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Per-Arne Bodin
Church Slavonic in Russian Dystopias and Utopias
In this paper I want to examine the function of the Orthodox Church’s liturgical language—
Church Slavonic—in Russian liberal dystopias and conservative utopias. In 2011 the Church
published the draft of a special program entitled “The Church Slavonic Language in the Life
of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Twenty-First Century” suggesting some changes to it
in the new millennium. It met with a firestorm of criticism and was withdrawn. Church
Slavonic has a special role in Russian culture mirrored in contemporary dystopias and
utopias. In the writings of the best-known Russian dystopians Church Slavonic functions as a
stylistic device or a motif as in Pelevin’s novel Empire V and in S.N.U.F. Vladimir Sorokin uses
extensive passages containing Church Slavonic. In the world described in Den’ Oprichnika
(Day of the Oprichnik) cursing and foreign words are forbidden, but Church Slavonic is freely
used. In his 2013 novel Telluria similarly inserts passages in Church Slavonic.
In all of these examples, Church Slavonic alludes to or is perhaps even directly
influenced by popular nineteenth-century seminary priest anecdotes. The comical effect
derives from the use of Church Slavonic to refer to modern or everyday phenomena for
which the language is actually entirely unsuited. The situation with the fans of empire is the
opposite. Here there are almost no examples of actual usage. Church Slavonic is instead
included in their grandiose plans for the language of the future as for example in the
writings of Aleksandr Dugin and Aleksandr Prokhanov.
For the Church, Church Slavonic is a foundation, a heavenly resource or a linguistic
prison; liberal writers treat it as a stylistic device for satirizing conservative or reactionary
trends in Russian society, while for conservative thinkers it represents a vague vision in a
distant future utopia and a striving for a new Slav orthodox unity. Perhaps it is even just an
empty concept that merely signals or expresses a desire to recreate the past and isolate the
Russia of the future or some sort of “linguistic stiob” used both by the liberals and the
conservatives in the same half humoristic, half serious way.
Per-Arne Bodin is professor of Slavic literatures at Stockholm University. His main research
interests are Russian poetry, Russian cultural history (especially the importance of the
Russian orthodox tradition) and Polish literature after the Second World War. His most
recent book are Language, Canonization and Holy Foolishness: Studies in Postsoviet Russian
Culture and the Orthodox Tradition, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm 2009 and
Från Bysans till Putin: Historier om Ryssland, Norma, Skellefteå 2016.
Edith W. Clowes
Provinces, Piety, and Promotional Putinism: Mapping Aleksandr Prokhanov’s Imagined
Russia
This talk investigates the rhetorical and mythopoetic techniques deployed by ultranationalist
journalist Aleksandr Prokhanov to transform geographical “space” into claims for Russian-
occupied “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.
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, USA). Her primary research and
teaching interests span the interactions between literature, philosophy, religion, and
utopian thought (Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia, 1993).
Author or editor of 12 books, multi-authored books, and forums, Professor Clowes most
recently edited a special number of the journal Region, titled “Centrifugal Forces? Russia’s
Regional Identities and Initiatives” (5:2 (2016)), following a conference on that topic held at
the University of Virginia in 2015. A multi-authored book, Area Studies in the Global Age:
Community, Place, Identity appeared with Northern Illinois University Press in 2016.
Professor Clowes’s recently published books include an interdisciplinary study on post-Soviet
Russian identity, Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity (Cornell,
2011) and a discursive history of Russian philosophy, Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary
Culture and the Question of Philosophy (Cornell, 2004). Professor Clowes is an associate
editor of Russian Review and serves on a number of other editorial boards (Losevskie
chteniia; Region; and Heidelberger Beiträge zur Slavistischen Philologie.
