universally lauded. Nearly every instance of publication of controversial works such as Not by Bread Alone and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich led to a virulent and publicly expressed backlash (often organized from above by conservative party cadres) against the liberal atmosphere that allowed such a book to appear in print. The accumulation of such sentiments ultimately helped bring about Khrushchev’s removal from power.
3. Recently declassified documents that shed considerable light on the political and military machinations behind the crisis are available at George Washington University’s Page 206 →National Security Archive (available online at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/).
4. See Boyer, Fallout, 120–28; Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America, 281–86.
5. Boyer is not alone among prominent critics and historians in making such a contention. Spencer Weart, in Nuclear Fear, is similarly insistent about the disappearance of the bomb from the American conscience: “The 1958–1965 spate of films, novels and magazine articles about accidental war brought down the curtain on the long series of important nuclear fiction and nonfiction published since 1945. Debate over accidental war was the final burst of serious argument before attention turned elsewhere” (279).
6. Even Aksyonov’s early works initiated a harsh conservative backlash following the end of the Thaw, by which time he had begun to write in a much more experimental and openly critical manner. Voinovich’s early career as an author featured the odd (given the general arc of his career) distinction of having penned a song about the Soviet space program that became widely popular after Nikita Khrushchev sang it atop the Lenin Mausoleum in 1960. Neither could be said to have ever been part of the mainstream of Soviet literature, but both were accepted at least by the more liberal branches of Soviet criticism in their formative years as authors.
7. For compendia and further discussion of these themes in American science fiction, see Brians, Nuclear Holocausts; Bartter, Way to Ground Zero; and Booker, Monsters, 65–104.
8. Yuz Aleshkovsky’s Kenguru (1981; Kangaroo), for example, contains a number of explicit references to the atomic bomb development program under Kurchatov.
9. Among the works she discusses are Daniil Granin’s novels Iskateli (1954; Those Who Seek) and Idu na grozu (1964; Into the Storm); Andrei Voznesensky’s poem “Monolog bitnika” (1962; “A Beatnik’s Monologue”); Aitmatov’s I dol’she veka dlitsia den’ (1980; The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years); Alexander Chakovsky’s Pobeda (1980–81; Victory); and Solzhenitsyn’s V kruge pervom (1968; The First Circle) and Arkhipelag GULAG (1973–75; The Gulag Archipelago).
10. Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light and Stone’s Literary Aftershocks both present excellent documentary evidence of the anxious and conflicted years after the bombings. The former focuses on a wider social context while the latter contains a chapter expressly treating fictional and nonfictional literary works from 1945 to 1963.
11. The United States exploded the world’s first hydrogen bomb at Elugelab atoll in the South Pacific late in 1952. The Soviet Union followed suit just after the end of the Korean War in September 1953. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, over the course of the Korean War years (1950–53), the number of operational warheads in the United States grew from 369 to 1,436, while the Soviet arsenal expanded from 5 to 120. These numbers would grow to 20,434 and 1,605, respectively, by the end of the decade (Norris and Kristiansen, “Nuclear Notebook,” 64–66).
12. Szilard even tried his hand at writing antinuclear satirical fiction, publishing a collection of five stories (composed between 1948 to 1960) titled The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories in 1961. He also is indirectly (or perhaps directly; see Grant, Companion, 89–95) connected to another prominent cold war satire, having formulated a refutation to the “Maxwell’s Demon” theory that plays a prominent metaphorical role in Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49.
13. Page 207 →Spencer Weart discusses Sakharov’s role in the limited Soviet antinuclear campaign of the late 1950s in Nuclear Fear: “Doubts about government bomb tests were stirring even in the Soviet Union. Although Soviet officials discouraged all talk of technological danger, some biologists privately discussed genetic risks. Backed up by the statements of foreigners such as [Albert] Schweitzer and [Linus] Pauling, they won quiet support from leading nuclear physicists and especially from Andrei Sakharov, who wrote Khrushchev to warn against the tests. These private concerns became public when the Soviet government backed up its peace propaganda with a 1958 announcement that it would cease all tests. Now the Supreme Soviet openly stated that testing meant ‘the poisoning of human organisms.’ At once Sakharov and other scientists began to publish, in the Soviet press, Pauling-style warnings about the thousands or millions of babies who would be born defective if other nations continued to test bombs” (204–5).
14. U.S. opposition to Soviet-backed regimes in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, for example, had little or nothing to do with any potential threat of nuclear weapons bases being installed there, as they nearly were in Cuba during the early 1960s. Carol R. Saivetz and Sylvia Woodby skillfully discuss the nonnuclear nature of the peripheral cold war among client states of the two superpowers in their Soviet–Third World Relations.
15. Seed’s American Science Fiction and the Cold War and Henriksen’s Dr. Strangelove’s America are two excellent works that adopt this broader perspective of the cold war in an American context.
16. Richard Chapple’s Soviet Satire of the Twenties provides a more detailed examination of the complexities underlying the production of satire during this period.
17. Ironically, Valentin Kataev’s 1926 satirical novel Rastratchiki (The Embezzlers) won official praise for its author despite its negative caricature of life under the NEP. Kataev’s satire is admittedly less biting than Bulgakov’s or Zoshchenko’s, and it places the blame for problems with NEP on antirevolutionary elements instead of on its planners. The disparity in reaction nonetheless demonstrates that subjects were not necessarily taboo to Soviet satirists as long as their treatment served the normative ideological function.
18. The continued publication and popularity of Il’f and Petrov’s works during the mid-1930s, despite an outcry over their generally unflattering portrait of the NEP period, indicates that some ideologically aberrant satire still managed to slip through the cracks.
19. Unlike in the Soviet Union, occasions of direct governmental intervention in literary matters in the United States are generally more local (as in school boards banning particular books from libraries) than national phenomena, although Herbert Mitgang’s Dangerous Dossiers suggests that federal surveillance and occasional harassment of authors for ideological reasons was hardly uncommon.
20. She does, of course, discuss the related concept of parody at length in Poetics of Postmodernism, and many of her claims about the purposes of postmodern fiction clearly contain an understanding of their satirical implications.
21. This is the case with most genres with a lengthy lifespan. If interpreted within the tradition of the historical novel, the differences among Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain stem in large part from Page 208 →the differences in their respective cultural and temporal contexts, even though all three conform to the genre’s conventions (see Holman and Harmon, Handbook to Literature, 229–30).

