I Remember Rostov
The Un-Nostalgia of "Tears of a Komsomol Girl" by Audrey Szasz
Nostalgia, in the estimation of theorist Therese Lichtenstein, is the “simultaneous desire to return to the past, and a recognition that it is impossible to do so,” which culminates in a “sense of yearning” for a “quality of purity that exists in the sunset visibility of a vibrant past”.[1] Certainly this is a familiar condition for anyone feeling cheated out of a life of full self-actualization, and probably now for the majority of planetary inhabitants that weathered the year 2020. There is a more peculiar variant on this - Ost-algia - which deviates from standard nostalgic reveries in that it involves yearning for a time and place which itself was a time of yearning, for a period in which humans anxiously waited at a threshold beyond which lay either the collapse of a failed system or its final, resolute victory. More specifically, the punning term refers to nostalgia for an idealized or personalized vision of the Soviet Union and its East Bloc satellites, as Ost- is the German term for “East” and the split between these two cultures was most vividly mediatized or given dramatic heft by the “Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier” then splitting East and West Berlin. The Ost-algic impulse can come either from those who had direct experiences of this mythical East, or those who haven’t, who somehow find the stereotypical imagery of uniform austere grayness, unyielding discipline and even the background of nuclear arms brinkmanship to contrast favorably with a digital 21st century of cloying, pandering, and endlessly nested falsehoods. As Alexei Monroe, spokesperson for the Neue Slowenische Kunst movement affirms:
The Cold War is a very rich and evocative period, particularly the period of ‘New Cold War’ from 1980-1985, which I remember clearly. I think that the general cultural awareness of the proximity to mass annihilation did directly influence the aesthetics of the period, and that there is even a type of ‘Cold War Poetics.’ Perceived mortality and ongoing crisis tend to generate deep and even sublime cultural responses.[2]
Given the emotional pitch indicated here, the Ost-algic reactions of those who felt themselves to be losers in an ideological war are some of the strongest and, using an example like cultural critic Christina Kaier’s reaction against the subsequent era of economic “shock therapy”, probably the most resentful.[3] Make no mistake, the Marxist intellectual community does have a vested interest in converting a yearning for the Soviet empire into some sort of more substantial action, and therefore it is difficult to say how much of the attributed yearning comes from honest observations of a current trend in motion, and how much it is just being fabricated from whole cloth. Yet there’s at least something in the air here, given the trickling of relatively high-profile Ost-algic films, television serials, books etc. that have become woven into the tapestry of 21st century pop culture. Anthologies of Soviet-era electronic music and lavish architectural coffee table books like Soviet Bus Stops or CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed point towards occluded histories of creativity and expression, as well as prompting a spirited debate as to whether these phenomena occurred because of or in spite of a culture of authoritarian central planning. Titles like the latter tend to suggest a dynamic tension between the two and resist ascribing absolute agency to one party or another, again citing an “age of premonitory discord”[4] as being conducive to a unique, irreplicable aesthetic. Elsewhere, dramatic events like the Chernobyl and Deutschland ’83 TV miniseries (based on the titular nuclear reactor catastrophe and the “Able Archer 83” military exercise respectively), seem to aim at a more ambitious use for Ost-algia. Their narrative arcs flatter certain conceptions about the universal goodness of humanity; with variants aimed at both the “because of…” and “in spite of…” camps mentioned above.
In the midst of generally optimistic narratives, whether they pin their hopes on some socio-economic utopia that has not yet fully flourished or upon the impossibility of “centrally planning” humanity’s essential goodness, we do occasionally see hints of something less likely to verify these sorts of positive self-assessments. These often manage to seep through the cracks as marginalia or asides in the more uplifting Ost-algic devotionals: take for example the CCCP coffee table book noted above, in which a description of the admittedly fantastic Fyodor Dostoevsky Theatre of Dramatic Art is acknowledged as a “surreal masterpiece…designed to echo the primitive religious architecture of Veliky Novgorod,” while nevertheless it is also noted for having a column that acted as a jumping off point for “would-be suicides”.[5] Just as cracks in the concrete sidewalk are easy enough to stumble upon, so too are these suggestions of a world that is not dramatically improved by hindsight: at the very least, it is a world where we are made to understand that a belief in dreams’ realization also requires an acknowledgement of the same for nightmares.
