Snow White and Russian Red
Irinia Denezhkina, translated by Andrew Bromfield
The decline and fall of communism is a distant memory in Dorota Maslowska’s first novel, Snow White and Russian Red, published in Poland in 2002. The same goes for Irina Denezhkina’s short story collection Give Me (Songs for Lovers), published in Russia the same year, while the teens in Hitomi Kanehara’s Snakes and Earrings, published in 2003, came of age after Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 90s. Maslowska was 19 and Denezhkina and Kanehara were 20 when they made their respective literary debuts. All three books were best sellers in their native countries; all won or were nominated for major literary prizes; and all are now being released stateside to heaps of hype, touted as portraits of the tormented generations that came of age after the collapse of their nation’s 20th-century identities. But not all precocious literary phenoms are created equal: all three build their tales from the raw materials of youthful alienation–sex, drugs, extreme fashion, nihilism–but with vastly different degrees of self-consciousness and toward very different ends.
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Snow White and Russian Red was published in Poland by an arts collective called Lampa and in the U.S. by Grove/Atlantic’s newly resuscitated Black Cat imprint, the same paperback line that produced Naked Lunch and Tropic of Cancer. It’s narrated by speed freak Andrzej “Nails” Robakoski, who wraps a two-day bender around an escalating feud with his girlfriend, Magda, and the similarly escalating anti-Russian tension whipped up by the burghers of the unnamed city where he lives. Nails is pissed about the “Americanization” of Poland’s economy, but Maslowska plays the political posturing and xenophobia as black comedy–at one point Nails and his buddy “Lefty” steal headsets and a soda from McDonald’s, screaming at the cashier, “Osama’s going to fuck you up for sucking off those Eurococks!” Meanwhile, all the girls in the novel–even Angela, a cheerful satanist/animal-rights activist–are desperate for the kind of money and celebrity that only a capitalist consumer culture can provide. Nails takes Angela’s virginity on his mother’s pullout bed, and he spends a large part of the rest of book with what’s probably her blood caked on his crotch. The image suggests a violent blurring of gender, one of Maslowska’s countless experiments in boundary smudging; later, she imagines the white and red of the Polish flag bleeding together into the “flags of a pink state, the kingdom of colored pencils.”
There aren’t any such exhilarating fuck-yous in Irena Denezhkina’s Give Me (Songs for Lovers), just the kind of vapid materialism and shoddy Russian workmanship, decked out in bunting and streamers, that would make Nails Robakoski foam at the mouth. First published on the Internet, her stories of Russian adolescence were discovered by a critic who nominated them for the country’s National Bestseller Prize, then published to big sales and acclaim by a Saint Petersburg press (under, tellingly, their “easy reading” line). Denezhkina, a journalism student, has an eye for the rush of teenage romance, but her world barely contains any conflict deeper than thwarted puppy love. She provides periodic hints of an adult life beyond school–Denya, a spooky young veteran of the fighting in Chechnya, vents his disillusionment in the title story “Give Me!,” the best of the lot–but they’re crammed between bits of ham-handed internal monologue, annoying rhetorical questions, faux insights, and forced metaphors. One story is named after a Richard Ashcroft video that sounds way more interesting than the story itself, which interminably channel surfs from one boring teen crush to another. In terms of literary tourism, it’s like never leaving the bar at the youth hostel.
In the recent anthology Japan’s Changing Generations, a group of academics including Loyola’s Laura Miller (coeditor of an upcoming collection called Bad Girls of Japan) set out to guess whether the generation gap outlined in Snakes and Earrings is a matter of “life-course”–meaning that today’s malcontents will mature into fully socialized adults–or groundwork for a radically different society. Their answer was basically: “We’re not sure.” You could ask the same question of these three authors, but clues to their future might be found in the way each has responded to the creeping fingers of fame: Denezhkina has continued on at J-school; Kanehara has written a second best-selling book, Ash Baby, about the relationship between a girl and a pedophile; and Maslowska has come out with a 150-page prose-poem, written in a hip-hop style and probably untranslatable, that apparently mocks the media and her own success. It’s called Paw krolowej–a double-entendre suggesting both “queen’s peacock” and “queen’s puke.”