2. The Intersection of Literature and Politics during the Cold War

1. Some Slavists dispute this view, claiming that the positive effects of the Thaw were powerful enough to cause a greater tolerance for ideological divergences in official literature even during the 1970s. See Hosking’s Beyond Socialist Realism and Peterson’s Subversive Imaginations.
2. Voinovich cites specific individuals (“KGB agent Tsvigun,” “professional [writer Vadim] Kozhevinkov,” and “Marshal Brezhnev”) as examples of this corrupted system in the Russian original. The published English translation mistakenly renders militsioneri (Soviet policemen) as “millionaires” (millioneri), an error I have corrected here.
3. In this vein Gary Saul Morson (writing as Alicia Chudo) only half-jokingly defines Aesopian language as follows in his satirical piece “The Devil’s Dictionary of Received Ideas”: “A Russian method of using apparently innocent words and gestures to express subversive meanings. Often practiced and always suspected. Thus the Russian cautionary habit of checking to make sure nothing one writes could possibly be taken as alluding to a Soviet leader; under Brezhnev, eyebrows disappeared from literature” (Chudo, And Quiet Flows the Vodka, 180).
4. See Clowes, Russian Experimental Fiction; Ryan-Hayes, Contemporary Russian Satire; Booker, Dystopian Impulse, 115–40; Morson, Boundaries of Genre, 102–3; and Porter, Russia’s Alternative Prose, 20–26.
5. In the cultural environment of the early twenty-first century, such a skeptical/ cynical view of political utterance may seem almost commonplace, given the scrutiny—in popular if not governmental forums—of the premises upon which the 2003 invasion of Iraq was based. The relative ease with which the American populace accepted the official version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a cassus belli in 1964 serves as a powerful reminder that such a view has not always been as prevalent.
6. As I illustrate in later chapters, the strategies for this approach vary widely, from Zinoviev’s narrator musing on how to define the genre of the book he is writing in Homo Sovieticus to Coover’s incorporation of actual quotes from Eisenhower’s speeches and transcripts from the Rosenberg espionage trial into The Public Burning.
7. The Russian Civil War is an “international” conflict from the standpoint of this schema in the sense that the secessionist Confederacy represents a quintessentially “un-American” worldview.
8. Thomas Moore’s remarkably concise summary runs as follows: “[Laszlo] Jamf of Darmstadt came to Harvard on an academic grant, sometime in the late 1920s, where, on the model of the Watson-Raymer experiments in which an ‘Infant Albert’ had been conditioned to feel reflex terror of all furry things, he conditioned Infant Tyrone to respond to a certain mysterious smell by getting an erection. . . . Broderick Slothrop [Tyrone’s father] agreed to let the I. G. Farben cartel of Germany pay for Tyrone’s future education at Harvard and signed a contract committing the Slothrop Paper Company to manufacture the Notgeld banknotes of the calamitous German inflation of the 1920s. Linkages for these various deals ran through Massachusetts businessman Lyle Bland, who had ‘arrangements’ with German financier Hugo Stinnes. . . . Page 209 →During the inflation, Laszlo Jamf sat on the board of directors of the Swiss Grössli Chemical Corporation, a firm soon to be incorporated into the Farben cartel. The Farben cartel in turn had linkages with German General Electric and, therefore, with American GE ‘under Swope, whose ideas on matters of “control” ran close to those of Walther Rathenau, of German GE,’ and later German foreign minister” (72).
9. Although he mentions Soviet attitudes about the United States in passing, he does not outline any specific Soviet cognitive schemata.
10. I will briefly address some of these instances in this section in the process of exporting Maltby’s template to Soviet society. More detailed explication of each can be found in subsequent chapters.
11. See Riasanovsky, History of Russia, 593; Remington, Truth of Authority, 118–20.
12. Turonok, Dovlatov’s editor in the story, uses the word polnotsennyi, literally “fully valued,” to describe the ideal child he seeks. He enumerates the specific characteristics of such a child as follows: “No damaged goods, nothing gloomy. No cesarean [sic] sections. No unwed mothers. A complete set of parents. A healthy boy meeting all the social requirements” (Compromise, 27).
13. One need look no further than the general American public’s somewhat shocked reaction to the revelation in early 2002 of the propaganda campaigns run by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence to see how durable this association remains.
14. Ziiaiushchie vysoty is a distortion of siiaiushchie vysoty sotsializma, “the gleaming heights of socialism.”
15. Consistent with Soviet patterns of giving villages new “Soviet names,” the name of the town has been changed from the very apt Griaznoye, “dirty” or “muddy,” to Krasnoye, which means both “red” and, in a folksy colloquialism, “beautiful.” Golubev’s name also carries a mixture of connotations, from “dove” (golub’) to “light blue” (goluboi, which is also a slang term for homosexuals, roughly corresponding to “gay”), as well as a pun on the word golova (head), which is, as in English, often used figuratively to denote the “head” of a department, for example.
16. The Ghost Shirt Movement’s opposition to machines is reminiscent of the Mephi in Zamyatin’s We. The Mephi, who live outside the technocratic and rigidly organized society of the “One State,” also unsuccessfully attempt to foment a revolt against the mechanization of human life, though unlike Vonnegut, Zamyatin ends his novel with a minute glimmer of hope that his revolutionaries are not utterly defeated.
17. See chapter 4 for further discussion of this concept.
18. The puns are even more obvious in the original because of the close similarity among the verbs byt’ (to be), pit’ (to drink), and bit’ (to beat).
19. Vonnegut echoes the sentimental yet sensible philosophy espoused by jazzman McClintic Sphere in Pynchon’s V., which is (not coincidentally, in my view) articulated in the context of cold war geopolitics: “There’s no magic words. Not even I love you is magic enough. Can you see Eisenhower telling Malenkov or Khrushchev that? Ho-ho. . . . Keep cool, but care. . . . If my mother was alive I would have her make a sampler with that on it” (Cat’s Cradle, 366).
20. Boyer treats civil defense during the late 1940s and early 1950s in detail in By the Bomb’s Early Light, including quotes from popular magazine articles and books with titles such as How to Survive an Atomic Bomb or “You Can Live Despite A-Bomb” (see 319–33). Henriksen in turn extensively discusses the shelter-building phase of civil defense during the early 1960s in Dr. Strangelove’s America, 202–12, 231–34.
21. Page 210 →It was released instead as a feature film and, despite limited numbers of available prints and considerable negative press attention, received the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1966.
22. Although civil defense documents from the late 1960s were generally more forthright in discussing these topics, they still included statements that were questionable at best, especially after Carl Sagan and Richard Turco’s formulation of the “nuclear winter” theory. A 1968 pamphlet published by the Office of Civil Defense titled In Time of Emergency, for example, contains the following predictions as part of its advice to citizens: “After a nuclear attack, food and water would be available to most people, and it would be usable” (9); “even in communities that received heavy accumulations of fallout particles, people soon might be able to leave shelter for a few minutes or a few hours at a time in order to perform emergency tasks” (13); “milk contamination from fallout is not expected to be a serious problem after an attack” (16).
23. This normalcy apparently includes singing “Waltzing Matilda” for hours on end. Neither the filmmakers nor Shute had particularly well-developed notions about Australian culture beyond certain highly superficial aspects. Both the novel and the film nevertheless managed to tell compelling, if often sentimentalized, stories about the demise of humanity.
24. Critics such as Weart who have derided the sentimentality of the novel and the film have largely overlooked the decidedly unsentimental episodes within it: Julian’s impassioned speeches about the meaninglessness of the war, the stinging satirical absurdity of a scene in which two stuffy gentlemen discuss the foolishness of their club’s wine committee for not stocking better reserves of port before they became unavailable, the government’s tight-fisted control over information even as the radiation approaches, and so on.
25. Two other episodes with nuclear themes were also aired, “Time Enough at Last” in 1959 and “No Time Like the Past” in 1963.
26. This applies at least to Randy Bragg, the novel’s protagonist, and his associates, all of whom in some way transcend (if not radically, by today’s standards) the race, gender, and class norms of the time in an idealized depiction of American values. Not without its blind spots, the book is nevertheless more complex than some of its detractors claim; it is neither a jingoistic affirmation of blind patriotism (despite its conclusion that a war that sets American society back a thousand years could be won in any meaningful way) nor ignorant of the deus ex machina tropes it uses in depicting its heroes’ survival. While undoubtedly patriotic, especially when compared with an unabashedly humanistic work like Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 (which also came out in 1959), Frank’s novel also defines patriotism considerably more expansively than Eisenhower did, to say nothing of McCarthy or Nixon.
27. See chapter 4.
28. Mordecai Roshwald’s dystopian novel Level 7 had already dramatically illustrated the potential problems with the kind of underground system that Strangelove suggests. In that novel each side in an atomic conflict has built an elaborate hierarchy of underground shelters intended to allow portions of its population—mostly the military, economic, and political elite—to survive an all-out nuclear war. The gradual failure of each level of protection and the slow descent of the narrator into insanity deftly underscore the futility of any civil defense scheme that presumes not only the capacity to survive a nuclear war but the desire to do so.