Maria Engström
Post-Humanism, Сosmos and Contemporary Russian Art
The paper surveys and analyses the development of the ”cosmic” theme in the
contemporary Russian visual culture, commencing with the famous ”Gagarin Party” in 1991
and onwards to the projects of Anton Vidokle and Arseny Zhilyaev devoted to Russian
cosmism from 2016. Specific attention is paid to the ideological component of the ”cosmos”-
metaphor for artists and musicians who belong to Timur Novikov’s circle (”New Artists”,
”New Composers”, ”New Academy”). Those were the first in early 1990s to attempt
appropriating the Soviet space discourse, connecting the Russian utopian impulse to the
new technologies and enhanced perceptions of the reality as well as visualising the ”new
Russian idea” in popular culture.
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.
Engström’s most recent publications include “Apollo against Black Square: Conservative
Futurism in Contemporary Russia”, “Daughterland [Rodina-Doch’]: Erotic patriotism and
Russia’s future”, ”Post-Secularity and Digital Anticlericalism on Runet”, “’Orthodoxy or
death!’: Political Orthodoxy in Russia”, “Contemporary Russian Messianism and New Russian
Foreign Policy”, “Forbidden Dandyism: Imperial Aesthetics in Contemporary Russia”. She co-
edited Digital Orthodoxy: Mediating Post-Secularity in Russia, a special issue of Digital Icons:
Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media (2015). Her current project
“Visuality without Visibility: Queer Visual Culture in Post-Soviet Russia” (2017-2020)
is supported by the Swedish Research Council.
Maria Galina
“Попаданчество” as a Reflection on the Post-traumatic Syndrome. Evolution of a Trend
Popadantsy/попаданцы – a division of trash literature describing the adventures of a
modern protagonist or a group of protagonists who by chance find themselves in some key
point of historical past or in a fantasy world. In the latter case we have escapist, relaxation
literature but more interesting for us is the first case. Minding that a protagonist tries to
revise the past for a better (i. e. more fit to collective mind expectations) future and that
the trend is popular only on the post-soviet (in fact “Russian world”) territory we may
conclude that the enormous popularity of the trend is connected with social tension and
frustration as a consequence of the USSR’s collapse. It may be worth mentioning that this
trend appeals to the reconstruct movement (role games that imitate historical events
especially military ones) and the input of this movement into the events of the past three
years cannot be underestimated.
Maria Galina, Moscow, Russia, Novy Mir Magazine, department of literature critique and
social studies, columnist, an author of several fiction books and also of the two collections of
articles "Science Fiction from the biologist point of view” (2008) and “Not only about
Science fiction” (2013) dedicated to SF and its history.
Sofya Khagi
Parameters of Space-Time and Degrees of (Un)Freedom”: Dmitry Bykov’s ZhD
Given that previous analyses of Dmitry Bykov’s magnum opus ZhD have largely focused on
the novel’s ideological superstructure, I would like to pay closer attention to its poetics.
Specifically, I would like to concentrate on ZhD’s deployment of space and time—what
Mikhail Bakhtin would call “the chronotope” (the intrinsic connectedness of artistically
expressed temporal and spatial relationships), and the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics
would refer to as spatial and temporal planes in the structure of the artistic text. In a more
contemporary critical parlance, the term “geopoetics” is applicable here— in W. J. T.
Mitchell’s words, “the question of landscape, the poetics and iconology of space and place,
and all their relations to social and political life, to experience, to history.” As Mitchell’s
formulation explicitly articulates it, and as can be seen in Bakhtin, and more implicitly in the
Moscow-Tartu writings, poetic and political meanings of space and time are linked. My
objective, accordingly, is twofold: to open up a new interpretative channel by examining
spatial-temporal parameters of ZhD; and, via the former, to contribute to the polemics
surrounding ZhD’s political and historiographic vision. I will address the following issues: a)
Bykov’s symbolic geography—the capital, the periphery, the heartland, and assorted real
and fantastic locales; b) non-Euclidian spaces and warped timelines c) the chronotope of the
road; d) the motifs of the railroad and the train; and e) traits of space- time and movement
as they pertain to the problem of (un)freedom. As I will argue, of strategic importance to
ZhD’s spatial-temporal poetics and, by extension, the novel at large is the problematic of
personal and collective freedom and lack of it.
