Table Of ContentTh e Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia
i
Th e Post-Soviet Politics
of Utopia
Language, Fiction and Fantasy in
Modern Russia
Edited by Mikhail Suslov and Per-Arne Bodin
iii
I.B. TAURIS
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iv
Contents
List of Figures vii
List of Contributors viii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction Mikhail Suslov and Per-Arne Bodin 1
Part One History
1 Alternative Russian Revolution: Viacheslav Rybakov and Kir
Bulychev Go Koshino 23
2 Ressentiment and Post- traumatic Syndrome in Russian
Post-Soviet Speculative Fiction: Two Trends M aria Galina 39
3 Telluro-Cosmic Imperial Utopia and Contemporary Russian
Art Maria Engstr ö m 61
4 Lazarus on the Ark: Heterotopias in the Novels of Vladimir
Sharov and Evgenii Vodolazkin Muireann Maguire 81
Part Two Ideology
5 Conservative Science Fiction in Contemporary Russian
Literature and Politics Mikhail Suslov 105
6 Othering Russia: Eduard Limonov’s Retrofuturistic (Anti-)
Utopia Andrei Rogatchevski 129
7 Religio- political Utopia by Iana Zavatskaia Anastasia
Mitrofanova 155
8 ‘Respectable Xenophobia’: Science Fiction, Utopia and
Conspiracy V ictor Shnirelman 175
Part Th ree Language
9 Church Slavonic in Russian Dystopias and Utopias
Per-Arne Bodin 203
v
vi Contents
10 Contested Utopias: Language Ideologies in Valerii Votrin’s
Logoped Ingunn Lunde 219
11 ‘Londongrad’ as a Linguistic Imaginary: Russophone Migrants
in the UK in the Work of Michael Idov and Andrei Ostalsky
Lara Ryazanova-Clarke 235
Part Four Territory
12 Provinces, Piety and Promotional Putinism: Mapping Aleksandr
Prokhanov’s Counter-Utopian Russia E dith W. Clowes 261
13 Parameters of Space-Time and Degrees of (Un)Freedom:
Dmitry Bykov’s Z hD Sofya Khagi 281
14 Th e New ‘Norma’: Vladimir Sorokin’s T elluria and Post-Utopian
Science Fiction M ark Lipovetsky 301
Aft erword: Back to the Future, Forward to the Past?
Explorations in Russian Science Fiction and
Fantasy Kå re Johan Mj ø r and Sanna Turoma 315
Selected Bibliography 331
Index 345
Figures
3.1 Anton Chumak, N ew Earth , 2015. 73
3.2 Th e Plumbum-Cobalt Society. Still from video installation
Th e Hunting Fragment: Th e Russian Stereo , 2016. 74
12.1 Th e Pskov ‘sacred hill’. 267
13.1 Th e Trumpeting Angel of Chernobyl. 286
vii
Contributors
Per-Arne Bodin is Professor Emeritus of Russian and Polish Literature at
Stockholm University. He is also a Doctor Honoris Causa in theology at
Uppsala University. His research interests include Russian and Polish
literature, Orthodox religion, Church and culture.
Edith W. Clowes holds the Brown-Forman Chair in the Humanities
and teaches Russian language, literature and culture and Czech literature in
the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of
Virginia (Charlottesville). Her primary research and teaching interests
span the interactions between literature, philosophy, religion and utopian
thought
Maria Engström is Associate Professor of Russian, School of Humanities
and Media Studies at Dalarna University, Sweden. Her research focus is on
the post-Soviet right- wing intellectual milieu, the role of the Orthodox
Church in Russian politics, contemporary Russian Utopian imagination, and
Imperial aesthetics in post-Soviet literature and art.
Maria Galina is the author of several fi ction books and also of two collections
of articles – S cience Fiction from the Biologist Point of View (2008) and Not
Only About Science Fiction (2013) – dedicated to SF and its history.
Sofya Khagi is Associate Professor of Russian Literature in the Department
of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She
has published on nineteenth- and twentieth- century Russian poetry, post-
Soviet literature, science fi ction and contemporary Baltic literatures and
cultures.
Go Koshino is an associate professor in the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center,
Hokkaido University in Japan. He is engaged in a joint research project on
comparative study of socialist ‘red’ cultures in countries of the former Soviet
Union, China and Vietnam. He is also working on other topics: Russian SF,
the image of illness in nineteenth- century Russia, the memory of the
Napoleonic War, and Belarusian literature.
Mark Lipovetsky is Professor and Chair of the Department of Germanic and
Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the
author of eight books and more than a hundred articles published in the US,
Russia and Europe.
viii
Contributors ix
Ingunn Lunde is Professor of Russian at the University of Bergen and
Professor II of Russian Literature and Culture at the University of Troms ø .
Her research interests include Russian sociolinguistics, Slavic medieval
culture and Russian literature of the nineteenth to twenty- fi rst centuries.
Muireann Maguire lectures in Russian at the University of Exeter. She is
currently working on H ideous Agonies , a study of childbirth as a theme in
Russian and Western literature. Other research interests include nineteenth-
century Russian literature, particularly Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; science
fi ction; and Gothic literature.
Anastasia Mitrofanova is Chair of Political Science, Church-State Relations
and the Sociology of Religion at the Russian Orthodox University as well
as Professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU) and
a fellow of the AURORA consortium. Her research interests include the
infl uence of Orthodox Christianity on world politics, nationalism in today’s
Russia and government- initiated nation- building projects in Belorussia and
Moldova.
K å re John Mjør is a research librarian at the Western Norway University of
Applied Sciences and a lecturer in Russian at the University of Bergen. He has
published on Russian intellectual history, Russian imperial history and
contemporary ideologies. He is currently working on an edited volume on
the civilizational discourse in contemporary Russian intellectual and cultural
production.
Andrei Rogatchevski is currently Professor of Russian Literature and
Culture at UiT Th e Arctic University of Norway (Norway). He is an
experienced scholar whose fi elds of research include Russian literature, fi lms
and culture. In addition, he studies Czech culture, the cultural background of
Russian immigrants in the United Kingdom and extreme right- wing
extremism in post-Soviet Russia.
Lara Ryazanova-Clarke is Head of Russian and Director of the Princess
Dashkova Russian Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh. She is a
series editor of the ‘Russian Language and Society’ book series at Edinburgh
University Press. Her research focuses on Russian sociolinguistics and
discourse studies.
Victor Shnirelman is a senior researcher of the N. N. Miklukho-Maklai
Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences
and an author of over 300 works, including more than twenty monographs
on archaeology. Shnirelman’s main fi elds include the ideologies of nationalism
in Russia and the CIS, ethnocentrism and irredentism.