3. Page 211 →“The Bind of the Digital” and Other Oversimplified Logic

1. Compare the excerpts from Tanner, Iser, Maltby, Hirshberg, and Rojecki in the previous chapter.
2. Hence the incorrect identification of political dissenters with the enemy in both the Soviet Union and the United States. U.S. history during the cold war is rife with instances in which political dissenters have been inaccurately (and intentionally) branded as Communists in order to mobilize the strong negative reaction that this term carries, thanks to the cold war schema. Spencer Weart notes, for example, that Oppenheimer’s opposition to U.S. nuclear policy in the 1950s—which resulted in the removal of his security clearance—had an “impact on public opinion as great as if he had been condemned for treason” (180). Many of those who questioned Oppenheimer’s motives, including former Manhattan Project colleagues such as Edward Teller, accused him of directly or indirectly aiding the Soviets. In the Soviet Union, political dissidents, including scores of writers who violated the regulations of the publication system, were similarly vilified as enemies of the state and/or collaborators with the forces of capitalist imperialism (regardless of the nature or the validity of their transgressions) for most of that country’s existence.
3. The fact that he or she has also rejected “bad” becomes irrelevant since, as the historical practice and recurrent satirical trope (see Babbitt, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Public Burning, and others) of having individuals recite loyalty oaths or other patriotic propaganda demonstrates, claiming to be on the side of right is a performative act that demands constant reinforcement to steel oneself against infiltration.
4. For further discussion of the mundane milieu of Pynchon’s suburbia in the novel, see Molly Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983); and Maurice Couturier, “The Death of the Real in The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon Notes 20–21 (Spring/Fall 1987): 5–29.
5. See chapter 5 for further discussion of White Noise in this context.
6. Barth undoubtedly satirizes aspects of the statesmanship and rhetoric that led to the “Quiet Riot” (the academic analogue for the cold war) in Giles Goat-Boy, but his satire strikes me (as well as critics such as Maltby and Tanner) as less of a subversion of a particular historical and political rhetoric than a leery examination of the cultural values that guide the post–World War II age in general.
7. Billy/George’s heavily framed autobiography itself is written from a retrospective viewpoint that alludes to epic literature from its opening lines: “George is my name; my deeds have been heard of in Tower Hall, and my childhood has been chronicled in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. I am he that was called in those days Billy Bocksfuss—cruel misnomer” (Giles Goat-Boy, 41).
8. Barth accentuates the parallels with Oppenheimer’s life via indirect reference to Oppenheimer’s loss of security clearance in apparent retribution for questioning U.S. nuclear policy: “All [Spielman] asked was that the flunking Computer not be programmed to EAT [that is, kill] its enemies automatically. So they call him a Student-Unionist, and they strip him of his privileges” (Giles Goat-Boy, 69).
9. Robinson provides an extensive discussion of Barth’s use of “The Hero-Myth as Story,” drawing direct connections with the scholarship on heroic archetypes produced by Lord Raglan and Joseph Campbell. Compare John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, 179–258.
10. Page 212 →The latter two of these strategies are especially common in the mid-1950s, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was at its peak. The linguistic aspect remains fairly consistent throughout the period leading up to Giles Goat-Boy’s publication.
11. A number of Barth’s critics (Robert Scholes, Charles B. Harris, Jac Thorpe, James Gresham) have accentuated the dialectical drive of the novel, claiming that it is composed of various diametrical pairs (such as the hyper-American Peter Greene and the Socialist Leonid Alexandrov, or the atavistic Croaker and the superrational Eblis Eierkopf) that are more or less synthesized by the novel’s end. Indeed, George’s entire enlightenment is predicated on such a dialectical progress. As Stan Fogel and Gordon Slethaug note in Understanding John Barth, though, this sort of reading both undervalues the self-discrediting epilogues and fails to recognize that many of the dialectical resolutions are incomplete: “The balances of those resolutions are not equally achieved in all instances: Max and Eierkopf cannot really be integrated, nor can East and West” (95). Their interpretation not only supports their argument that the novel is primarily a “satire . . . of the literary conventions that serve to shore up the presentation of heroic deeds” (95) but also helps bolster the assertion that Barth’s satire is subversive rather than normative, since he argues that synthetic solutions like George’s are incomplete at best and thoroughly unreliable at worst.
12. The multiple postscripts that threaten to cancel each other out demonstrate Barth’s awareness that confirmation of the existence of paradox is itself paradoxical, since all it proves is that nothing can be conclusively proved due to paradox’s inherent resistance to logic.
13. As his later essays “The Literature of Exhaustion” and “The Literature of Replenishment” demonstrate, Barth shares Iser’s wonder at the persistence of human interest in literary fictions despite their recognized “inauthenticity.”
14. The late 1920s and early 1930s witnessed a number of actions that served to divide the population of the Soviet Union more rigidly into clearly discernible pro and con factions. The Party Resolution of 1932 on literature codified Socialist Realism as the ideologically acceptable literary mode and officially abolished the unmistakably unbinary concept of the “fellow traveler.” Similarly the campaign against the kulaki (relatively wealthy peasant farmers) was used to weed out opponents of collectivization among the peasants in general, regardless of their economic status.
15. Zinoviev’s novels include considerable satire of various classes of dissidents and Voinovich’s Moscow 2042 includes a character widely interpreted, despite Voinovich’s continuous denials, as a satire of Solzhenitsyn’s nationalistic brand of dissidence. Aksyonov’s Say Cheese! fictionalizes the events surrounding the publication of the Metropol’ literary almanac and uses them to satirize the unwillingness of some writers who claim the dissident title to engage in genuine protest when given the chance.
16. In her Border Crossings (1983), Carol Avins broadly and reflexively defines this nineteenth-century notion of the West (which she states denotes only the countries of Western Europe before 1917) as “the accumulated ideas about it—assumptions and images included in every intellectual’s cultural baggage.” After the revolution, she notes, the word “West” (zapad) became synonymous with capitalism, although “its other meanings . . . are not submerged by this one: it continues to have dimensions beyond the political and economic” (4).
17. Page 213 →Mayakovsky’s poem “150 Million” (1920) satirizes Woodrow Wilson as a dull-witted and antiquated capitalist, while Marietta Shaginian’s novel Mess-Mend, ili ianki v Petrograde (1924; Mess-Mend, or a Yankee in Petrograd), written under the pseudonym Dzhim Dollar (Jim Dollar), is an anticapitalist parody of Western adventure novels. Alayne P. Reilly’s America in Contemporary Soviet Literature (1971) provides insightful commentary on several other works of “Propagandist Caricature” (1) from the 1920s and 1930s, such as Pilnyak’s O-kei, amerikanskii roman (1933; Okay: An American Novel) and Il’f and Petrov’s Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (1937; One-Storied America).
18. See Clark, Soviet Novel, 255–63; Marsh, Soviet Fiction since Stalin, 197–206; and Kasack, Dictionary of Russian Literature, 73, 181–82, 193–94.
19. Booker makes a similar claim; see Dystopian Impulse, 130–37. I discuss Voinovich’s engagement with dystopia in Moscow 2042 at length in the next chapter.
20. Olga Matich and M. Keith Booker have both discussed The Island of Crimea as a dystopian text that parodies not only official Soviet versions of Communist reality but also “the more strongly utopian orientation of many of Aksyonov’s earlier works” (Matich, “Vasilii Aksenov and the Literature of Convergence”; quotation from Booker, Dystopian Impulse, 130). The general dystopian tenor of Soviet dissident writing is treated more substantially in the next chapter.
21. Voinovich’s Chonkin novels also strongly resemble two previous satirical (or at the very least parodic) portraits of common soldiers, the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek’s masterpiece Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za sv tové války (The Good Soldier Schweik) and Alexander Tvardovsky’s verse novel Terkin na tom svete (1954–63; Tyorkin in the Other World). While Voinovich’s work contains clear thematic similarities to Hašek’s, the comparison with the latter is perhaps more relevant, since Tvardovsky directly mentored Voinovich during the late 1950s and early 1960s in his position as editor of Novyi Mir, one of the leading Soviet literary journals. Tyorkin in the Other World is largely self-parody, as Tvardovsky uses his own Stalin Prize–winning wartime poetry cycle Vasilii Terkin (1941–45) as the original text. Much as his writing influenced Voinovich’s early style, Tvardovsky’s transformation from an exemplary Socialist Realist author to one of the leading liberal figures of the Thaw provided a potential model for Voinovich’s personal development as well.
22. The types she identifies are “the production novel plus five other types: the historical novel, the novel about a worthy intellectual or inventor, the novel of war or revolution, the villain or spy novel, and the novel about the West.” She goes on to note that the “differences between these types are not as great as they might seem, since all involve, minimally, a ‘road to consciousness’ pattern and usually a ‘task’ as well” (Clark, Soviet Novel, 255).
23. Occasional exceptions to this rule do exist, ranging from Khrushchev’s approval of the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to works by official writers such as Aitmatov or Iskander that contain comparatively mild criticisms of Soviet policy toward non-Russians. On the whole, though, dissent in the official publication system of the post-Stalin Soviet Union required approval of the state organs, making it a pyrrhic victory at best (and, consequently, making it dubious in the eyes of many émigrés).
24. Gordon Clough’s “Translator’s Preface” to the 1978 American edition of the novel offers a good explanation of this largely untranslatable pun: “[Ibansk] is a double pun, deriving partly from the commonest Russian forename Ivan, and part from the coarse Page 214 →verb ‘yebat”—to fuck. So Ibansk means, broadly speaking, a fucktown or fuckland for the Ivans” (Zinoviev, Yawning Heights, 7).
