In Vodka, Fucking, and Television Maksym Kurocbkin sketches - iSites

In Vodka, Fucking, and Television Maksym Kurocbkin
sketches the rather scabrous portrait of a sarcastic, selfeffacing,
offensive, painfully sensitive and intensely
proud writer whose "tife and work," to use a standard phrase,
have run smack into a brick wait. But this Hero, as Kurochkin
sardonicatly designates him, is no mere elitist scribbler
betlyaching about his latest bout with writer's block.
A cowering stave to his addictions and a willing victim of
the modern world's most rampant and debilitating distractions,
he also bears a distinct resemblance to Everyman.
One can't help but think that while Kurochkin was working
on this play his memory rang with at least the vague echoes
of one of the seminal novels in Russian literature. Mikhail
Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. That would have been in a
post-modern sort of way, of course. It is the shared moniker
alone that clicks, not anything to do with plot, themes, or
characterizations, but that is sufficient. It makes the connection
and delivers a message that hits home. Kurochkin's
Hero is unmistakably a child of his era.
Numerous playwrights in the 2000s have staked their
claim to having defmed Russia's hero-of-the-moment. Vasily
Sigarev, whose work is enjoying great success in Europe
and has been staged several times in the United States, is
the author of gritty, stylistically traditional exposes of un-
couth, undereducated, and hyperactive social pariahs. 'I'he
Presnyakov brothers, Oleg and Vladimir, have gained a
strong international reputation with slick, stashing plays that
reconfigure basic Russian mythicat types, often in the tight
of Western inftuences. Yury Klavdiev, a relative newcomer
whose reputation is just becoming known beyond Russian
borders, examines votatite loners and outsiders who precariously,
though nimbty, maneuver on tight wires stretched between
the poles of violence and tenderness. Ivan Vyrypaev,
working in a structurally inventive form that is monologic
in spirit if not in actual form, observes intelligent, if sometimes
deviant, characters who eagerly engage in the timehonored
Russian pastime of fevered introspection. Female
voices have not been as prominent as in the 1990s, although
Yelena Isayeva, Natalya Vorozhbit, and Otga Mukhina have
put forth heroes and heroines fit for their times.
Kurochkin, tike the characters who inhabit his more than
20 ptays, is harder to define than most of his peers. Geography
may have played a role in this. He was born and raised
in Kiev, Ukraine, historicatly one of the great Eastern-European
crossroads. The Russian tanguage dominated the linguistic
landscape, as it had for hundreds of years in Ukraine,
John Ereedman is a contributing editor for TheatrePorum.
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helping to ensure Kurocbkin would write in Russian. But
aside from tbe obviously prominent native Ukrainian speecb,
Kurocbkin also occasionally heard, or at least saw, evidence of
the familiar but opaque cbatter of Polish and Belarusian. For
tbe record, Kurocbkin flatly denies possessing any exceptional
linguistic powers. "My mixing of languages [in some plays]
reveals a complex I have," he wrote to me in an email with
typically merciless self-deprecation. "This is a real sore spot.
The fact of tbe matter is I do not bave a good ear. I am very
bad at capturing linguistic peculiarities" (27 October 2007).
As he sees it, he was handicapped
in comparison to
his parents and friends
who knew Polish well. As
for Beiarusian, he notes
ironically that bis first significant
contact with that
language occurred during
perestroika when, in the
Beiarusian satirical journal
Vozhik (Hedgehog),
be encountered the only
caricature he had ever seen
of Joseph Stalin (24 October
2007). Be tbat as it
may, a broad cultural diversity
simmered beneatb
the surface of life in Kiev
even as the Russian tongue
claimed supremacy over ail
things cultural.
Emissaries of Western
societies also pressed in
upon Kurochkin's sensibilities,
primarily by way
of cinema and television.
Born in 1970, he was a
member of the last generation
to mature in the crumbling
Soviet empire. This
was a time when technology
unleashed an unprecedented
and unrelenting
deluge of information,
knowledge, propaganda,
and downright gibberish on a society tbat previously had been
relatively controlled and comparatively closed. This sent an
entire region's cultural barometer into paroxysms. For matiy
in the lands east of Europe, the usual fiow of time was interrupted,
although each person had his or her own reason for
thinking so. Some saw these events as the end of the world,
the loss of an entire social structure by whicb they deftned
their very being. Others interpreted these developments as tbe
fruition of their dreams, the culmination of historical inevitability
and an opportunity to begin creating civilization anew.
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Tbe result is that the greater Slavic world experienced a nearly
catastropbic warp in time, the past seeming to vanisb altogether
wbile the future rusbed in to overwbelm the present.
