Fictionalism and Routine: Tropes of Alienated Violence in A. Salnikov’s «The Department»

Abstract

The article analyzes the mechanisms of alienation and normalization of violence in Alexey Salnikov’s novel The Department (Отдел), which exists in two versions — the magazine version (2015) and the book version (2018). The focus is on the bureaucratization and cinematic code in the perception of cruelty.

In contemporary media discourses, violence increasingly takes on the form of everyday normality, which calls for a rethinking of its artistic representations. Salnikov’s The Department combines bureaucratic and cinematic codes, demonstrating the mechanisms of alienation and routinization of cruelty.

The aim of the article is to determine how these mechanisms are realized in the text through bureaucratic procedurality, the trivialization of everyday details, and the fictionalization of events.

The analysis explores how the representation of killings in reports diminishes their emotional significance, turning violence into a routine process. This aspect is examined in the context of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil and Slavoj Žižek’s notion of systemic violence. The main characters lose their capacity for reflection, while the language of bureaucracy, mythologization, and alienated cataloguing of reality serves to justify crimes.

Another important mechanism of alienation is the use of cinematic clichés. The protagonist perceives what happens through film stereotypes, and the department where he works becomes receptively similar to a cinema hall or film set. Operation Hollywood, ekphrastic references to cinema, and the narrativization of events through familiar scenarios create the effect of fictionality of what is happening, echoing Žižek’s ideas on the perception of violence in mass culture and Susan Sontag’s reflections on visual distancing.

A comparison of the versions shows that in the magazine version, the fight against aliens introduces a different interpretative focus on violence. In the book version, this element is removed, shifting the emphasis to power, control, and the individual’s voluntary participation in an absurd system.

Thus, the novel demonstrates how bureaucracy and pop culture can be used to transform violence into an everyday norm and evil into a social convention.