Sixty-two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Russian novelist Yuri Olesha’s dubious protagonist Nikolai Kavalerov peers into a street mirror only to see someone else, a grotesque parody of himself, coming out of it. Olesha was not envisioning the fall of communism in his novel Envy. Quite the contrary. Yet the metaphor for Russian history contained in this moment is extraordinarily prescient. Shortly after Kavalerov’s vision in the mirror, the narrative shifts from the first person to the third and then, Olesha writes, “the narrator fell silent.” Despite this warning, the “narrator” continues for another twenty pages. Who is telling this story? Who is in control of the plot, the characters, the most basic structures out of which meaning can emerge?
In 1989, Russia looked briefly into the mirror of its past, but the image reflected back was, much like Kavalerov’s, distorted and menacing. Two years later, the Soviet narrative came to an end, yet much in Russia today shows that the “narrator” may have prematurely announced his demise. The extravagant Soviet kitsch flourishing today on the streets of Moscow, the massive distortions of history to be found in much new “scholarship” and in the new public high school textbook endorsed by the Russian government, and the inability to reckon with a past that engulfed and suffocated Russian society for almost seventy-five years has left present-day Russia contemplating itself much like Kavalerov before the mirror in 1927.
When the Berlin Wall
