Illness as Metaphor in Alexei Salnikov’s The Petrovs in the Flu and Around It

Abstract

This article explores the flu as an organizing motif and metaphor in Alexei Salnikov’s novel The Petrovs in the Flu and Around It, a recent best-seller and the 2017 laureate of the prestigious NOS(E) Award. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag argues that literature reads metaphorical meanings into diseases, and specific illnesses as metaphors dominate in particular eras. As the era of coronavirus reveals, the flu is often referred to in the public discourse as a trivial illness that does not require specific precautions or compassion. Contemporary Russian literature invoking the flu plays on its meaning as a common but potentially dangerous disease. In Liudmila Petrushevskaya’s short story ‘The Flu’, the illness is used to metaphorize the intermingling of the horrible and the mundane. In Salnikov’s The Petrovs, the flu has a similar function, revealing the loss of compassion and free will in the Putin era. The Petrovs in the Flu and Around It together with Salnikov’s other novel, The Department, speak about the social and cultural condition of the Putin era, characterized by moral compromises with evil and rooted in Soviet trauma.