Sofya Khagi is Associate Professor of Russian literature at 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 fiction,
and contemporary Baltic literatures and cultures. Her book, Silence and the Rest: Verbal
Skepticism in Russian Poetry, has been published by Northwestern University Press in 2013.
She is currently working on a monograph on Victor Pelevin.
Go Koshino
Alternative Russian Revolution: Viacheslav Rybakov and Kir Bulychev
Alternative history, a subgenre of Science Fiction, becomes in mode during 1990s after the
collapse of the Soviet Union. It speculates on parallel worlds in which famous historical
incidents had taken a different development path than in reality. Some writers dealt with
alternative history in which Russian Revolution has never occurred. Viacheslav Rybakov in
Gravi-ship Cesarevitch (1993) works out a peaceful history of alternative Russian Empire.
Even communism composes one of major official religions there. In contrast with Rybakov’s
optimistic viewpoint, another famous SF writer Kir Blychev in Assault on Dulber (1992)
shows rather pesimistic speculation on historical alternatives. In this story the White army
wins the civil war, but the anti-revolutionary regime also turns out to be harsh and violent.
In any case Vladimier Nabokov is forced to leave Russia.
Go Koshino is an associate professor in 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
working on other topics: Russian SF, image of illness in 19th century Russia, memory of
Napoleonic war, and Belarusian literature. His recent publication (English articles) includes
Sharing Writers for a Small Nation: Belarusian-Jewish-Russian Writer Grigory Reles (2016)
and Illusion and Mirror: Image of China in Contemporary Russian Literature (2014)
Irina Kotkina
Science Fiction Series Etnogenez and Post-Soviet Geopolitical Utopias
My presentation is going to address the Etnogenez literary project. This is a gigantic series of
science fiction and fantasy novels, launched in 2009 by the Kremlin ‘political technologist’,
media magnate, and president Medvedev hail-fellow, Konstantin Rykov. Etnogenez was
conceived as a highly ambitious project, combining huge number of science fictional books
in various genres, e-books, computer games, audio podcasts, and web-platforms for fandom
discussions. Oriented broadly towards younger audience, Etnogenez novels were reported
to be published in million copies. In an article published last year in the magazine Utopian
Studies co-authored with Prof. Mark Bassin, we studied connections of the Etnogenez
project to the inspirational ideas of Lev Gumilev. Soviet geographer and dissident historian,
he developed theories of Eurasianism, passionarity of the ethnos and ethnogenesis, which
gave name to the whole project. But since the novels of the series differ in their plots and
genres, the whole project is much broader than Gumilevian theories, and was planned by
the creators as an ‘alternative Bible of the world’ for youth. In fact, the project offers the
alternative history of the universe, which says much more about present-day Russian
society, than about the distant future and the past. The problem, which I am going to raise
in this presentation refers to the picture of alternative history offered by Etnogenez project.
Another problem is – why the project, which started as successful, was frozen in August
2015, and if it means that alternative history is no longer needed in Russia.
Irina Kotkina holds PhD from European University Institute (Florence) in History and also
Candidate of Cultural Studies degree (PhD equivalent) from Russian State University for
Humanities in Moscow. Irina Kotkina hold several post-doctoral appointments in Germany
(Dresden and Berlin), France (Paris, Maison du Science de l'Homme). She was employed as a
project researcher at Södertörn University in Sweden with the project "The Vision of Eurasia:
Eurasianist Influences on Politics, Culture and Ideology in Russia Today". Dr. Kotkina is
studying cultural politics and all aspects of Russian culture. She publishes broadly on Russia's
cultural policy, opera, and theatre. She is particularly interested in the Bolshoi Theater opera
history in the XX century and among her recent peer-reviewed publications are articles on
Medvedev's modernization and the Bolshoi Theater, Stalinist Bolshoi Theater and the search
for the model Soviet opera, and building of national operatic traditions in the Soviet
republics under Stalin. She has publications in Revue des Etudes Slaves, Russian Review,
Baltic World, