Authority

No, dear reader, you and I were not mistaken after all: Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin's nominal head of ideology, has been officially proclaimed a great Russian novelist. Moscow bookshops have received the novel Near Zero, whose author, one Natan Dubovitsky, is — according to the newspapers Vedomosti and Russky Pioner — none other than V. Yu. Surkov himself. The pseudonym is easily decoded: Dubovitskaya is the maiden name of the Kremlin administrator's current wife, while Natan in Hebrew means "given by God" — much like a senior government post, or the gift of writing.

That said, Vladislav Surkov has never personally confirmed his authorship. On one hand, this allows a light, flirtatious marketing intrigue to hover around the freshly published novel. On the other hand, one presumably needs to wait and see how the novel is received. If everyone likes it — and especially if the Supreme Command likes it — that is one thing. But if President D. Medvedev, or, God forbid, certain members of his family, should fail to appreciate it — what then? One must always leave oneself a line of retreat. Who knows, perhaps responsibility for this illegitimate child of Kremlin prose will eventually be claimed by one of the many unofficial writers in Surkov's circle. We shall see.

That said, some of the reviews of Near Zero that have already appeared leave little doubt that its author is a very senior official and no one else. For instance, Kirill Reshetnikov (also known as the poet Shish Bryansky) writes in Izvestia, with complete seriousness, that Dubovitsky combines Nabokov's language with Shakespearean tragedy. Recall the Dovlatov apocrypha about Ernst Neizvestny: "Neizvestny had guests over. Ernst was holding forth on his place in art. At one point he said: 'The horizontal is life. The vertical is God. At the point of intersection — me, Shakespeare, and Leonardo!..' Everyone was somewhat stunned." Equally congenial to Shish Bryansky is Alexander Andreyevich Prokhanov (quite possibly a co-supervisor of the creative workshop that produced the novel), who informs us in his editorial in the newspaper Zavtra: "The novel is excellent, perhaps impeccable, bearing the marks of refinement, schooling, and literary mastery… The principal hero of the novel is language itself. Elegant, complex, metaphorical, it shifts its magma, density, and colour from episode to episode."

No, say what you will, nobody makes such an effort for an ordinary new writer, however talented. Such incense is burned these days only for bosses. And if it is not being burned in Surkov's name, it is frightening even to think who Natan Dubovitsky might actually be. Surely not…

Impossible. Better let it remain Surkov.

You will laugh, but I did in fact read the novel. And so I can already report that the central character, Yegor Samokhodov, is an extraordinarily successful political technologist, an intellectual of the highest order — one who even knows the common noun "husserl" (one wonders, is it masculine or feminine?) — a raw-boned cynic, not a trembling creature (a loser) but one who has the right ("a sovereign user," in the novel's terminology). In his reminiscences he is fond of a rural A. P. Chekhov, encrypted as "Grandmother Antonina Pavlovna." In short, it is clear enough who this is meant to be.

I also wish to report that the theme-and-idea of the work is fairly simple. It is exhaustively described by one small anecdote from the earlier life of the author of these reflections.

More than ten years ago, in the middle of the summer of 1999, the then-influential oligarch Boris Abramovich Berezovsky decided to run for a seat in the State Duma. In a single-member constituency — such constituencies still existed at the time.

He subsequently chose Karachay-Cherkessia, where he won. But initially other options were also considered, among them the Republic of Gorny Altai. And so a group of consultants, of which I was a member, set off for Altai to ascertain how receptive the local mountain voters might be, if it came to it, to loving Boris Abramovich.

Since Gorny Altai has no airport of its own, we flew into Barnaul — the capital of the neighbouring Altai Krai. At the airport we were met by a certain representative of the Gorny Altai elite who genuinely wanted Berezovsky to run in their region. For in those difficult years an oligarch's election campaign offered the hope of earning reasonably good money while also acquiring useful new connections in the capital. I remember the name of our greeter but will not mention it here, as he is guilty of nothing.

We got into the car and set off in the required direction. At this point I decided to ask:

"Shouldn't we stop in Srostki? Shouldn't we drink a toast on the bonnet to Vasil Makarych Shukshin?"

The man from the regional elite turned to look at me attentively and, after a postmodern pause, said:

"Of course. If you like, we can stop in Srostki. It is almost on the way. Though, to tell the truth, what is there to see? Everyone goes on about Shukshin, Shukshin. In my opinion — nothing interesting, pure primitivism. Now I, for example, grew up on Borges."

We heard this and drove on to Srostki without comment.

In short, the novel Near Zero is about more or less exactly that. Yet another composition by senior Pioneer Kolya Vintikov on the theme "How clever I am, or How many new quotations I memorised over the summer." Which is, in turn, an additional piece of evidence in favour of Mr. Surkov's authorship. Because the official's journalistic writings published over the past three years have been animated by precisely the same theme-and-idea. Identical. "I have seen Joan Miró."

The novel was even published almost to the day of Borges's 110th birthday, which fell on 24 August of this year. This was no accident: the publisher has testified that the author begged him to "hurry very much." It is entirely possible that cries of "a Russian Borges has appeared!" were anticipated. It is only strange that none have materialised so far.

Let us now leave Borges aside for a moment and turn to another famous writer — Dmitry Bykov, who published a vicious (in places, unjustly vicious) review of Near Zero in Novaya Gazeta.

In many respects, Bykov is right. But in some respects he is completely wrong. And with him, unlike with Natan Dubovitsky, one not only wishes to argue but is obliged to.

