A Little Nostalgia: The Detective Novels of Alexandra Marinina

Old Songs about the Main Things. In December 2002, Russkoe Radio-2, a station that broadcasts songs of the era, celebrated the year of its work with a party advertised as Motherland is the USSR! Appetizers served featured such hits of Soviet cuisine as Olivie salad, salami, spiced vodka, and stewed pears. Guests older than thirty immediately plunged into a state of nostalgia for the good old days. In the end of the celebration, each guest received as a gift a of sardines, a of caviar, Odessa smoked sausage, a of peas, a bottle of Stolichnaya, and a marinated herring. The food that used to symbolize well-being was packed in a long forgotten net bag (avos'ka). Previously considered so depressingly and therefore unwanted, the avos'ka was a welcome accessory in 2002: a lady wearing a mink coat proudly tossed her stylish purse into her avos'ka and, laughing, put the treasure onto the back seat of her Volvo. (1) The popularity of Russkoe Radio-2 and of other radio stations airing an old repertoire (2) is only one manifestation of nostalgia. (3) The sentiment that developed by the middle of the 1990s became contested by different social groups and has been expressed by a variety of cultural forms. In this article, I explore the ways in which nostalgia for the past has affected post-Soviet detective fiction, the most popular literary genre in the 1990s. Through my analysis of the mysteries by the popular writer Alexandra Marinina, I intend to show that rather than being an expression of craving for a comeback of Stalinism, post-Soviet nostalgia may be an attempt at creating cultural continuity and incorporating the cultural memory of the past into the present. Post-Soviet nostalgia as part of Russia's attempt to reconstruct its identity, to make sense of Russia's through rethinking its past, and to conquer time, which had spun out of control since perestroika, fits into a larger cultural and political phenomenon that Andreas Huyssen describes as present pasts. Huyssen writes: One of the most surprising cultural and political phenomena of the 1990s has been the emergence of memory as a key cultural and political concern in Western societies. This turning toward the past stands in stark contrast to the privileging of the future so characteristic of earlier decades of twentieth-century modernity. Modernist culture was energized by what one might call 'present futures.' Since the 1980s, it seems, the focus has shifted from futures to pasts, and this shift in the experience and sensibility of time needs to be explained historically. (4) In Russia, which used to be in the avant-garde of the utopian aspirations of the twentieth century, the turn to the past is especially dramatic. The political, cultural, and social significance of post-Soviet revisiting and rewriting history with nostalgia has compelled scholars to explore this sentiment in works of literature, film, architecture, memoir, and other forms of cultural production. In The Future of Nostalgia, cultural historian Svetlana Boym proposes to differentiate between two kinds of nostalgia: restorative and reflective. Restorative nostalgia evokes national past and future and is focused on the recovery and preservation of what is perceived to be an absolute truth. Reflective nostalgia is focused on the individualized meditation on history and suggests flexibility, an individual narrative, and cherishing shattered fragments of memory. While restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously, reflective nostalgia can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection. (5) Our understanding of restorative and reflective nostalgia would be incomplete without analyzing various ways of expressing nostalgia. Ways of expressing this sentiment range from replaying and reproducing works of the past in the new historical period, creating pastiche and parody of the old works, and reworking the familiar old values in new works. …

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