THE ORIGINALITY OF MODERN RUSSIAN ANTI-UTOPIA (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE WORKS OF T. TOLSTOY AND A. GROMOV)

Аннотация

This talk investigates the rhetorical and mythopoetic techniques deployed by ultranationalist journalist Aleksandr Prokhanov to transform geographical “space” into claims for Russianoccupied “place.” Prokhanov’s project is designed to support Putin’s drive for the incremental re-annexation of border areas with significant Russian population to the south and west of the Russian Federation. Documentation and discussion will include Prokhanov’s three main political projects: as chairperson of the Izborsk Club, Prokhanov’s physical building of “sacred mounds” in border areas and his rhetoric attached to these projects; the editorial bully pulpit in Prokhanov’s rightist newspaper, Zavtra, that support redrawing and expanding the existing western borders of the Russian Federation; Prokhanov’s ultranationalist novels, such as Gospodin Geksogen (2002) and Krym (2014) that script a reinvigorated Russian national identity. Although his writings have little to do with science fiction or even utopia per se—but seen in terms of speculative right- wing place-making rhetoric—Prokhanov’s pathos, vocabulary, and geographical imagination fit well with the themes and keywords of the 2017 Uppsala conference on “‘Russian World’ and Other Imaginary Places: (Geo) Political Themes in Post-Soviet Science Fiction and Utopias.” To start with, his writing embodies one prominent form of the contemporary Russian rightist political imagination. Many of his themes pair well with conference themes: of overcoming the trauma of territorial loss, creating an alternative historical narrative of re-membering imperial greatness; combining Russian Orthodoxy and the pagan occult to create new rituals of nationhood; and invoking the Ukrainian crisis (2014 - ) to build new fictions of Russian greatness. KEYWORDS: Author, novel, times, literature. “THE ORIGINALITY OF MODERN RUSSIAN ANTI-UTOPIA (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE WORKS OF T. TOLSTOY AND A. GROMOV)” P age 315 | 3 INTRODUCTION in the structure of the artistic text. In a more contemporary critical parlance, the term Edith W. Clowes holds the Brown-Forman “geopoetics” is applicable here— in W. J. T. Chair in the Humanities and teaches Russian Mitchell’s words, “the question of landscape, language, literature, and culture and Czech the poetics and iconology of space and place, literature in the Department of Slavic and all their relations to social and political life, Languages and Literatures at the University of to experience, to history.” As Mitchell’s Virginia (Charlottesville, USA). Her primary formulation explicitly articulates it, and as can research and teaching interests span the be seen in Bakhtin, and more implicitly in the interactions between literature, philosophy, Moscow-Tartu writings, poetic and political religion, and utopian thought (Russian meanings of space and time are linked. My Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after objective, accordingly, is twofold: to open up a Utopia, 1993). Author or editor of 12 books, new interpretative channel by examining multi-authored books, and forums, Professor spatial-temporal parameters of ZhD; and, via Clowes most recently edited a special number the former, to contribute to the polemics of the journal Region, titled “Centrifugal surrounding ZhD’s political and historiographic Forces? Russia’s Regional Identities and vision. I will address the following issues: a) Initiatives” (5:2 (2016)), following a Bykov’s symbolic geography—the capital, the conference on that topic held at the University periphery, the heartland, and assorted real of Virginia in 2015. A multi-authored book, and fantastic locales; b) non-Euclidian spaces Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, and warped timelines c) the chronotope of the Place, Identity appeared with Northern Illinois road; d) the motifs of the railroad and the University Press in 2016. Professor Clowes’s train; and e) traits of space- time and recently published books include an movement as they pertain to the problem of interdisciplinary study on post-Soviet Russian (un)freedom. As I will argue, of strategic identity, Russia on the Edge: Imagined importance to ZhD’s spatial-temporal poetics Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity (Cornell, and, by extension, the novel at large is the 2011) and a discursive history of Russian problematic of personal and collective philosophy, Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian freedom and lack of it. Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy (Cornell, 2004). Professor Clowes is Various modern writers use the an associate editor of Russian Review and utopian/dystopian genre as a channel to serves on a number of other editorial boards express their visions and scenarios of the (Losevskie chteniia; Region; and Heidelberger future that cannot be expressed in any other Beiträge zur Slavistischen Philologie. way. I define a utopia in terms of a new state Specifically, I would like to concentrate on structure, whereas anti-utopia concentrates ZhD’s deployment of space and t