25. The characters Truth-Teller (Pravdets), Singer (Pevets), and the Boss (Khoziain) function, for example, both as representatives of common character types found in Soviet society and as representations—sometimes parodic, sometimes not, depending on Zinoviev’s somewhat capricious sympathies—of Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Galich, and Stalin, respectively.
26. Zinoviev may be alluding to Yuri Olesha’s Envy in this passage. As Janet Tucker notes, two characters in Envy also find a piece of literature that has been discarded, a symbol with political overtones: “Kavalerov and Ivan stumble on a page . . . from Gogol’s Taras Bul’ba. Writers, Kavalerov and Ivan, notice what everyone else ignores—the truth behind surface reality. And they find the page cast away, and in a vacant lot, not [in] the garbage. A vacant lot is a space ignored by urban development. Marxism (along with the city and industry) has passed it by—so the vacant lot is to urban space as writers are to Marxist society” (Revolution Betrayed, 87). By the time, fifty years later, when Zinoviev is writing, the vacant lot of Envy has become the garbage heap of The Yawning Heights, as writers who refused to play by the state’s rules were not only ignored but also often cast out, literally or figuratively (compare Dovlatov’s reference to Kozlov, the editor who threw out manuscripts unread to cut down his workload, in The Invisible Book).
27. Thus Ibansk is a utopia in only the negative sense of More’s original Greek pun. It is ou topos but by no means eu topos.
28. The first English-language edition consists of 829 pages and nearly as many chapters.
29. Literally, “a little page of heroic history” (stranichka geroicheskoi istorii). Stranichka is a diminutive form of stranitsa (page) and thus heightens the irony of this passage, since genuinely “heroic” history is presumably deserving of more than a passing mention.
30. The accent with which the Boss speaks, an exaggerated form of the Georgian lilt with which Stalin (that is, “the Boss”) spoke Russian, is almost impossible to render into English, but the translation quoted here does manage to convey Zinoviev’s derisive intention.
31. The word (sdokh, derived from the infinitve sdokhnut’) that Zinoviev uses to refer to the Boss’s death is usually reserved for animals, especially cattle, although it is colloquially (and somewhat pejoratively) used to refer to humans as well. It would certainly be inappropriate in reference to a “heroic” figure such as the Boss in the kind of writing Zinoviev is parodying in this section.
32. For more detailed discussion of this novel, see chapter 4.
33. Although it does not appear in the original, the English translators add the word “victors” into the second line, an emendation that generally corresponds with the rhetoric Iskander is parodying.
34. The interrogative used in the original Russian (kakoi) is more akin to “what sort of” rather than “when,” but the context of “when” in this sentence (that is, “in what situation” rather than “at what time”) generally retains this meaning in translation.
35. This scene echoes—unintentionally, in all likelihood—the scene in Dr. Strangelove in which Group Captain Mandrake attempts to bring General Ripper the “good news” that he has discovered a radio broadcasting civilian programming, which would Page 215 →suggest that a Russian attack is not underway as he had been told. Ripper reacts not with relief but by berating Mandrake for “questioning his orders” and then by locking him into his office. Mandrake’s discovery that Ripper’s order to attack Russia is not a relatively benign misunderstanding but the result of Ripper’s insanity comes too late to prevent the film’s ultimate apocalypse.
36. Iskander’s sentence contains two Russian words that are translated into English as “truth,” istina and pravda. These words’ semantic weight is similar, although not identical, in Russian; istina is often rendered into English as “verity” and connotes an eternal truth, whereas pravda stems from the same grammatical root (prav) as the word pravednost’ (righteousness) and connotes “correctness.” The latter, however, was famously the name of the official Communist Party newspaper founded in 1912 and thus bears additional satirical connotations in this context (that is, that “boring, but comforting” Pravda can be used to artificially obscure or supersede “alarming” istina).
37. Evidence indicates that Stalin first arranged for Kirov’s assassination and then blamed the assassination on followers of Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, two of Stalin’s former rivals in the power struggles that followed Lenin’s death in 1924. As was the case with Zinoviev and Kirov, Sharpie is subjected to a show trial as an enemy of the state, after which he is sentenced to exile, which ultimately leads to his death (Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot). Furthermore, as Stalin did for Kirov, Ponderer is posthumously given heroic status by the very person responsible for his death, an act of political alchemy that transmuted dissidence into political orthodoxy. Robert Conquest’s Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989) gives a full, if not always unbiased, account of this complicated episode in Soviet history.
38. The original Russian reads something akin to “out-patriotize and out-rage the patriot.”
39. The mummified Great Python is actually described as having “vigilant” (bdiashchii) eyes rather than simply “open” (otkrytyi) ones, a much more typical propagandistic phrasing.
40. Although it is not explicitly mentioned in the text, one of the problematic aspects of Bashov’s biography (in terms of his potential acceptance within Soviet society) that is tidied up via his new naming is the apparent Jewishness of his father’s patronymic. Vasily Vasilievich is a thoroughly Russian name, just as Trotsky was a more suitably Russian-sounding surname for a member of the party elite than Bronshtein.
41. This translation from the original retains the paronomasic intent of the Russian name Poniat’ev, which is derived from the word poniatie (concept) and the verb poniat’ (to understand). Given the close association of both Gurov and his father (consistently called Conceptiev/Poniat’ev) with “the Idea” (Ideia), Bashov’s name for Soviet Communism, this linguistic linkage is appropriate. Gurov and his father both claim to live their lives according to the Idea/Concept of the revolution, even as they profit financially from their status as party elites, a fact that runs totally contrary to the egalitarian rhetoric of Communism.
42. Significantly Gurov kills her on November 7, 1939, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. He marries Electra before the end of the year and then kills (or at least is complicit in the murder of) the doctor who falsified Brutnikova’s death certificate. His actions thus parallel Stalin’s in that Gurov murders a loyal Communist out of egocentric motives and then eliminates his accomplice, just as many of Stalin’s executioners from the 1930s eventually found the tables turned on them.
43. Page 216 →This is never stated explicitly in the novel, although it can be inferred from the fact that Bashov at one point cites records that indicate that Brutnikov assumes his wife’s name at marriage, a reversal of the norm in Russian society (10). The origins of the name Gurov are further complicated by the fact that Electra’s last name presumably should also be Brutnikova, which hints that Collectiva’s last name (like her first name) is adopted rather than familial. Aleshkovsky does not clarify this situation in the novel, leaving the origins of at least one and possibly two of Conceptiev/Brutnikov/ Gurov’s last names in ontological limbo.
44. Bashov mockingly refers to him using the anachronistic and decidedly un-Communist phrase “solidly enthroned” (164).
45. Aleshkovsky revisits the notion of a fictive filmed record being used as part of a legal proceedings in Kangaroo (see chapter 5).
46. When Bashov’s biography is idealized, his date of birth is altered to coincide with the exact beginning of the Soviet Union. Both come into existence on November 7, 1917, according to Aleshkovsky’s fictionalized accounts of history.
47. The particular issue he votes on thus is ultimately irrelevant, since the opposing vote is intended to be purely symbolic rather than representative of actual dissent.
48. The reference to the “Supreme Con of all times and all peoples” parodically links Satan directly to Stalin, since this title (with “Ruler” in place of “Con”) was one of the latter’s favorite honorifics.
49. The English translation makes the Russian etymology of Gusev’s name (it is derived from gus, the word for “goose”) clearer to non-Russian readers by spelling it Goosev. I have chosen to retain the standard transliteration of the original Russian here because some of the common English connotations with geese (silliness, stubbornness) that are likely to be conveyed by this spelling are, in my view, not intended.
50. This date is potentially significant, since it marks the feast day of St. Basil the Confessor, an eighth-century martyr, in the Russian Orthodox tradition. Bashov’s first name (Vasily) is the Russian version of Basil, and the story of Gusev’s actions on this day seem to cause him by the end of the novel to seek a righteous martyrdom akin to St. Basil’s.
51. David M. Bethea discusses both serious and satirical uses of the train/locomotive as a Socialist, and later Communist, metaphor in Russian culture in The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction. From the time of Herzen and Belinsky (that is, the mid-1800s) onward, the metaphorical horse-versus-train debate became one that divided Russian intellectuals roughly along Slavophile and Westernizer lines. Tolstoy’s extremely negative train symbolism in Anna Karenina (1873–77) and Dostoyevsky’s similarly unfavorable associations in The Idiot (1868) were among the most prominent early criticisms of the locomotive as a symbol of progress.
52. Outraged Reason’s rhetoric in the original Russian text is considerably more inflammatory and profuse, including claims to be prepared for “a bacillus of chaos prepared for the West, a bacillus of Peoples’ Liberation movements” (my translation of “My gotovim dlia Zapada batsillu khaosa, batsillu Narodno-Osvoboditel’nykh dvizhenii”).
53. The novel’s 1983 setting would place the start of this war in 1968, making it roughly contemporary to the height of American involvement in Vietnam. The South-versus-North distinction Percy makes between the warring sides furthers this allegorical association.
54. Page 217 →Such a situation recurred in the Reagan administration’s unflinching support of the anti-Communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua during the early and mid-1980s. Despite considerable evidence that the Contras were as capable of committing atrocities as the Communist Sandinista faction, American support was so steadfast as to include potential violations of the Constitution and disregard for prohibitions on international weapons trade. As H. W. Brands points out, American support for Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and the Cambodian resistance coalition (which included the Khmer Rouge) during this period was equally spurious in terms of “the distance between the noble ends America pursued and the ignoble means it employed to pursue them” (Devil We Knew, 171).

