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The Slynx 41 2.1 ACTA UNIVERSITATIS STOCKHOLMIENSIS Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature 43 Phantoms of a Future Past A Study of Contemporary Russian Anti-Utopian Novels Mattias Ågren ©Mattias Ågren and Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis 2014 Front cover photography: Jack Mikrut, Sochi 2014 Opening Ceremony Courtesy of the Swedish Olympic Committee. ISSN 0346-8496 (Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature) ISBN printed version 978-91-981947-3-9 ISBN electronic version 978-91-981947-2-2 Printed in Sweden by US-AB, Stockholm 2014 Distributor: Stockholm University Library Contents Acknowledgments vii A Note on Transliteration and Translation ix 1. AT THE CROSSROADS OF HISTORY 1 1.1. The Aim of the Thesis 3 1.2. Utopia and Anti-utopia 7 1.3. The Importance of Generic Tradition 8 1.4. Reaction against Utopia: A Confusion of Terminology 11 1.5. Is Utopia Really Dead? 14 1.6. Towards ‘Specialized’ Utopias 17 1.7. Multiple Metanarratives 21 1.8. The Poetics of the Anti-utopian Novel 25 1.8.1. Temporal and Spatial Displacements 26 1.8.2. Metanarratives Manifested through Rituals 31 1.8.3. Between Complicity and Freedom – The Protagonist 34 1.8.4. A Dialogue with Metanarratives 36 2. ANTIUTOPIA ON THE THRESHOLD: TATYANA TOLSTAYA’S THE SLYNX 41 2.1. The Deconstruction of a City-State 47 2.2. Time as a Vicious Circle 53 2.3. The Hero as a Fool 56 2.4. Newspeak or Oldspeak 58 2.5. The Absence of Utopia 59 3. THE RISE OF COMMERCIAL METANARRATIVES: VIKTOR PELEVIN’S GENERATION ‘P’ 67 3.1. The Chronotope of the Computer Game – Digital Displacement 74 3.2. The Protagonist as a Computer Game Character 80 3.3. Advertising as Propaganda – A Confusion of Tongues 83 4. IN SEARCH OF A LOST SPIRITUAL PARADISE: VLADIMIR SOROKIN’S ICE TRILOGY 95 4.1 An Ontological Displacement 99 4.2. The Mythological Ice – A Utopia 100 4.3. The Fallibility of Planet Earth: A Global Space 105 4.4. Shifting Perspectives: Protagonists on Either Side of the Border 110 4.5. The Mythological Utopia as Temptation – and the Anti-utopian Turn 112 5. MUTATIONS OF UTOPIA: THE RECENT DEVELOPMENT OF ANTI-UTOPIAN NOVELS 119 5.1. A New Temporal and Spatial Displacement 125 5.2. The Clash of Metanarratives: Dmitry Bykov’s ZhD as Dialogue 129 5.2.1. Russian History as a Three-piece Box 132 5.3. Olga Slavnikova’s 2017 – Metanarrative as Undercurrent 138 5.4. Viktor Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F – Discourses as ‘Утøпiя’ 146 CONCLUSION: ANTI-UTOPIA CHASING UTOPIA 149 Bibliography 155 Index of Names 163 Sammanfattning 167 Acknowledgments Finally, this book is finished. Many people have made it possible. First and foremost, I am greatly indebted to my supervisor Professor Anna Ljunggren for taking me on board, for showing unwavering support and patience dur- ing all these years, as well as for sharing her vast knowledge, brilliant eye for detail, and not least kindness and friendship. Thank you! I also owe a great deal to my second supervisor, Professor Per-Arne Bodin, for his critical readings, encouragement and inspiration, for sharing so much of the knowledge he wears so lightly, and for constantly reminding me of the wide range of subjects worthy of attention and study. This book has been made possible by the generous funding received from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and the Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation. For this I am deeply grateful. My thanks are also due to the Bir- ger Calleman Foundation, the P A Siljeström Foundation, the John Söder- berg Foundation and the Vera Sager Foundation. A grant from the Swedish Institute enabled me to visit the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State Uni- versity. I would like to express my gratitude to all my friends and colleagues at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stockholm University for our inclusive and creative atmosphere. Over the years, I have appreciated the support and valuable comments on my work of Peter Alberg Jensen, Leonard Neuger, Kazimiera Ingdahl, Maria Zadencka, Alexander Pereswetoff- Morath, Elisabeth Löfstrand, Karin Grelz, Tora Hedin, Natalia Ringblom, Natalia Galatsky, Kerstin Olofsson, and Ludmila Pöppel. A special word of gratitude goes to Gunnela Mogensen for her inspiration and humour, and for making gloomy days feel a little brighter. I thank all my fellow doctoral students who have participated in seminars and discussions, and given valuable comments and critique. In particular, my thanks go to Tora Lane and Fabian Linde, my fellow travellers in the troika which the three of us constituted from the very beginning of our doctoral vii studies. You are true friends, and I consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to share this experience with you. In Moscow, my sincerest thanks go to Boris Lanin, Georgy Satarov, Niko- lay Bogomolov, Galina Ponomareva, and Alexandra Polivanova for their inspiration, support and kindness, and for