Of the republics, only Georgia managed to produce a consistently interesting body of work throughout zastoi: poetic and visually stunning explorations of Georgia's national past; 'philosophical comedies' that examine 'the incongruity between dream and reality, between the desires of the natural man and the structure of a society founded on mechanics and regulations';[93] subtle psychological dramas exploring the tensions of modern Soviet life. (Distribution was frequently restricted to Georgia.) Otar Ioseliani, who began his career in i966 with Leaf fall (Listopad), a feature film of near-documentary verisimilitude, experienced so many problems with later films that he eventually left for France, where he continues to work. Lana Gogoberidze, originally a documentarist, won fame with Some Interviews on Personal Matters (Neskol'ko interv'iu po lichnym voprosam, 1979), whose forty-something heroine finds she can no longer juggle the complicated balls of her life and whose past - like Gogoberidze's - includes a reunion with a mother released from the Gulag after Stalin's death.
By the last years of zastoi, 'the state's intrusion in private life considerably diminished, while the arena for public expression and the possibilities for private pleasure both expanded. Culture and everyday life were, of course, still constricted by political surveillance and economic controls, and censorship still operated ... But conformity in modes of behavior, public expression, and individual identity became far less coercive, and the politicization of everyday life, the expectation that communal or political goals shaped individual desires, was muted and even ridiculed.'[94] Counter-systems - the cultural equivalents of the black and grey markets that supplemented the stagnant economy - defied, paralleled and in a sense complemented the 'public gloss, monumen- talism, desiccated oratory, and relentless ritualism' of state systems.[95] The urban, topical irreverence of estrada (revue) comedy, acute commentaries on the shortcomings of Soviet life performed most adroitly by Arkadii Raikin and Mikhail Zhvanetskii, appealed to live audiences. And a plethora of voices - from women, from provincial Russia, from non-Russian republics - leaked into and thickened the official chorus.
New technology permitted the spread of culture - primarily, but not exclusively popular culture - with a speed and on a scale previously unimaginable. The advent of cheap audio cassettes allowed everyone from long-distance truckers to high-school students to hear gypsy songs previously banned from the airwaves, the immensely popular songs of Zhanna Bichevskaia, Alla Pugacheva and Valerii Leont'ev, and the far more abrasive ones of bards like Aleksandr Galich and Vladimir Vysotskii. (The Composers' Union fought back, mandating 'that 80% of all songs performed had to be those of Soviet composers' and establishing 'review commissions to vet all rock groups'.61) A few years later video technology, though accessible only to a tiny elite, permitted the beginnings of an underground cinema movement, mainly in Leningrad. What began as 'an underground band of young layabouts and drunken "weekend warriors" who started to film their own debauched and violent free-for- alls in the woods in the early 1980s' went on to make the Soviet Union's first horror movies, where 'crazed "zombies" or necro-denizens wander apocalyptic landscapes and commit acts of wanton cruelty, homosexual violence, and murder'.[96] With the increase in the availability of VCRs, pirated foreign films eventually entered Soviet homes without even a token nod to official channels.
Popular fiction during zastoi superseded in popularity if not in critical esteem the new generation of 'serious' writers known variously as 'urban', 'the Moscow school', and 'the forty-year-olds'.[97] It satisfied a reading public that had grown substantially thanks to urbanisation, better education and living conditions and increased leisure time. The makulatura scheme, introduced in i974 to solve the Soviet Union's perpetual paper shortage, enabled readers to trade in newspapers and magazines for books. 'Large segments of the population which had previously been uninterested in the printed word outside newspapers were now introduced to the idea of the book as something valuable to be acquired; they were also encouraged to build a library of ideologically neutral and highly readable literature.'[98] Crime fiction burgeoned, both the home-made versions produced by novelists like Arkadii Adamov, Lev Ovalov and Arkadii and Grigorii Vainer, and the imports: fifteen works by Agatha Christie alone appeared in Soviet journals between 1966 and 1970.[99]Iulian Semenov's thrillers fed the hunger for escapist popular fiction, as did Valentin Pikul' 's piquant novels of the diplomatic, aristocratic and dynastic life of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia. The state, eager for its share of the profits, authorised print runs in the millions (that sold out immediately) and screen adaptations. The prestigious Moscow-based journals like Novyi mir and Znamia did not need such material to keep their circulation high, but provincial journals like Volga, Sel'skaia molodezh (Rural youth) and Ural'skii sledopyt (Urals pathfinder) relied on detective novels and/or science fiction to attract subscribers, and the legal journal Chelovek i zakon (Man and the law) came out in enormous print runs because it published Georges Simenon's Maigret novels and Semenov's 6 Ogareva Street.[100]
The Brezhnev regime's final spasm of cultural repression occurred in 1979, with its refusal to publish a 'literary almanac', Metropolis (Metropol'). Metropolis contained poetry, essays, drama and short fiction by twenty-six writers, famous and obscure. Its editors - Vasilii Aksenov, Viktor Erofeev, Andrei Bitov, Fazil Iskander and Evgenii Popov - justified Metropolis as an effort to combat 'the dreary inertia which exists in journals and publishing houses . . . the condition of stagnant, quiet fright'.[101] Deliberately fostering a pluralist approach by including aesthetically diverse material, the editors tried - and failed - to publish via legal channels. The authorities blocked the intended 'book launch' at a downtown cafe (literally: they sealed off the block and closed the cafe for 'sanitary' reasons). The Writers' Union expelled five contributors, including Erofeev and Popov, slandered Aksenov and Akhmadulina, intimidated others; several, including Aksenov, emigrated. In the paralysis that ensued, and that persisted until 1986, Soviet culture bifurcated into its official sphere, 'total marasmus, total decay, supercretinism', in Popov's words, and an active, even 'tumultuous' literary underground whose members - mainly born between 1945 and 1955 - had virtually no hope of publication.
93
Anatoly Vishevsky
94
Joan Neuberger, 'Between Public and Private: Revolution and Melodrama in Nikita Mikhalkov's Slave of Love', in McReynolds and Neuberger,
96
Jose Alaniz and Seth Graham, 'Early Necrocinema in Context', in Seth Graham (ed.),
200i), p. 9.
97
Sally Dalton-Brown, 'Urban Prose of the Eighties', in Arnold McMillin (ed.),
98
Stephen Lovell and Rosalind Marsh, 'Culture and Crisis: The Intelligentsia and Literature after 1953', in Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (eds.),
99
Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy 'Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian
100
Viktor Miasnikov 'The Street Epic',
101
Cited by Robert Porter,