Abstract

This paper explores Tselina (The Virgin Lands, 1978), the third installment in the USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev’s infamous series of memoirs, as a work of literature and a historical document of the late 1970s. The book claims to contain Brezhnev’s autobiographic account of his mission as Second, and then First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan in 1954–1955 responsible for the Virgin Lands Campaign in the northern regions of the republic. By reading a sample of the text closely, I demonstrate that its alleged ghostwriter, the newspaper Pravda (“Truth”) agricultural correspondent Alexander Murzin, assembles Brezhnev’s narratorial voice from impersonal clichés of Soviet bureaucratic newspeak, which, as Alexei Yurchak’s socio-anthropological research from the early 2000s showcases, had by then lost its referential grounding in empirical reality and functioned as a form of quasi-aestheticized, performative public discourse dissociated from Soviet subjects’ private interests. I argue that Tselina is a paradigmatic sample of late Soviet non-fictional discourse, which, like today’s post-truth, alternative fact, and fake news practices, functions in the mode of fiction by disregarding Aristotle’s distinction between history and poetry. Like the poet and unlike the historian of the Poetics, producers and consumers of ideologically charged narratives deal with what could/should/must have happened according to the objective rules of reality, not with what exactly happened on its chance-driven surface. Indicating how Tselina is fundamentally at odds with both the empirical facts it supposedly renders and with its “author’s” physical image so familiar to his contemporaries from TV, I account for the book’s low tellability (in narrative theory, the parameter measuring the degree to which a story is worth telling and interesting to read/listen to) as resulting, initially, from its formulaic nature and, later, from the temporary disintegration of Soviet doublethink. I rely on the recently published historical scholarship on Brezhnev, the theory of fictionality, and experimental translation studies to trace how Murzin’s literary exercise in authorial ventriloquism falls into oblivion without ever being properly read.