Enter enigmatic author Audrey Szasz and her latest novel, Tears of a Komsomol Girl. [linked material “not safe for work” –ed.] One of the intriguing facets of Szasz’ new book is the degree to which, while graciously indulging the historical tourist’s hunger for Ost-algia, she also refuses to accept the carefully delineated moral and conceptual boundaries of this way of thinking. The pivotal figure looming over Tears… is, after all, a serial murderer active from the years 1978-1990, something that Soviet propagandists of the time would be all too happy to identify as a phenomenon that could arise only from distinctly Western psychopathology. Furthermore, this is not a “garden variety” serial murderer by any conceivable metric, but rather a man whose actions still rank among the most carnally vicious (and in fact most “serial” among non-combatants, with over fifty slain left in his bloody wake) of all world-historical individuals fitting this category of criminality. Andrei Chikatilo, the individual in question, was to the freshly dismantled USSR what arch-villains like the Moors Murderers or Charles Manson were to their respective countries and eras; a ghoulish “return of the repressed” personified, a person so singular in his bloodlust that he effectively killed certain preconceptions about his time along with his human victims. With his chaotic murder trial being distinguished as post-Soviet Russia’s first real “media circus,” the public revelations of Chikatilo’s unparalleled rampage of cannibalism, necrophilia and mutilation clearly portended the end of whatever ideological purity the Russian population associated with the unique historical circumstances of the late USSR.
Tears… is partially told from the perspective of the “Rostov Ripper,” and features some necessary exposition of the humiliating back story which accelerated Chikatilo’s total disconnection from humanity. Nevertheless, Szasz admits that this is a “provisional” version of the murderer, with historically verifiable facts about his appearance and traumatic childhood jostling regularly with imagined encounters that may have not even happened to the story’s other main character. Indeed, the majority of the plot development revolves around a character crafted to seem initially like his polar opposite, though this apparent moral binary is very quickly denied in favor of something more complex and therefore less suitable to nostalgic reverie. Arina, the Komsomol girl of the title, is a prodigious young musician burdened by a host of family issues, and cursed with a tumultuous worldview brimful of petty resentments, general mistrust, and such universally shared foibles of youth as the wish for more stylish shoes even when much more serious priorities need to be dealt with.
The lyrical descriptions of Arina’s adolescent ennui and immoral fantasies are regularly set in stark relief against dutifully quoted socialist scripture. The latter is shown to also be a specialty of Chikatilo (noted on his Murderpedia profile as “an avid reader of Communist literature”), and gradually her character is shown to be distinguished from the historical Chikatilo by fewer salient aspects than we might think. The exact degree of her private humiliations and her capacity for destruction differ from the murderer’s, but in some of the book’s most surreal, feverish sequences, we are in fact left to wonder if Arina would rain down more terror on the population than the killer himself, as when she dreams of addressing the twentieth Congress of the Komsomol: as she begins her lecture with a boilerplate introduction about proud accomplishments in the Young Pioneers and Komsomol organizations, she turns the lecture sharply towards Greek mythology and eventually segues into a monologue on the actions of Chikatilo. Her increasingly impassioned delivery is matched by a Sade-ian scene escalating among the audience and culminating in “the Palace of Congresses implod[ing] in a torrent of blood, semen and excrement, collapsing as it sinks into the ground.”
As sequences like this should indicate, the narrative (which progresses in a circular rather than linear form, told by an ‘unreliable narrator’), is permeated with events that many mainstream readers would find “shocking” to have been composed by a woman, even in this supposed era of triumphal, infinitely versatile femininity. To her credit, Szasz manages to steer this narrative away from over-simplified gender / identity politics, and I doubt she is concerned that most of her admitted literary influences brought to bear on this story are male: its moments of phantasmagoric violence channel Lautréamont, its clinical / forensic detail call upon J.G. Ballard’s canon, and the recurring narrative of the would-be heroine’s confrontation with the murderer recalls Baudelaire’s description of his prose poetry in Paris Spleen (“I do not keep the reader’s restive mind hanging in suspense on the threads of an interminable and superfluous plot…take away one vertebra and the two ends of this tortuous fantasy come together again without pain.”)[6] Szasz’ resistance of horror / suspense genre tropes with relation to gender (such as the still popular “final girl” phenomenon) seem all the more useful to this narrative when she offers her own analysis of the impotent murderer’s revenge motives. To wit: “the insistent, highly gratifying desire to androgynise or neuter his pubescent victims […] erasing their differentiating characteristics, cutting and slashing to render his young victims sexless, to nullify them.”
