Golden Ages are generally a retrospective phenomenon. The Golden Age of science fiction, for example, is usually located in the 1930s or 1940s, although Peter Graham identified it simply as “12.” But the Golden Age of paranoia is something else entirely: it is almost always now. Certainly that was the case during the Cold War, and again in the 1990s, with the X-Files/Dan Brown Axis of Intrigue dominating the global entertainment industry. Our current age of “fake news,” allegations of Russian hacking, and science denial renders these previous decades quaint.
In her thorough and intelligent book Russkii paranoidal΄nyi roman (The Russian Paranoid Novel), Irina Skonechnaia wisely sets aside all purported golden ages in favor of Russia's Silver Age (1880s–1920), which in her hands proves to be Russia's true golden age of paranoia. The Silver Age coincides with the rise of psychoanalytic thought (and therefore Freud's 1911 study of his favorite paranoid not-quite-patient, Judge Daniel Schreiber), a fact that Skonechnaia exploits admirably in her discussion “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).” Here, as throughout the book, Skonechnaia strikes a delicate balance between the historical (that is, how paranoia was being constructed at the time) and the theoretical (while Freud may have had the first word on paranoia, he definitely did not have the last).
Skonechnaia's choice of the Silver Age (rounded out by a Nabokovian coda) is not merely a matter of historical coincidence. By focusing on the works of Fedor Sologub and Andrei Belyi, Skonechnaia shows that the metaphysics of the Symbolist-dominated Silver Age, with its focus on correspondences between the high and the low as well as its emphasis on the hidden or deferred, provides a comfortable home not just for the unheimlich, but for a full-blown paranoid worldview. Describing Symbolism as a “return to the mystical against the backdrop of the reigning rationalism and positivism,” Skonechnaia argues that the persecution complex found so often in her chosen texts is “persecution by vanished forms of cognition that are trying to form the extrasensory (сверхчувественное) … and connect it to the everyday.”
Reinterpreting Symbolism as paranoid allows the author to revisit the movement's genealogy. Vladimir Solov΄ev's influence has long been a given, but Skonechnaia points out that the philosopher's eschatology, in addition to its obvious manifestations in the verse of Aleksandr Blok and Belyi, “develops into the conspiratorial plots of [Symbolist] paranoid novels.” From there, her focus on the “decadence” of the early Sologub allows her to identify “suspicion” as the “first stage of Decadent cognition.”
It should come as no surprise that Sologub's Petty Demon plays a large role in this book; Skonechnaia's analysis of this text offers few surprises on its own, but does help her make her larger argument about Symbolist paranoia. The other major Silver Age novel to which Skonechnaia devotes a chapter is, of course, Belyi's Petersburg, which relies on plot lines familiar from conspiratorial thrillers to produce a world in which paranoia seems relatively justified. Instead of a conclusion (or even the traditional Russian “In Place of a Conclusion”), Skonechnaia ends with an extended discussion of Nabokov's Russian novels, particularly The Eye, The Defense, Despair, and Invitation to a Beheading. Here Skonechnaya finds Nabokov in dialogue with Belyi and Sologub.
The Russian Paranoid Novel points scholars of conspiracy towards the rich texts of the Silver Age, while reframing Silver Age narratives in terms of the conspiratorial. Given the hermeneutics of suspicion that characterize our current climate, a study of hundred-year-old literary texts could not be more timely.