To borrow a phrase he coined in 2004, in an article composed
while in residence at Iowa University's Internationa! Writing
Program, Kurochkin is botb a product and an explorer of
"society's informational obesity" ("The Second Speed"). When
Kurocbkin entered Kiev University in the early 1990s, he
actually symbolized the paradoxes of his age by his choice of
study. Applying the advaticed principles of astroarchaeology,
he conducted research in
the field of pre-Christian
Slavic monuments.
Kurochkin, it seems
me, is an ideal writer
for the global age.
Amidst confiicting voices
he hears a common message.
Across vast breaches
of time he espies
timeless customs and
rituals. Among differing
cultural traditions he discertis
shared values. In a
play like Kitchen (2000),
I find sitnilarities with
Tony Kusbner's Angels in
America—noi because of
tbe topic but because of
the works' scope and the
authors' desire to map
out cardiograms for tbeir
respective nations. Tbe
masterful, sweeping, and
utterly untranslatable
Kitchen conjoined characters
from the ancient
Nibelung myth witb
modern Russians, wbile
wrestling with one of ibe
most painful subjects
ot our time-—to avenge
or not to avenge the
sins of tbe past. Being a
poet, Kurocbkin left the
answers to tbe spectators, inspiring tbem as tnucb as baffling
tbe critics. Kitchen is typical of Kurochkin's drama in
its obliteration of conventional unities. His Stalowa Wola
(1998), or Steel Will, mixed the Polisb Middle Ages with the
Space Age and used both Russian and Polish languages. His
Fighter Class "Medea" (1994)—like Vodka, Fucking, and Television,
translated into Englisb by John Hanlon—observed
an outlandisb, futuristic war of the sexes being fougbt on
the edge of the last city standing, by Ukrainian, Russian, and
American soldiers speaking a stew of languages.

These plays, however, reflect only one aspect of Kurochkin's
tatent. I know of no other Russian-tanguage ptaywright
who strives so to reinvent his art with each new play he
writes. Eottowing the enormous success of Kitchen, Kurochkin
delivered the ambitious Imago (2002), a radical reinterpretation
of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. This piece
mounted a peculiar defense of everything unsophisticated
in the eternal battle between the unwashed and the respectable.
Simultaneousty, he unveited In the Retina (2002), the
intimate dramatization of a strange story by the Ukrainianborn,
Russian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky about a
man disappearing into his tover's eye to encounter everyone
she has loved before him. Vastly different in style and
scope not only from Kitchen but from each other, these ptays
shared only Kurochtcin's seemingly endtess flair for the eccentric
and the paradoxical. None prepared us entirely for
Repress and Excite (2006), an acerbic take on culture and
human retations in the twenty-first century whose form is
a kind of parody of a boutevard metodrama. Repress and
Excite is being prepared for future publication in Theatre-
Forum.
Vodka, Fucking, and Television (written 2003, staged
2006) is a smatl ptay with big pretensions. It is a Janus-faced
piece that can be read as a personal confession or a portrait
of a generation. When the Hero proclaims he must prove
to himself he "can speak the truth," this is a clear-cut and
identifiable challenge for an individual, a society, and, perhaps,
a whole planet overrun—in Kurochkin's memorable
phrase—by "plush disposable heiresses." This play is a kind
of suicide note, a declaration that life cannot go on as it has
been. [Photo 2] Accordingly, the Hero calls in his friends.
Vodka, Fucking, and Television, and gives them the news:
one of them will have to go.
The lies are everywhere and no one denies it.
"Television is a magical window onto the natural world,
a source of knowledge, a reliable friend in times of sadness
and depression," gushes Television with no shame whatsoever.
[Photo 1]
"What a crock of shit," responds the Hero, probably muttering
with loathing.
Like most of his contemporaries, the Hero is contemptuous
of those who came of age in the 1960s. "The Sixties
generation," as that demographical group is known in Russia,
is famed for its idealism and its failure to stop the nation
from sliding into the devastating stagnation of the Brezhnev
era. Kurochkin's irony here is as sharp as ever; not only does
the Hero admit that he worships the great Sixties generation
writers Alexander Volodin and Alexander Vampilov, but
one has to wonder just how well the Hero's own generation
is coping with the Putin era. Few will ever accuse it of being
idealistic.
"We are nobodies, we're nothing—we work in advertising
and magazines," the Hero declares before wending his
way around to one of those marvelously paradoxical observations
that Kurochkin's characters are so apt to make or
embody. "We're already nothing, we never existed," the Hero
asserts. "But we will."
If such a claim poses more questions than it answers,
that, too, sounds very much like Kurochkin.
SOURCES
Kurochkin, Maksym. Emails to the author. 24 and 27 October
2007.
Kurochkin, Maxim [sic]. "The Second Speed." University
of Iowa, n.d. www.uiowa.edu/~iwp/EVEN/docu-
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