For instance. Dmitry Bykov complains that the novel contains a great many undisguised, direct borrowings from Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, and indeed Bykov's own ZhD. In the reviewer's opinion, the abundance of brazen plagiarism indicates that Near Zero was written by a team of literary Afro-Russians who may have deliberately set up their client, thus taking revenge on him for his deeply contemptuous attitude toward them.

To this I reply: no, dear Dima, the abundance of borrowed passages is precisely what speaks to the Surkov-inspired nature of the novel. Whether or not the official wrote Near Zero in his own hand from start to finish, he undoubtedly read through it and edited it. And the direct borrowings were no secret to him. He is, after all, very well-read (see above).

Two things simply need to be mentioned here.

A) Over the past ten years, the Kremlin's ideological machine — personified by Natan Dubovitsky's godfather — has operated in exactly this way and no other. It produces no original ideas. All ideas are taken from elsewhere — from the present or the past — then declared its own and subsequently gradually hollowed out and, in the end, completely drained of meaning. "Tainted," as one talented journalist put it. So the novel Near Zero was crafted in precisely the manner of their domestic politics department. No differently.

And you are quite right, Dima, to say that stealing literature today is certainly no harder than stealing oil or gas. Literature has neither a well-armed security service nor a corps of well-fed officials. And if certain senior officials feel absolutely no distress (note: they do not shoot themselves or resign) over, say, the demonstratively and even somewhat lasciviously stolen YUKOS, why should others (nominally also senior) worry about a few appropriated literary fragments?

After all, in our country rights belong to whoever ranks higher. Tomorrow a new Russian literature textbook will come out for the eleventh grade of secondary school. And it will state that the key Russian writer of the early twenty-first century is N. Dubovitsky. And V. Sorokin, V. Pelevin, and D. Bykov will be described as "second-rate writers of the Dubovitsky circle." Or will not be mentioned at all. And children will study this, and know precisely this. So what? As the late S. V. Mikhalkov remarked on a related occasion: "When they strike up the tune — you'll stand."

B) One must not forget the key word: "Borges." To accusations of plagiarism, Natan Dubovitsky could respond quite clearly: about postmodernism, the death of the author, and the typewriter. And that not only does he have the right, but as the Russian Federation's federal postmodernist he is obliged to recycle old borrowed novels in order to extend their life within a novel that is entirely his own and entirely new — a novel whose existence is in no way bound to the existence of its author and transcends the latter.

After all, Dubovitsky perhaps wishes, like Borges's hero, to write someone else's novel exactly — not Don Quixote, but ZhD. He has not managed it yet, but — before you know it — everything lies ahead. There is no point in getting in his way.

Dmitry Bykov is also not entirely right when he declares the following:

"…the people who wrote such a novel — with its devastating self-portrait, its floridly colourful stylisations, its apologia for emptiness, and its undisguised borrowings — have handed the presumed author an extraordinarily unflattering portrait. It is too accurate a likeness… If the presumed authors' aim was precisely this, then the novel Near Zero must be acknowledged as the loudest and most precisely targeted oppositional act of the past decade."

You see, dear friend.

The novel's protagonist, Yegor Samokhodov — in whom many diabolically handsome traits of V. Yu. Surkov are discernible — may well displease people who are at least partly committed to traditional values and Christian morality. But to the unnamed author himself — and to the teeming herds of his ideological brethren — such a figure is perfectly appealing. For it fully embodies the informal (not written on tablets, but known orally and by heart) moral code of contemporary monetocracy. This is precisely what a two-legged creature must be if it wishes and claims the right to belong to today's Russian elite. If a member of the Nashi movement diligently makes his way to Lake Seliger and reads Near Zero with a laser pointer, in time he will earn his cell in the patience-game that this power-life is dealing out. In short: if you want to be even a slightly sovereign user rather than a pitiful loser — model your life on Yegor, and better still on his creator and prototype. In one and the same person.

And Yegor Samokhodov's superhuman sense of himself is also, more or less, perfectly intelligible. For a person remains a creature of God even when he categorically denies this (or has even obtained a ruling from the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation confirming that it is definitively not the case). And so he — despite his flabby will and rattling reason — cannot help but measure himself against traditional values and Christian morality. And he inevitably tries to justify himself before those very norms which he has, ostensibly, discarded and rejected. And the best justification is: I am a superman. Therefore I have the right not to submit. Not a mere radish (a bad person), condemned to look at the world with a dog's eyes, but — a junior partner of the prince of darkness, standing above archaic prohibitions.

And the fact that the new superman bears no resemblance to the Nietzschean one — being narcissistic, petty, small-minded, mercenary, vindictive, hollow, vile, vulgar, weaselling, and certainly not ready for any heroic deed — well, that is the epoch. Whatever age you live in, such is your messiah.

And therefore, although in a literary sense Near Zero does not merit serious discussion — here Bykov is one hundred percent right — this little book cannot be called insignificant or useless. No — it is necessary and important to us, and even, if one thinks about it, very much so.

Some time ago I wrote in EZh that the article by Alfa-Bank president Pyotr Aven about Zakhar Prilepin, published in that same Russky Pioner, is the catechism of our ruling elite. That article has everything — as things actually are: what they think, what they feel and what they do not feel, what they want and do not want. Not in propaganda, but in life.

And Near Zero crudely presents the ideal of the bio-human being. Who is supposedly called to rule over the space that, for simplicity's sake, is still presented as "Russia." The novel's hero is the owner of an ordinary biography in this truly extraordinary time (however freighted with a terrible question mark of "minus").