4. Cold War Critiques of Utopia

1. Critics such as Alexandra Aldridge, M. Keith Booker, Edith Clowes, John Glad, Gary Saul Morson, and David Sisk.
2. This formula can be expressed in two basic ways: (1) the utopia is a “good” society—the best, in fact—while all others are flawed, or (2), the present is “bad” whereas the future according to the utopian model is “good.”
3. The essays collected in Rafaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan’s Dark Horizons come to a similar conclusion, though they exclusively concern themselves with dystopias in the broadly defined genre of science fiction. Some, though not all, of the works I discuss here fit within that category.
4. This, of course, is the form of the three best-known twentieth-century dystopias, Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
5. Novels such as Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Aksyonov’s The Burn, and DeLillo’s White Noise.
6. See the previous chapter for more detailed discussion of these cultural binaries in Russian history.
7. While not (in my opinion) absolutely watertight, Bethea’s argument in this regard has much to recommend it. This is not, alas, the time or the place for a more thorough dissection of his interpretive logic.
8. Aleshkovsky often (though not always) advocates for pre-Communist social values such as Russian Orthodox Christianity, for example, while Voinovich and Aksyonov are more ambivalent about or downright opposed to such retrograde cultural motion. Voinovich even directly satirizes one form of “apocalypticist” nationalism in the character of Sim Simych Karnavalov in Moscow 2042 (see below).
9. The seventeenth-century flourishing of utopian writings that followed More’s Utopia (1516), including such works as Johann Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619), Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1623), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), and John Harrington’s Oceana (1656), can be (and have been) attributed in part to the “discovery” and exploration of the American continent.
10. These are, not surprisingly, also among the most prominent forces within C. Wright Mills’s “power elite,” a concept articulated in 1956 at the height of the “first” cold war. Russell Hoban satirizes the power elite in his postapocalyptic novel Riddley Walker through the character of Lissener, a blind genetic mutant. Lissener is initially a sympathetic character because he is grievously mistreated by Goodparley, the political head of Hoban’s postnuclear Britain. However, Lissener quickly merits derision for his steadfast insistence that his people were the “Power Leat” before the Page 218 →nuclear war in the book’s distant past, missing the point that this makes them culpable in the development of the very weapons that have made the world as it is. His efforts to rediscover the secret of gunpowder and overthrow Goodparley, reinforce the potential for destruction within the desire to be among a power elite defined primarily by its control of knowledge and weaponry.
11. Howard P. Segal’s Technological Utopianism is a magisterial overview of more than twenty Americans dating back to the nineteenth century who have been instrumental in promulgating notions of utopian futures predicated on technological innovation.
12. The fact that German troops were occupying Paris and establishing Jewish ghettos in Poland and Czechoslovakia (although the latter may not have been known to the author) at the time of this article’s publication makes Langer’s references to the potential abilities of “industrious, powerful nations” and “aggressive, clever races”—phrases that resonate with the Nazis’ propagandistic image of Aryans—a highly unfortunate irony.
13. Boyer identifies the United Nations, whose charter predated the use of the atomic bomb by two months, as a continuation of a “dream of world government—from Tennyson’s great parliament of mankind to Wendell Wilkie’s visionary 1943 bestseller One World” (By the Bomb’s Early Light, 34). He cites a somewhat fleeting but significant groundswell of support for global government schemes as one of the most noticeable immediate results of the development and use of the bomb. For a full discussion of this theme, see Bomb’s Early Light, 33–45.
14. The United States is not exempt from the kinds of dystopian charges that are easily leveled at the Soviet Union because of Stalinism. Without overstating the point, it bears mention that the cold war period saw events such as the rise (and, admittedly, also the fall) of McCarthy and HUAC, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a rancorous (and incomplete) process of granting civil rights to all citizens, and a marked increase in covert (and often illegal) government activity, such as counter intelligence programs (COINTELPRO). None of these, nationalistic rhetoric aside, corresponds particularly well to the basic principles of the Constitution. The United States was formed with the semiutopian intent of “establish[ing] a more perfect Union,” but at least some of its official actions during the cold war had a directly opposite (that is, dystopian) effect.
15. For thorough bibliographies of dystopian works from this period, see the works mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: Brians, Nuclear Holocausts, and Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky.
16. At the Trinity test, Oppenheimer famously quoted from the Bhagavad Gita (“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”). The comment that Vonnegut paraphrases in the novel (see below) was not actually made by Oppenheimer until 1948.
17. Oppenheimer adamantly opposed the development of hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, leading to a vicious attack on his national loyalty that ultimately resulted in the revocation of his security clearance in 1953. Richard Rhodes provides a succinct yet detailed account of Oppenheimer’s hearing in his Dark Sun, 530–59. The text of the hearings was also published by the United States Atomic Energy Commission as In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It should be noted that Oppenheimer’s views regarding the atomic bomb after 1945 were by no means unequivocally negative. Oppenheimer’s comments to W. L. Laurence in 1965 demonstrate more pride than regret: “I never regretted, and do not regret now, having done my part of the job. . . .I Page 219 →also think that it was a damn good thing that the bomb was developed, that it was recognized as something important and new, and that it would have an effect on the course of history” (quoted in Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, 226). Lifton and Mitchell conclude that Oppenheimer’s mixed messages were a result of “struggling with his own survivor emotions . . . [that] had not only to do with creating a murderous weapon but, just as importantly, with having embraced that weapon as a beneficent force” (225).
18. A number of private companies reaped a substantial profit from producing components, machinery, or raw materials for the Manhattan Project, even if they were not privy to the details of what their products were being used to create.
19. This laboratory is located in Ilium, Vonnegut’s frequent fictional double for Troy, New York. As such, it becomes a cousin (in terms of both the fictionalized geography of Vonnegut’s United States and the technologically dystopian tenor of both novels) to the Ilium Works that Paul Proteus manages in Player Piano.
20. Manhattan Project physicist I. R. Rabi wrote that the bomb represented “a new understanding of man, which man had acquired over nature” (quoted in Rhodes, Dark Sun, 201), one of many comments by principals involved in the development of the atomic bomb who describe that knowledge as somehow beyond nature.
21. Brother is described as “hid[ing] manuscripts of protest letters in his home” while at the same time testifying against dissident authors. When his colleagues claim that Brother is “an informer” and “a provocateur,” Chatterer insists instead that he “works on no-one’s behalf” in order to “bring everyone down to his own level” (528–29).
22. Zinoviev offers an early clue regarding his attitude toward the narrator’s job when he notes that the institute where the narrator works (which was responsible for the Slogan’s installation) “occupies the upper floors of the Yellow House” (11). The phrase “yellow house,” zheltyi dom, is a euphemism for a madhouse in Russian and also serves as the title for Zinoviev’s first postemigration novel, The Madhouse (1980).
23. Perhaps coincidentally a road rally occurs in both On the Beach and The Island of Crimea on the eve of apocalypse, although the element of wish fulfillment that the race contains in On the Beach is notably absent from Aksyonov’s novel.
24. In an interview published in 1986, poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya uses the same zoological metaphor of rabbits and boa constrictors (without referencing Iskander explicitly) to describe Aksyonov’s depiction of the West in The Island of Crimea: “[He] saw . . . how the West, like a rabbit, is gazing at the Soviet boa constrictor which has hypnotized it. In The Island of Crimea Aksyonov built a model of the West in one separate country. The question is whether or not the West is able to survive.” She also describes Luchnikov’s dream of a unified Russia in terms of the “visible decay” of Western life: “The envy, the neurosis, the longing for wholeness, for a beautifully monolithic world—even if we have to enslave or be enslaved, let’s become beautiful and whole, the way the communist world is beautiful and whole” (quoted in Możejko, Briker and Dalgård, Vasiliy Pavlovich Aksënov, 30).
25. Marlen’s name—a combination of Marx and Lenin—is another example of superficial adherence to ideology dominating identity. A number of Soviet satires use characters with similar names (which were not uncommon during the Soviet era, especially among children born in the 1920s and 1930s)—see the discussion of Aleshkovsky’s novel The Hand in the previous chapter—to comment on the totality with which Soviet rhetoric suffused everyday life.
26. Page 220 →In her article “Vasilii Aksenov and the Literature of Convergence,” Matich argues that the entire novel is Aksyonov’s repudiation of the philosophy of convergence (which is clearly expressed in Luchnikov’s article) that he himself had espoused earlier in his career. She summarizes this position as follows: “Like many western and Soviet liberals in the 1960s, young Aksenov believed in the peaceful coexistence of socialism and capitalism and the eventual convergence of the two political systems. Developed in the 1950s by western social scientists, the convergence thesis was a response to postindustrial society as shaped by modern science and technology. According to the theory, in the space age capitalism and socialism would become indistinguishable in spite of ideological differences. . . . In the Soviet Union, the reformist intelligentsia adopted it in the hope that Stalinist Russia could be transformed into a democratic, technologically advanced society” (“Vasilii Aksenov,” 642). She argues that Aksyonov uses The Island of Crimea to “demythologiz[e] his literary persona of the 1960s and the many layers of ambiguity associated with his generation. He is saying farewell to Russia and preparing himself for dissident politics and, eventually, emigration” (643–44).
27. While Voinovich has repeatedly denied that Karnavalov is intended to be a parody of Solzhenitsyn—a denial he repeats in his Portret na fone mifa (2002; Portrait in a Myth’s Setting), despite spending most of the remainder of that work criticizing Solzhenitsyn for self-aggrandizement—there are simply too many biographical and philosophical correspondences between the two to invalidate this interpretation altogether.
28. The parody of Solzhenitsyn, whose cycle of historical novels about the Russian Revolution titled The Red Wheel (Krasnoe koleso) is divided into several “knots” (uzly), is unmistakable here.
29. This name is typical of Soviet bureaucratic shorthand and stands for Moscow Republic. In the original the name is Moskorep, short for Moskovskaia respublika.
30. Voinovich’s play with the time frame in the novel makes “text” refer in this manner not only to Kartsev’s account of the trip, but to the trip itself, since the book he has not yet written based on his experiences (presumably also the one the reader has in hand) appears in the future Moscow and influences both his decision making and the unfolding plot.
31. This unusual portmanteau title’s origins are explained to Kartsev by one of the Moscowrep officials in the kind of extravagant terms that were used to laud Stalin: “The Genialissimo is simultaneously the general secretary of our party, holds the military rank of generalissimo, and, moreover, stands apart from everyone in the scope of his genius. In view of all his ranks and attributes, people used to call him ‘our general secretary, genius, and generalissimo.’ Well, as everyone knows, among his other virtues, our leader is also distinguished by his exceptional modesty. And he asked us many times to call him by a name that was simpler, shorter, and more modest. And so, in the end, it was that simple and natural name that caught on—Genialissimo” (125).
32. In this regard Bukashev is like Bashov in Aleshkovsky’s novel The Hand (see next chapter), although his reasons are more intellectually than personally motivated. Whereas Bashov recognizes the irrationality of the Soviet system largely as a result of his quest for vengeance, Bukashev seems to have understood it from the start (although he does not begin to rebel against it immediately).
33. Page 221 →In the published English translation, druzhok is rendered as “little fool.” It actually means something more along the lines of “pal” (druzhok is a diminutive of the word drug [friend]), whereas durachok (the diminutive form of durak [fool]) carries the meaning given in the translation.
34. The English translation adds the final line, which explains the combined acronyms more clearly.
35. In the Russian original, this organization is named BEZO (short for “organy gosbezopasnosti,’” or “organs of state security”), a name that contains a satirical connotation with the word/particle bez, which means “without” or “the absence of” (for example, bez- modifies opasnost’ [danger] into bezopasnost’ [“security” or “absence of danger”]). Since the NKVD and the KGB were important tools in achieving the physical absence of people and things considered dangerous to the Soviet state, the emphasis placed on this particle in the name BEZO accentuates this negative association. The parallel between Siromakhin’s and Bukashev’s ranks in BEZO and the KGB, respectively, also supports this connection. Siromakhin’s first name—Dzerzhin, a clear reference to the Cheka’s first leader, Felix Dzerzhinsky—also alludes to his secret police bloodlines. There is further irony in BEZO’s very existence, given that the absorption of the KGB into the Communist Party has apparently left a vacuum that requires at least nominal filling.
36. Whereas the English translation renders Kartsev answer to Siromakhin’s “OK?” (“O’kei?” in the original), also as “OK,” the Russian text reads “Shiur,” an approximation of the English “sure.” Voinovich makes sure his Russian readers understand this answer—whose unfamiliarity points out Kartsev’s doubts as to whether Siromakhin is actually an American agent or a Russian one—by providing a footnoted explanation of how “sure” would be used in this context.
37. The word Voinovich coins in Russian is “kabesot,” which is short for “kabinet estestvennykh otpravlenii” (Moskva, 114), a term that sounds as bureaucratically euphemistic in Russian as “Bureau of Natural Functions” does in English.
38. Voinovich is not alone in using this combination for satirical effect, either in Russian literature or cold war fiction in general. In Aleshkovsky’s Hand, Bashov tells of how his father, a wealthy peasant who resisted collectivization in the 1920s and was killed as a result, foretold the corruption that Bashov’s current prisoner would engage in as a member of the Soviet elite: “Even the fact that sausage would be made practically from shit at your meat-packing plants, Citizen Gurov—that too Poppa foretold” (17). Early in Catch-22, Heller describes a heavily bandaged patient in Yossarian’s hospital ward who is connected to two jars in a manner that similarly effaces the distinction between food and waste: “Sewn into the bandages over the insides of both elbows were zippered lips through which he was fed clear fluid from a clear jar. A silent zinc pipe rose from the cement on his groin and was coupled to a slim rubber hose that carried waste from his kidneys and dripped it efficiently into a clear, stoppered jar on the floor. When the jar on the floor was full, the jar feeding his elbow was empty, and the two were simply switched quickly so that the stuff could drip back into him” (10).
39. Karnavalov’s edict is a direct reversal of Peter the Great’s order to shave the beards of the clergy and gentry in the early eighteenth century.
40. The English translation does not convey the clear association with Soviet terminology, but the Russian words for “emergency board” (Chrezvychainaia kollegiia) can be readily transformed via portmanteau into “Cheka.”
41. Page 222 →Siromakhin’s comments (like the policies of Karnavalov’s new regime themselves) contain an echo of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Marx’s argument in that work is that most revolutionaries fail to accomplish true revolution because they simply imitate previous revolutionaries (as Louis Bonaparte, a.k.a. Napoleon III, imitated Napoleon Bonaparte, who himself imitated the Roman emperors) and, like their models, eventually became tyrants who uphold or even strengthen the bourgeois status quo. For Marx this was one of the salient differences that would arise from a genuinely proletarian revolution.
42. Detailed analyses of each of these works in terms of their dystopianism/anti-utopianism is already extant, so I will not reproduce that work here. See, for example, Babenko, “Fazil Iskander,” 131–34; Clowes, Russian Experimental Fiction, 136–39 and 165–71; McGuire, Red Star, 73–75; Booker, Dystopian Impulse, 120–27; Nepomnyashchy, Abram Tertz, 130–47; and Howell, Apocalyptic Realism, 83–100.