making me feel at home in such a big city. I likewise wish to thank Hélène Mélat and Julie Hansen for their insightful readings, necessary critique, and helpful comments during the later stages of preparing the manuscript. Special thanks go to Ursula Phillips for her excellent effort in editing the final draft of the text and correcting my worst mistreatments of the English language. Larisa Korobenko checked all quotations in Russian while Aleksei Semenenko has done a fantastic job in turning a Word-document into a book. My studies in Russian began in Umeå, and I am certain I would not have reached this far had it not been for the faith that Vera Lidén and Stella Se- vander put in me from the very beginning. I simply cannot thank you enough. I am also deeply grateful to Per Ambrosiani and Inga Nyman for their hospitality and friendship, and to Frans Lundgren, Mathias Barder, Mattias Hansson, and Maria Dahlin simply for being such wonderful and long- standing friends. Finally, I want to thank my father, Bo, for pushing me to make my pur- poses clear, but especially I want to thank my mother, Annette, for all her support in my loving pursuit of the Russian language and its culture. Stockholm, October 2014 viii A Note on Transliteration and Translation When transliterating quotations, Russian book titles, and bibliographical references in the footnotes, I have made use of the Library of Congress trans- literation system for Russian with some minor revisions. Personal and place names, however, are referred to in accordance with the conventional English spelling of Russian names, i.e. as they would normally appear on maps, in newspapers, and published translations of novels, for instance: Andrey Pla- tonov, but Andrei Bely. Translations are mine unless otherwise stated. On the first occurrence, the title of a novel will be given in Russian, and in cases where a published trans- lation in English already exists, the English title will be given in brackets. In other cases, my own translations of titles appear in square brackets. Subse- quent references to the novels in the text are according to their English titles. The only exceptions are Viktor Pelevin’s Generation ‘P’ and Dmitry Bykov’s ZhD, which will be referred to consistently by their Russian titles. All quota- tions, however, will refer to the Russian editions. ix 1. At the Crossroads of History Anybody who wishes to control a society first controls the narrative of the society. Salman Rushdie1 On New Year’s Eve 1999, towards the very end of the century, the President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin announced his premature resignation from office. He apologized for not having lived up to the expectations of the people, and for having been naïve in thinking it possible to achieve progress through shock therapy. On that same day he also announced the appoint- ment of the then-prime minister Vladimir Putin as acting president, who then set out to articulate his vision of the future of the country. At the beginning of the 1990s, once the Soviet monolith had been disman- tled, hopes ran high, the future was open, but the present was uncertain and it was moving fast. As a consequence, attempts to forecast and shape the future of the country engaged Western, as well as Russian experts. Various groups of politicians, sociologists, political scientists, and journalists were founded, sometimes with a formal character with statutes and membership, in order to understand the wheels that had been set in motion, and to influ- ence the choice of direction of future policies.2 The time immediately before and after 1991 was a turning point in Rus- sian history marked by conflicting narratives about the past, present, and future. This conflict lay at the foundation of a polarity in late Soviet culture between, on the one hand, official culture, i.e. the officially recognized – and permitted – art, the purpose of which was to promote, or at least not contra- 1 Quoted from a seminar held in Stockholm with Salman Rushdie and Roberto Saviano, broadcast by Swedish national television (SVT) on 26 November 2008. 2 Based on my conversations with Georgy Satarov, himself one of the original members of one such group called ‘Club-93’, a leading Russian expert on corruption, and during the 1990s advisor to President Boris Yeltsin. 1 dict, the ideological tenets of the state and the Communist party, and, on the other hand, banned works – particularly literary ones, which were neverthe- less present, either in Western (tamizdat) publications smuggled into the Soviet Union, or in samizdat editions manually copied on typewriters and disseminated from hand to hand. Illegal literature comprised, despite the risks involved in possessing it, an alternative point of view, or even an alter- native truth that contested the official one promulgated by the state.3 One important result of the perestroika years, and the new openness of glasnost, was the abolishment of literary censorship.
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