Charming Masks of Evil. The “ Oligarch” between Aestheticization and Demonization (towards a Literary History of the Character)

If, following Max Weber (1917), we describe our reality of modernized, bu- reaucratic and secularized society as disenchanted (in German: entzaubert), then a number of literary genres, ranging from magical realism to fantasy, aim at playful, literary re-enchantment of the world and therefore represent a strong anti-modernist gesture in the midst of contemporary culture. While pointing to “natural” restrictions of the objective, rational perception of the world and often questioning rationality as such, fantastic elements of literary texts normally aim at sharpening the reader’s awareness of the limitations of the customary approach towards reality, thus potentially enabling a new look at social, political and cul- tural problems of the “real” world. Therefore, both the fictions that realistically “describe” or “reflect” the world, and those texts that transfer social and political phenomena to the realms of the uncanny, the grotesque, and the (post)modern mythology, are of importance. The novels “Twelve Circles” (2003-04) and “Voroshilovgrad” (2010) obviously belong to the latter category. These texts are not stereotypical, naturalistic stories about the life of the post-Soviet elite; instead, they offer a postmodern anthology of types, motives, and plots, which, among other elements, also include the de- monic figures of the oligarchs. Despite their structural significance, these figures, however, are not real “characters” of the story, but appear in the form of phan- tasmagoric images, whose agency manifests itself only through the discourses of “money,” “power,” and “violence:” discourses the oligarchs control and use against the protagonists of the novels.