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Retro-Future In Post-Soviet Dystopia, Sergey Toymentsev
Retro-Future In Post-Soviet Dystopia, Sergey Toymentsev
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article “Retro-Future in Post-Soviet Dystopia” Sergey Toymentsev explores the vision of retrospective future in such Russian novels as Tatiana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, and Dmitry Bykov’s Zhd. Unlike Zamyatin’s and Platonov’s anti-Soviet satires, post-Soviet dystopias do not respond to any utopian narrative, but project the historical and ideological reality of Russia’s violent (predominantly Soviet) past into the future. Such a traumatic reenactment of the Soviet past in the dystopian future testifies to the rise of authoritarianism in contemporary Russia as well as its incomplete collective memory …
Recollecting Wondrous Moments: Father Pushkin, Mother Russia, And Intertextual Memory In Tatyana Tolstaya's "Night" And "Limpopo", Karen R. Smith
Recollecting Wondrous Moments: Father Pushkin, Mother Russia, And Intertextual Memory In Tatyana Tolstaya's "Night" And "Limpopo", Karen R. Smith
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
With their references to Alexander Pushkin, Tolstaya's "Night" and "Limpopo" respond to the cultural crisis of 1980s Russia, where literary language, bent for so long into the service of totalitarianism, suffers the scars of amnesia. Recycling Pushkin's tropes, particularly his images of feminine inspiration derived from the cultural archetype of Mother Russia, Tolstaya's stories appear nostalgically to rescue Russia's literary memory, but they also accentuate the crisis of the present, the gap between the apparel of literary language and that which it purports to clothe. "Night," an ironic reworking of Pushkin's "Queen of Spades," dismantles the nostalgic imagery of his …
Practicing Nostalgia: Time And Memory In Nabokov's Early Russian Fiction , Philip Sicker
Practicing Nostalgia: Time And Memory In Nabokov's Early Russian Fiction , Philip Sicker
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Nabokov's earliest Russian fiction reveals his lifelong preoccupation with time and his complex strategies for preserving heightened moments of experience. Dissatisfied with the brevity of involuntary (Proustian) recall, his émigré protagonists strive to inhabit their Russian past more fully through a painstaking process of aesthetic re-creation. Beginning with a handful of vivid recollections, the hero of Mary gradually fabricates a past that is more intensely real than the original. Nabokov's most mature characters, however, recognize the solipsistic danger and utility of living in a vanished mental paradise. Turning to the present, they find unexpected beauty in the arrangement of ordinary …