5. Totalized Distortions and Fabrications

1. The Herero recur in Gravity’s Rainbow as the Schwarzkommando, whose story of unintended consequences is “a lurid tale . . . of Hitler’s scheme for setting up a Nazi empire in black Africa, which fell through after Old Blood ‘n’ Guts handed Rommel’s ass back to him in the desert. . . . Well, the black cadres had no more future in Africa, stayed on in Germany as governments-in-exile without even official recognition, drifted somehow into the ordnance branch of the German Army, and pretty soon learned how to be rocket technicians. Now they were just running loose” (Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 287–88).
2. Despite his distinctly military outlook on life and his stalwart opposition to Communism, Eisenhower at least gave some thought to the potential dangers of certain forces in American society. In his farewell address on January 17, 1961, he gave the following warning: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Of course Eisenhower did not necessarily follow his own advice in this regard while in office, as Coover was quick to satirize in The Public Burning (see below).
3. Compare “nuclear normality” (Lifton and Markusen, Genocidal Mentality) and “nuclear mindset” (Hilgartner, Bell, and O’Connor, Nukespeak) (both discussed in chapter 4) as well as Pynchon’s comment above about an “unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts.”
4. As mentioned in passing in the introduction to this volume, Betonie’s comment in Silko’s Ceremony about how “witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth” (116) echoes this sentiment.
5. See chapter 2.
6. The same holds true for the Soviet Union through the 1970s, where the nuclear elite (both strategists and developers) was separated from society intellectually and physically, just as the Manhattan Project scientists had been. The strict control over information that was commonplace in everyday Soviet policy was even more evident in nuclear matters, necessitated both by the inherent sensitivity of atomic weapons research and the desire to mask Soviet nuclear inferiority until the arms race could be equalized. Khrushchev and Brezhnev were keenly aware of the futility of a nuclear Page 223 →war for both sides but also needed to maintain a position of political and military strength to effectively continue the cold war as a standoff. Gaddis, We Now Know; Brands, Devil We Knew; Rhodes, Dark Sun; and Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb all discuss the Soviet nuclear program and policies surrounding it.
7. In the latter stages of the cold war, nuclear accidents in both countries precipitated this process of disclosure. Although opposition to nuclear energy was not absent in the United States before the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island or in the Soviet Union before the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, its effect on public consciousness (and thus the effectiveness of its demands for more candid information) of the two societies was markedly greater afterward.
8. See chapter 2.
9. Despite continual failures and massive expenditures on elaborate programs such as Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, nicknamed “Star Wars”), such antimissile defense systems are still an integral part of the United States Missile Defense Agency’s plans as of 2010.
10. Mike Moore writes that MIRVs increased the potential for nuclear war by shortening the response time available to an attacked nation in order to retain a strong enough nuclear counterforce: “In this new post-Strangelove world, an enemy who struck first would have a clear advantage, said nuclear strategists. Because one MIRVed ICBM could theoretically knock out several enemy missiles in their silos, the side that struck first could retain many of its missiles for a possible second strike. . . . In a MIRVed use-’em-or-lose-’em world, the U.S. and Russian commanders might have just minutes to make a launch–no launch decision, even if the information they had was muddled and ambiguous” (“Midnight Never Came,” 21).
11. As Boyer and others have pointed out, though, few of Kubrick’s characters are simple parodies of particular historical figures, functioning instead more like Barth’s parodic composites in Giles Goat-Boy. Turgidson voices the sentiments of noted nuclear hawk Curtis LeMay—perhaps making General Ripper a stand-in for Thomas Power, LeMay’s even more bellicose successor as SAC commander—and Strangelove amalgamates aspects of Edward Teller, Wernher von Braun, and Henry Kissinger (Boyer, Fallout, 98–99).
12. See chapter 2.
13. Katerina Clark claims that this genre is “the most common type of Stalinist novel by far” and “more or less originated with [Fyodor Gladkov’s] Cement” (Soviet Novel, 256). This genre is concerned with “how the plan was fulfilled or the project was constructed” and features a predictable master plot that Clark summarizes in The Soviet Novel, 255–60.
14. In a 1984 piece titled “Who’s Braver—the Cosmonaut or the Dissident?” Aksyonov describes details of Akademgorodok that he clearly adapted in creating Pikhty in Our Golden Ironburg: “According to the authorities, these were meant to be ‘fortresses’ of scientific productivity set far away from the dissipation of the big cities. The authorities never foresaw that these towns would turn into ‘nests of sedition.’ . . . One of the most remarkable of [these towns] in this respect was a Siberian town where amidst the vast void of the taiga nonconformist art was encouraged. There were exhibitions of avant-garde art, performances of forbidden jazz and presentations by controversial young poets and balladeers. . . . There was a famous café, the Integral [presumably not named for the rocket in Zamyatin’s We], where for a short time an Page 224 →independent discussion club was set up. The discussers, jokingly fencing with foils, argued some pretty serious questions, such as the competence—if any—of a one-party system” (143).
15. See Kustanovich, Artist and the Tyrant, 102–6; Kuznetsov, “Vassily Aksyonov’s Parody of V,” 181–85.
16. In the original this reads dabl’-f’yu, a roughly phonetic Russian rendering of the English letter “W,” which has no equivalent in Russian. Because of the shared atomic research aspect, it is perhaps tempting to interpret the Ironburg institute as being analogous to the Soviet bomb program established under the leadership of Yuli Khariton at Sarov in the 1940s, but I resist such a reading for two reasons. First, the temporal setting of Aksyonov’s novel is much too late for such a comparison to make sense, especially given the importance of the specific historical time frame to bomb research (that is, moving a program to develop the atomic bomb the 1970s makes little sense). Second, details about the program at Sarov were unavailable to all but the upper echelons of Soviet officials, whereas propagandistic reports about the achievements of “cities of science” like Akademgorodok were common during the time Aksyonov wrote the novel. This is not to say that the potential value of systematic scientific endeavors like those established at Akademgorodok was not spurred at least in part by the success of the Soviet Los Alamos set up at Sarov, but Aksyonov is not likely to have had that specific project in mind in creating this novel.
17. His name, like almost all the others in the novel, contains semantically absurd elements. Veliky-Salazkin literally means “Great-Toboggan,” and as Kolesnikoff points out, his hyphenated name “is . . . ironic for it suggests an aristocratic background, when in reality he comes from a poor family” (197). This irony is heightened by the fact that the last thing a hero of Soviet science should affect is an aristocratic air, especially if his proletarian credentials are legitimate, as Veliky-Salazkin’s are. Other unusual names, such as Kitousov (suggestive of kitovyi us, “whalebone”), Morkovnikov (carrot-man), Mohrsitzer (a Germanic name connoting “carrot-sitter”), and Slon (elephant), all parody the rigid rationality of Socialist Realism by resisting positive or even sensible metaphorical associations.
18. Memozov causes Ironburg to disappear in a dream world that temporarily displaces the “real” one that Kitousov narrates as the setting of the novel. The scientists merely start over after finding a new piece of metal (a new zhelezka) and in the process reassert the primacy of Kitousov’s point of view.
19. All of the quotations from Kessler are my translations of his original German text.
20. Kolesnikoff singles out “the overstated praise of individual achievements or achievements of the whole country” among a number of particularly ripe sources of parody-ready materials for Aksyonov (“Our Golden Hardware as a Parody,” 198–200).
21. This period lasted roughly from the late 1920s through the mid-1950s, although a substantial number of novels praising the accomplishments of Soviet science (especially the space program) and industry still appeared in the 1960s and even the 1970s.
22. The scientists’ almost mechanical desire to rebuild Ironburg after Memozov causes it to disappear is possibly meant as a satirical commentary on the recurrence of Stalinist traits in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union.
23. See chapter 3.
24. Page 225 →In The Public Burning Coover avoids any overt commentary on the matter of the Rosenbergs’ guilt, which subsequent evidence appears to have demonstrated fairly unquestionably in Julius’s case, although less completely in Ethel’s (see the 1997 revised edition of Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton’s Rosenberg File). As Weisenburger states, “The Public Burning submits no brief for either side . . . because it is more concerned with anterior matters: specifically, whether or not the Rosenbergs were given a fair trial, and more generally, whether a fair trial was even possible, given the intense anxieties and sense of impending crisis skewing American politics during the McCarthy Era” (Fables of Subversion, 192). The fact that evidence released to the public from the American and Soviet archives after the end of the cold war clearly implicates the Rosenbergs does not alter the fact that there were substantial irregularities in both the investigations and trials that led to the executions in 1953. The post facto justification of the verdict (and the unusually severe sentence) does not render Coover’s criticisms invalid since the evidence that was presented in the actual case against the Rosenbergs has been questioned even by some legal historians who have long asserted the Rosenbergs’ guilt.
25. All emphases and other unusual typographies in the passages quoted from The Public Burning are Coover’s, not mine.
26. In the book’s prologue the narrator notes that the global “score” changes from “1,625,000,000 people for Uncle Sam, only 180,000,000 for the Phantom” at the end of World War II to a situation in which “the Phantom has a score of 800,000,000 to Uncle Sam’s 600,000,000 and the rest—about 600,000,000 so-called neutrals—are adrift” (13–14) by the end of the 1940s. The somewhat pejorative use of the qualifier “so-called” in describing nonparticipants in the binary conflict demonstrates the cynicism with which an either/or system views any dissent, much less antagonism.
27. Nixon’s anti-Communism contributed greatly to his election to the senate and his selection as Eisenhower’s running mate, but Coover’s presentation of Nixon at this stage seems to imply that his actual political acumen was still rather undeveloped in 1953. Since superficial anti-Communism was rarely challenged at this time, Nixon has not had to elaborate his thoughts in the manner that Uncle Sam demands.
28. Such a ring, including such figures as Klaus Fuchs, Herbert Gold, David Green-glass, Julius Rosenberg, and others did exist, of course, as Rhodes exhaustively catalogues in Dark Sun. Nevertheless Nixon’s 1949 claim seems to have been predicated more on impressing Joseph McCarthy, on whose House Committee on Un-American Activities Nixon had recently been appointed to serve. The figures, including J. Robert Oppenheimer and his brother Frank, that Nixon interrogated as part of his inquiries into an atomic spy ring were all exonerated, whereas the actual atomic spies were apprehended in wholly separate investigations, many of which were undertaken by the British MI5 service in addition to Hoover’s FBI. See Rhodes, Dark Sun, especially 411–15, 420–22.
29. Stalin’s references and mistakes in the original are somewhat different, although the translation retains the sense of thorough misunderstanding and wild combination: “Tak, tak—tikho skazal Stalin . . . —Zapor . . . Barashki . . . Moia utroba . . . Shashlyk mirovoi revoliutsii . . . Bronenosets <<Potemkin>> . . . Èto uzhe prizyv k vosemnadtsatomu pomidoru Lui Bonaparta” (Aleshkovsky, Ruka, 131). Literally translated, this quote reads as follows: “‘Well, well,’ Stalin said quietly. “Constipation . . . Lambs . . . Page 226 →My belly . . . The shish kebab of world revolution . . . The Battleship ‘Potemkin’ . . . This is certainly a call to the Eighteenth of Tomato of Louis Bonaparte.” If Stalin’s cannot even correctly recall the title of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, one is obviously inclined to doubt his comprehension of its ideas.
