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SUMMARY: The article discusses the two latest novels by the modern Russian classic writer Vladimir Sorokin: Legacy (2023) and especially Doctor Garin (2021). Based on his interpretation of Sorokin's aesthetical and philosophical program developed elsewhere, Ilya Gerasimov reads Doctor Garin as a literary work that did not go as planned. Dismayed by the unexpected result, Sorokin wrote Legacy as a follow-up meant to explicate Doctor Garin 's message and explain it to himself and his readers. Therefore, Legacy develops to the extreme only one aspect of the 2021 novel. According to Gerasimov, Doctor Garin was planned as a postmodernist satire on the Russian intelligentsia, modernist literature, and the very society of modernity that produced them. Doctor Garin and his miraculous method of hypermodernism is an obvious reference to Aleksey Tolstoy's The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (1926–1927) about an impostor and adventurist seeking world domination. Sorokin mocks the modernist belief in "certain schemes to improve the human condition" (to quote this belief's famous academic critic, James C. Scott) and Russian modernist literature, from Vladimir Mayakovsky to Vasily Aksenov, as well as modern governments' failed political leadership. For over half of the book, Sorokin sustains his original rational design, channeling all his trademark spontaneous prose into "subtexts" – more or less extensive citations of imagined books or diaries introduced in the main text every 20–30 pages of the book. However, at some point, these subtexts disappear, and the protagonist fully immerses himself in Sorokin's irrational narrative driven by the logic of language rather than ideological considerations. This change of narrative mode transforms everything – from the protagonist's personality to the novel's central message. Gerasimov argues that Sorokin chose time as a central argument of his antimodernist criticism, vindicating postmodernism as a condition of multiple isolated chronotopes, with each subculture or identity group living in a unique temporality of its own – contrary to modernism's belief in progress and the normative universality of time. However, the spontaneous narrative of the novel's second half produces a different effect. It models social reality as multidimensional and yet fundamentally interconnected. In any of the very distinctive chronotopes, social reality acquires its stable characteristics only situationally in the eyes of an active subject rather than by some preset, anonymous and objective factors, such as temporality or identity. This message is communicated by the narrative independently of its author, who attempted to produce a different conclusion in the follow-up novel Legacy . Inadvertently, instead of affirming a postmodernist worldview – relativist but static – and mocking the old modernism and some hypothetical "metamodernism" anticipated since the late 2010s, Sorokin outlined a program for a truly new, "post-postmodernist" modernism. It combines postmodernism's multifaceted, multidimensional view of reality with modernism's ability to produce a coherent narrative anchored in an unequivocal moral position. It embraces multiple temporalities, but also the idea of the future as a condition radically different from the past and present. Gerasimov uses the difference in conceptualizing temporality as the main criterion differentiating the modernist and postmodernist epistemes, in any of their aesthetic versions, as well as the hypothetical new modernism as spontaneously outlined in Sorokin's Doctor Garin .

The article introduces the publication of an archival document − extracts from the diary of Ekaterina Sakharova (1886−1963). Trained as an agronomist, after the Revolution of 1917 she worked as a secretary for various academic organizations and as a translator. Ilya Gerasimov argues that Sakharova's diary is unique not just in its time span (the first entry dates back to 1905, and the last – to 1963) but also for its comprehensive reflection of the main stages in the evolution of the Russian intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. From 1905 to 1922, Sakharova's worldview went through at least five major transformations – as dramatic as switching from endorsing revolutionary terrorism to taking an explicitly counterrevolutionary political stance. The diarist tried to present her latest change of heart each time as an "objective" and "predetermined" consequence of her previous experiences and thoughts, explicitly claiming that it was a final life decision and that nothing could change it in the future. Analyzing her perception of time and attitude to her social environment, Gerasimov concludes that Sakharova's diary reveals a dynamics of individual subjectivity different from that suggested by the mainstream literature on the topic. Rather than presenting the work on her "self" for the future, the text shows the author's attempts to interiorize a new, recently crystallized hegemonic public discourse by rewriting herself (her emotions, values, aspirations) in the past. A new future becomes possible by revisiting her own past, and this probably holds true not only in the case of one exemplary intelligent's personal diary.