Szasz’ immersion into period products and nomenclature is another exemplary feature of the book, and is quite advanced given her personal residency in the country happened sometime after the collapse of the USSR proper. In some respects, it is on a par with someone like Bret Easton Ellis (if deployed with less centrality to the story at hand than, say, the litany of designer goods recited in that author’s American Psycho), and the frequent narrative asides about contemporaneous pop music like Kino or Forum add life to proceedings that otherwise reek of death. Like …Psycho, Szasz’ novel is also shot through with moments of mordant humor that connect the reader with the preoccupations of the time, and paradoxically act not as a release valve from a horrific situation but rather as a means to more completely immerse the reader in it. As Szasz vividly paints a mental tug-of-war in Arina’s head between her Chikatilo / “Satan” obsession and the quotidian, perhaps rotely memorized minutiae of Soviet life, we come across non-sequiturs such as “one of the most widely used tractors manufactured in the USSR is the 130-horsepower DT-75M” and “in the past two decades, the arable land cultivated in Soviet Asia has almost doubled,” between which there are detailed musings on the Rostov Ripper’s descent from schoolteacher to sexual deviant. More effective still is when Soviet iconography colors Arina’s peregrinations of mind to the point where, for example, she fantasizes about a sexual encounter with Lenin himself: noting the “electricity […] running through my body,” she flashes upon Lenin’s oft-recited 1920 propaganda slogan “electrification plus Soviet power equals communism.” In the larger context of this story, this appeal to the utopia arising from collective will and effort is as memorable Ellis’ making Patrick Bateman a vocal enthusiast of the self-determination anthems of Whitney Houston.
It should be stressed, though, that while these Tears… are caustic acid applied to the simplified and absolutist surface of nostalgia, this is not exactly a satirical novel of the kind alluded to above, in which a character “over-identifies” with the reigning zeitgeist and thus manages to inadvertently condemn it more than its own critics would be able to. If anything, Arina is ultimately indifferent to the socio-political machinations of her time, neither approving of them earnestly nor thinking it worth the effort to destroy them. This is summed up in one of her notable confessionals:
…my Komsomol activities give me the perfect cover for staying out late. I just love the idea of pretending to be a good girl whilst being very bad. Like the immense fun of being totally two-faced […] I side with the people in power, supporting them in public, but in private, do and think whatever the hell I want […] I don’t really believe all that crap about working together for the advancement of the people.
Even in her many rhapsodic fantasies, e.g. her review of a military parade together with the “smiling green ghosts of Major Yuri Gagarin and the late Leonid Brezhnev”, her cultivated self-image and the erotic pleasure she receives from directing this fantasy is the most important aspect of such pompous, theatrical scenes. As such scenes become more and more common, it seems gradually less illogical that she would harbor a desire to be numbered among Chikatilo’s superlative body count, simply to have experienced the most intense of possible experiences.
At this point, some attention also needs to be focused upon another key aspect of the book’s presentation, namely Karolina Urbaniak’s accompanying photographic collages. Urbaniak’s photographic imagery of Arina in period dress – from Komsomol uniform to Adidas tracksuit – expressively captures her indifference and self-absorption as her picture is nested among other memorabilia from the time, i.e. photos of the aforementioned pop icons and Arina’s musical idol Evgeny Kissin, Pepsi bottles with logos written in Cyrillic characters, assorted postcard imagery from the USSR and other world capitals. While strangely unsettling in their premonitory quality, they are still not as intense as the repeated imagery of Arina’s mutilated corpse which also appears at regular intervals throughout the book: flanked by yellowed newsprint and superimposed over backdrops of unemotive Khrushchyovka apartment buildings filmed in a crepuscular haze, these images are an additional challenge to anyone approaching this period with a surfeit of sentimentality. In these scenes the urban landscape itself seems to shrug its indifference towards historical events, no matter how likely they are to imprint themselves on the psyche of future inhabitants.
Returning to Lichtenstein’s thoughts on nostalgia above: another key feature of nostalgic thinking is that it “simultaneously conserves and destroys the past […] in this way it parallels the repression mechanisms of a wakened dreamer.”[7] Szasz’ book is unconcerned with engaging in this activity which (again, per Lichtenstein) “block[s] out the uncertainty of the present and the future.” Instead what we are left with is a tale that presents an unbroken continuum of human obsessiveness, showing that the same repercussions of thwarted passions and failure to self-actualize are still with us regardless of whose monuments are being erected or crumbling into dust. As Tears’ main characters reveal themselves to be the picturesque ideal and monstrous anti-ideal of an era (even as the latter is identified by Szasz as “just another loser” bereft of a “malignant halo”), they then begin to merge into one another in various unanticipated ways. Their common indifference to grand social narratives and their willingness to exploit them for personal gain is eminently worth considering.
[1] Lichtenstein, Therese (2001): Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer. Berkeley / Los Angeles: University of California Press.
[2] Alexei Monroe quoted in Bailey, Thomas Bey William (2012). Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society. Belsona Books Ltd.
[3] “After the final failure of the long Soviet experiment in controlled consumption, the impoverished post-Soviet population […] was inundated with the cheapest commodities of international corporate capitalism […] all we Russians got out of this harsh economic ‘shock therapy’ was vsiachecheskikh snikersov - ‘all kinds of Snickers’”. Kaier, Christina (2005). Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Cambridge / London: MIT Press.
[4] Chaubin, Frédéric (2011). CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed. Cologne: Taschen.
[5]Ibid.
[6] Baudelaire, Charles (1970) Paris Spleen. Trans. Louis Varese. New York: New Directions.
[7] Lichtenstein (2001).