30. Although the lengthy list seems incoherent in some regards, there is a consistency in that almost all of its constituent parts are marginalized from the idealized American vision of the 1950s as embodied by Eisenhower. Whether in terms of race (where the narrator’s mention of “spooks of terrors past” carries a doubly cynical meaning), class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, or philosophy, disparate factors from “CREEPING SOCIALISTS[S]” and “SANTY ANNY” to “COMANCHES” and “REDCOATS” are cast as blood enemies of America who are attacking under cover of the dark (488–89).
31. That is, the light of an atomic blast from the Nevada Test Site. Uncle Sam’s rout of the Phantom in Times Square thus represents the use of the bomb as a deterrent threat, an association that is ultimately made clear by the narrator’s statement that the “darkness lifts off the square like a great mushroom cloud rising high into the lightening sky and sucking the fears and phantasms of the people’s nighttime up with it” (494).
32. While the origins of Uncle Sam are still somewhat unclear, a 1961 congressional proclamation officially weighed in on the side of a long-standing story that attributed the moniker to a Troy, New York, meatpacker named Sam Wilson, who supplied provisions for U.S. troops during the War of 1812. By the late nineteenth century, especially during the Spanish-American War, Uncle Sam had frequently become a tool of satire employed by political cartoonists such as Thomas Nast to criticize U.S. foreign policy. The iconic, unambiguously patriotic Uncle Sam that Coover’s description evokes dates back to James Montgomery Flagg’s military recruitment posters that were used during both world wars.
33. DeLillo picks up this theme again in 1997’s Underworld, in which he takes the reader through virtually the entire history of the nuclear arms race in order to trace the development of U.S. cold war angst in its entirety. More important, though, Underworld also makes clear the ways in which this condition outlives the end of the cold war in much the same manner as the physical detritus of the conflict does. White Noise thus serves as the diagnosis of cold war trauma, and Underworld as the prognosis for the future if that trauma is left “untreated.”
34. To further demonstrate the emotional remove of the faculty of the College-on-the-Hill, Gladney’s Jewish colleague Murray Siskind even calls this power of Hitler’s “a wonderful thing” (that is, a thing to be marveled at) without a hint of irony (except, of course, for the reader).
35. Gladney does seem genuinely repulsed by Hitler’s anti-Semitism, for example, despite the fact that it obviously facilitates the exertion of the power over death that he finds so fascinating and even estimable.
36. Rojecki’s Silencing the Opposition again provides a sound analysis of how the objectivity of news coverage of nuclear issues by television networks such as CBS and NBC (both of whose corporate owners—Westinghouse and General Electric, respectively—derive substantial revenues from government defense contracts) shows evidence of having been undermined by financial considerations.
37. Page 227 →DeLillo (Underworld) suggests this practice is as irrelevant to solution of the larger problem as rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic, the cliché to which his construction here seems to allude.
38. See chapter 3.
39. He assumes a dizzying array of aliases and pseudonyms within the novel, so many that one of his aliases is Etcetera (in the original Russian, his unusual-sounding alias is “Ted,” a close homophone of i.t.d., the common abbreviation for i tak dalee, which translates into English as “and so on”). This first name and patronymic combination seems to be his preferred moniker.
40. A severed hand that Fan Fanych uses in deceiving the woman who wants her husband killed turns out to belong to a party member and sets a strange series of events into motion. After the hand has served its purpose of misleading the would-be victim’s wife, Fan Fanych feeds it to a tiger at the zoo. However, a zookeeper finds a finger of it in the tiger’s cage and takes it straight to Yezhov, the head of the Cheka. Yezhov recognizes the finger and claims that its owner was killed by members of “the right-wing and Leninist bourgeoisie.” Stalin, in turn, tells Yezhov to “brush up on industrialization and collectivization” (13–14) and declares NEP to be over.
41. A point left out of the English translation is that Kidalla also flatly notes that the fact that the cases are made up is an “unrevealed matter” (16).
42. In the original, Aleshkovsky has Fan Fanych use phrases from the Russian idiom of the camps (with which he was familiar as a former prisoner) to describe the penalty that these cases carry. Consequently the English translation contains additional context and more familiar references that help make his meaning clear. The original reads as follows: “chetvertak [a slang term for a quarter-ruble but denoting a twenty-five-year, that is, quarter-century, prison term], piat’ po rogam [literally, “five over the horns,” a common camp slang term for disenfranchisement], piat’ po rukam [literally, “five on the arms,” a pun on the noun poruka, meaning “parole” or “bail”], piat’ po nogam [literally, “five on foot” or “five on your legs,” presumably referring to the fact that a former prisoner would likely have to work in heavy labor upon his or her release] i gnevnyi miting na zavode <<Kalibr>> [“and an angry rally at the ‘Caliber’ factory”]” (17).
43. The dates that form the temporal boundaries of this case are, respectively, Bastille Day and Bloody Sunday, two of the more important benchmarks in the pre-Soviet history of European revolutionary movements.
44. The Perdebabaev portion of this name contains echoes of both the verb perdet’ (to fart) and baba (a colloquial term used to refer to women, comparable to the English “chick”). The French name Valois is derived from the verb valoir (to be worth), which makes his complete last name suggestive of “worth a woman’s fart,” a potentially apt designation given the nonsensical testimony that is attributed to him.
45. The original Russian text refers to Kornei Chukovsky rather than Mikhail Sholokhov, who is a more familiar representative of official Soviet literature for American readers because of his novel And Quiet Flows the Don (1934; Tikhii Don). Chukovsky provides a more apt association, however, since he is best known for his fairy tales for children.
46. Kidalla’s closing comments echo those of party functionary Andrei Zhdanov, who denounced Akhmatova as “half-nun and half-harlot” and Zoshchenko as “a vile hooligan” at the 1946 party congress.
47. Page 228 →The connection with the conditioning experiments conducted on the young Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow appears to be largely coincidental here, but the theme of behaviorist psychological conditioning recurs in a variety of ways in cold war literature (see Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Zinoviev’s Madhouse) as an analogue of ideological conformity. At least in the Russian instances, this theme has clear historical connections: the Soviets commonly used psychotropic drugs and other forms of psychological “persuasion” to condition (or often simply to punish) political dissidents.
48. The translation of kolkhoznitsy as “peasants” loses the distinctly Soviet overtones of that word (especially given the sickles they are carrying), which is more accurately rendered as “collective farm workers.”
49. The preposterous pseudonym under which Fan Fanych is tried suggests a somewhat different obscenity in Russian than the English rendering of “C. U. N. Tarkington.” In addition to providing clear association with one unmistakable center of capitalist culture (New York), the initials of the name Kh. U. Iork spell out the word khui, which is roughly equivalent to the English “prick” or “cock.”
50. If so this creates yet another chronological inconsistency—presumably intentional on Aleshkovsky’s part—since Chernyshevsky died more than sixty years earlier in 1889.
51. He even becomes annoyed with Kolya at one point early in the narrative when the latter apparently makes an unrecorded protestation against some aspect of Fan Fanych’s narration: “Shut your mouth, Kolya. Quit telling me to cool it or you can find some other international crook to spout his memoirs” (19). The original Russian here relies heavily on idiomatic expressions, but the general sense is retained accurately in the translation.
52. One of Booker and Juraga’s central assertions in their analysis of Astrophobia is that “Palisander’s carnivalesque revisions of history . . . function not so much as a parody of official versions of Soviet history as of the recent retellings of that history by dissident writers such as Solzhenitsyn” (Bakhtin, 150). They also single out Eduard Limonov as a target of Sokolov’s parody in the novel, noting that “Palisander’s outrageous sexual adventures often read almost as an attempt to out-Limonov Limonov” (153). While I acknowledge that this element clearly seems present in the work, I also feel that Booker and Juraga oversell their point somewhat by interpreting this parody of dissident counterhistory as the primary intention of Astrophobia. Sokolov’s parody uses models from both pro- and anti-Soviet texts, thus suggesting that the satire contained within this parody is reserved more for the fictionalizing technique that these two perspectives share, rather than their individual messages.
53. I quote it here at considerable length since paraphrasing it or producing another similar summary would simply repeat work that has already been done well.
54. Before the novel was translated into English as Astrophobia, English-speaking critics often referred to it using the working title The Epic of Palisandr because of the distinctively epic -iia ending.
55. Gregory L. Freeze singles out Andropov’s praise of Brezhnev’s speeches (“[He] brilliantly reveals the paths and prospects of communist construction in the USSR and inspires new heroic feats of labour in the name of strengthening our multinational state, the unity and solidarity of the Soviet people”) and the justifications for Brezhnev’s Page 229 →receipt of the Lenin Prize for his memoirs (“For their popularity and their educational influence on the mass of readers, the books of Leonid Ilich are unrivalled”) as some of the most heinous examples of this sort of absurd flattery (“From Stalinism to Stagnation,” 372). Of Brezhnev’s memoirs, Katerina Clark writes, “They remind one of the Stalinist variety of autohagiography, where ‘all the threads’ of the administration pass through the hands of one man, who is constantly achieving what by normal reckoning is impossible” (Soviet Novel, 238). As part of Sokolov’s critique in this regard, Astrophobia contains a scene in which Palisander loses a literary prize competition to both Stalin and Brezhnev, whose poem, quoted in the text, is wholly without merit (34).
56. His unusual last name refers to the flower the forget-me-not.
57. The word ocherk (often translated into English as “sketch”) is defined by Marc Slonim in Soviet Russian Literature as “a genre between a journalist’s report and an essay” whose purpose was “accurate and faithful reproduction of people and conditions of labor with an emphasis on industrial, agricultural, military, and other achievements of the country’s economic and social life” (166). Many of the realistic and naturalistic novels of the 1920s with revolutionary themes are essentially fictionalized examples of this genre.
58. Palisander even uses the diminutive form of Nezabudka’s first name (Iasha) here to affect a greater degree of familiarity. Palisander seems to intend the diminutive as a sign of his amity toward his “coeval” (rovesnik). The context of the passage in which the diminutive appears, however, causes it to function much as the use of a diminutive form by a landowner toward one of his peasants in a nineteenth-century novel would, that is, to accentuate the social inequality between the two.
59. The hat Palisander refers to in the original (the “murmolka”) is not technically equivalent to a graduate’s “mortarboard,” as the English translation reads. The murmolka is a traditional style of Russian hat dating back to the seventeenth century. This potentially makes Palisander’s reference to it even more uncomplimentary, since a murmolka would not only be perceived as inappropriately plebeian headgear for an academic but also somewhat antiquated.