The former literary scholar Grigory Chkhartishvili, now better known as the popular Russian detective writer under the pen name Boris Akunin, who is also a visible figure in the ranks of the Russian liberal opposition, in 2013 started the ambitious project of writing a multivolume history of Russia. Akunin announces his History of the Russian State as an alternative to the new mandatory history textbook currently under preparation by a group of professional historians on the request of President Vladimir Putin. According to Akunin, what sets his history of Russia apart from histories done by competitors is its objectivity: as he explains, he just wants to describe the past "as it actually happened." Turning to the first volume of Akunin's History of the Russian State published in the fall of 2013, Ilya Gerasimov does not discuss its merits as a history study, for it is beyond any professional criticism: Akunin is a pulp fiction writer, whose idea of historical craft corresponds to the standards of the 1820s or 1830s. Rather, Gerasimov uses this opportunity to discuss the influential "canon of Russian history" shared by both "conservative" and "liberal" historians. This canon was formed by the first Russian professional historian, Nikolai Karamzin in the 1820s, and then perfected by great historians of the late imperial period, the classic Stalinist historical text History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course , and the academic historiography of the 1970s. Despite conflicting interpretations of individual historical events and figures, all of these historians shared the fundamentally common view of Russian history as the history of "the Russian people" on Russian "historical territory". The history of the state became pivotal to this dominant view of Russian history, as only political institutions offered the necessary sense of continuity and consistency to the millennium-long process. Akunin's History of the Russian State provides Gerasimov with an ideal example of the archetypal version of the "canon of Russian history" as understood and thoroughly reproduced by a modern-day educated Russian. Akunin reveals the whole intellectual gestalt of social imagination of the Romantic historiography of the 1820s Restoration epoch that was preserved almost intact by the "scheme of Russian history": the organicist perception of nation, the "blood and soil" imagery of national territory, the idealization of the state as a mystic embodiment of the nation's "will," the racialized understanding of the "people." This type of thinking about society was instrumental in producing the ideal of nation-state in the late nineteenth century, and informed the politics of national purges in the 1930s (on political or ethnic grounds). Without dismantling this dominant scheme, Russian society is doomed to reproducing ideologies of variously framed nationalism, and even liberal historians will cultivate in their students the ideal of national purity and domination over "national" territory.

SUMMARY:
This is a Russian version of the text originally published in Ukrainian in the Kiev journal Ukraina Moderna . Gerasimov summarizes the rhetorical strategies of Bartov's opponents (in their critique of his book Erased ) and shows their unintentional outcome: the construction of a profoundly colonial image of Ukraine as requiring special standards for the assessment of its past and present. In this logic, Bartov's approach is anticolonial in that it considers Ukraine fully accountable for its traumatic past, just as any other European country. Gerasimov shares his "insider" knowledge of Bartov's next book – a "thick description" of the Jewish elimination in Buchach, Bartov's family town, based on hundreds of interviews and providing "hard" evidence lacking in Erased (for which it was criticized). Gerasimov predicts that this future book can play the role of Ukrainian analogue to the Neighbors by Jan Gross if Ukrainian intellectuals persist in denying and refusing to discuss specific contexts and features of the Galician version of Ukrainian nationalism and the implications of the present-day politics of memory in the region.

SUMMARY:
Ilya Gerasimov interprets the last three novels by the famous Russian writer Vasily Aksyonov as an attempt to find an explanation to the failure of democratic (from below) westernization in Russia. Since the early 1960s, Aksyonov based all his books on the complicated relationships of Russian westernized intellectuals with Russian society at large, on the one hand, and idealized western culture and society, on the other. The gradual realization of the elusiveness of an idealized single "West" and vulnerability of modernity compelled Aksyonov to revise the old simplified worldview of the Russian intelligentsia. Gerasimov contends that in his last books Aksyonov came out with a new scenario for Russian intellectuals vis-à-vis the seemingly westernized regime and conservative popular masses.

