ABSTRACT

This chapter examines Les Poderviansky’s macabre and bizarre scenarios in Heroi nashoho chasu [A Hero of Our Time]. His pornographic characters are creatures of a brutal, sexualized reality based on the paragons of socialist realism and the reductive system of Soviet literature. Constructing his dramatic universe from staple numbers of the Soviet cultural repertoire, the author crams them with unmotivated murders, gluttony, alcoholism, defecation, fights, indiscriminate and unrestricted screwing, thus stripping socialist realist creations to their bare bones and upholding the idea that socialist realism is pornography. The analysis proceeds by juxtaposing the writer’s dystopian nightmare against the utopian fantasies and public mythologies created by Soviet authors. Poderviansky’s comediography of violence not only represents an iconoclastic break with the Soviet era and socialist realism as its ideological tool, but also signifies the degeneration of both.