Epilogue

1. Seed discusses the trope of preserved knowledge leading to a renewed cycle of destruction in his American Science Fiction and the Cold War. He primarily treats this theme in Hoban’s Riddley Walker and A Canticle for Leibowitz, although he also mentions Leigh Brackett’s 1955 novel The Long Tomorrow (157–67).
2. The “Doomsday Clock” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at two minutes before midnight when A Canticle for Leibowitz was released and moved from seven to three minutes before midnight in the years that bracketed the publication of Cosmos. These two instances represent the two most dire assessments of the nuclear threat since the clock’s inception in 1947.
3. This is the literal translation of the Russian title. The book has been translated into English under the titles The Clay Machine-Gun (United Kingdom) and Buddha’s Little Finger (United States).
4. David Cowart notes in his article “Pynchon and the Sixties” (1999) that Mason & Dixon is filled with anachronistic references that bring the symbolic analogue of Pynchon’s mock eighteenth-century novel into clear focus: “Those small reflections in history’s distant mirror highlight a much larger congruence between the 1760s and Page 230 →the 1960s, for Pynchon ultimately reads the eighteenth century much as he reads the twentieth. As in one era the struggle to resist the totalizing tide of reason manifested itself as a taste for Gothic, a nostalgia for magic, and an embattled spirituality, so, in the 1960s, enormous numbers of American citizens resisted the logical-yet-monstrous coercion of cold war rationality as embodied in the military-industrial complex, the Vietnam war, the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction, and so forth” (5). As such Mason & Dixon provides a retrospective consideration of Anglo-American history that spans more than two centuries.

Bibliography

Notes

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Page 205 →Notes

Introduction

1. The Role of Literature during the Cold War

2. The Intersection of Literature and Politics during the Cold War

3. Page 211 →“The Bind of the Digital” and Other Oversimplified Logic

4. Cold War Critiques of Utopia

5. Totalized Distortions and Fabrications

Epilogue

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