SUMMARY:
Ilya Gerasimov reads the 2006 novel by Vladimir Sorokin Oprichnik as a literary experiment at constructing a society made of an ideal "national body" in 2027. Sorokin's notoriously carnal prose ideally suits this intention, and describes a society built upon the idealized Muscovite tradition, where "physiological" processes replace "sociological" ones. The triumphant "Holy Russia" is a monarchy, with a rigid social estate structure, dominated by the Orthodox Church and firmly controlled by the secret service and oprichnina, the restored institute of plenipotentiary officers introduced by Ivan the Terrible, directly responsible to the tsar. The country lives in tight isolation, literally surrounded by the "Great Russian wall," with a few gas and oil pipes running through the wall. All industrial goods, household items, and advanced technologies are produced by China, thus allowing for a steady infiltration of the Chinese inside the ideal and purified "Russian national body."

Gerasimov argues that Sorokin produced a sociologically accurate model of what a triumphant Russian ethnonationalist project would look like. A cult of pure national body determines a certain logic of political choices, be it the escalation of terror or the treatment of ethnic minorities. Gerasimov concludes that this "Holy Russia resurrected" as reconstructed by Sorokin is doomed because of its anti-intellectualism and determination to arrest any social dynamics and preserve the status quo at any cost, amid the changing sociopolitical environment. While Sorokin sees the main threat to this utopian society coming from the outside (mainly from "internal colonization" by the Chinese, prompted by the creative impotence of the new Russia), Gerasimov points to several other factors that have been only marginally outlined in the book.

The article deconstructs the metaphor of the national body and the persistent trope of violence in the new "Holy Russia." The idealized Russian "national body" appears to be more than the product of a writer's imagination. It is a logical implementation of a certain way of envisioning the Russian nation, popular among the Russian nationalists, and also familiar from Russian classic literature and social sciences.

SUMMARY:
Egor Gaidar, a leading Russian economist and an architect of the post-1991 economic reforms, has recently published two books dedicated to the Russian past: "Long Time. Russia in the World: Sketches of Economic History" and "The Fall of Empire: Lessons for Contemporary Russia." Ilya Gerasimov attempts to answer the question, what brought the renown economist to historical studies, and what is a contribution of these studies to the field of economic history of Russia and the world? With regard to the latter question, the answer is pessimistic: not only does Egor Gaidar largely ignore the rich and multifaceted tradition of writing economic history, but he seems to be completely unaware of the modern state of the discipline, methods, and problems that are being employed by historians. It is the leitmotif of both books that betrays the true motivation and genre of Gaidar's writings: using historical examples as self-evident teaching aids, Gaidar advocates a certain political agenda for modern Russia and defends his own role in the Russian transition of the early 1990s. This utilitarian use of history is hardly unique in the writings of politicians and public activists. What is interesting in Gaidar's case is that his historical treatises tell more about his political and economic thinking than anything else. The way Gaidar applies his expertise to the episodes of the past reveals his fundamental methodological blindness to the problems of social transition and mixed economies – something one would not expect from the Director of the Institute for the Economy in Transition. It is his treatment of history that allows one to understand Gaidar's peculiar sense of temporality. For Gaidar, the modern economies of the most advanced capitalist societies present the ideal norm, the future already institutionalized, up and running. The entire history of mankind is seen as a prologue to this normative reality. Hence "transition" is understood by Gaidar as a leap from the irrational, inefficient, and unjust past to the rational and righteous future-present. This makes him indifferent to everything not fitting into the idealized capitalist model, and to everything that constitutes the object of economic history. By the same token, this idealized image of advanced capitalism reveals methodological shortcomings of Gaidar as economist; for example, he is unaware of the tradition originating in gender studies of conceptualizing the enormous potential of "informal" and "non-capitalist" sectors of economy in the most advanced capitalist countries. This idealism coupled with a fundamental lacunae in modern economic theory made Gaidar indifferent if not hostile to entire sectors of economy and social groups that did not fit his ideal picture of the brave new capitalist world: non-monetary spheres of social services, welfare subsidised categories of population (e.g. senior citizens), and others. The "methodological blindness" of Gaidar compelled him to castigate as reactionary such phenomena as complex multiethnic polities, mixed economies, and everything else that did not fit into his oversimplified ideal model.

Gerasimov concludes that these shortcomings have had grave consequences for contemporary Russia, going well beyond the sphere of academic debates. Gaidar and the cohort of his fellow economists with similar theoretical backgrounds have become firmly identified with "Western" and "liberal" socioeconomic and political agendas, and are responsible for compromising these values in the Russian public opinion due simply to their theoretical crudeness and dogmatism.

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This paper approaches the phenomenon of Jewish criminality in Odessa from the vantage point of the anthropology of violence, looking into how new perceptions of Jewish identity can be determined from the demarcation between "us" and "them," the strategies of crossing boundaries between ethno-confessional groups, and the specificity of Jewish criminality.

The largely archaic Russian state could not regulate social processes on the micro-level of people's every-day lives and affairs. Therefore Jews, as well as other ethnic groups in Odessa, engaged in processes of permanent self-organization. In the situation of anomic, rootless, "colonial" life in Odessa's rapidly developing society, new strategies of social behavior and new patterns of socialization emerged daily, some of which violated the law. While official criminal statistics cannot be taken as an accurate representation of the actual involvement of an ethnic minority in criminal activities, it does suggest a degree of integration into "official" society by a minority group. Judging by this criterion, Odessa Jews had fairly intensive contacts with the official institutions of society (particularly given the open anti-Semitism of city officials). However, the main thrust of the Jewish interaction with larger society laid outside the institutional framework. Jews participated en mass in various activities that crossed all traditional lines and boundaries – legal as well as ethnic – in their quest for adaptation to the challenges of the day, and for greater security and prosperity. No traditional scenarios and certainly no legal regulations taught Jews and Russians in Odessa how to build personal and economic relationships across ethno-confessional boundaries. On the contrary, religion, traditions, and law reinforced segregation and separatism as well as mutual mistrust and hostility. People violating traditions and occasionally breaking the law entered uncharted waters, and their innovative sociability and frontier mentality challenged institutionalized social norms. In this respect, Odessa demonstrated a completely different pattern of Jewish criminality: neither a "traditional Jewish" way of illegal operations nor a "typical immigrant" urban model of uncompromising fight for control over certain territories. According to police files and newspaper accounts, Odessa Jews were engaged in all types of criminal activities and were quite prone to violence, including murder. In the situation of weak or inefficient state institutions and given the rootless nature of "colonial" life, social hierarchies and unofficial systems of authority were spontaneously constructed. Thus, Jewish criminality in Odessa was more than a manifestation of "social malady." Its overrepresentation in public discourse (compared with official statistics) and certain patterns represented in thousands studied cases suggest that it was also a product of the conflict between the established institutions of the archaic state and the rapidly modernizing "colonial" (or "frontier") enclave within the empire. Odessa Jews behaved and felt themselves to be different from Jews in other parts of Russia, finding their own roads to modernity, which were not always legal.

SUMMARY:
Ilya Gerasimov discusses implications of the project of building "a liberal empire" in Russia, which was recently introduced into the public debate by Anatoly Chubais, a liberal politician and CEO of the Russian state electric company "United Energy Systems". This vision of a new (liberal) empire by Chubais deliberately ignores complex historical and ideological connotations of this term, particularly in the Russian context. Another peculiar trait of this latest edition of Russian ideology of imperialism consists in virtually ignoring the internal dimension of empire as a system of domestic policies, administrative structures, cultural and ethnoconfessional arrangements, and so on. The initial stage of public discussion of the project of "liberal empire" shows an alarmingly low level of expertise provided by historians and political scientists, specifically invited to comment on the Chubais' program. The essay is based on the typescript of a recent TV show aired by the First Channel under the title "Empire for the People".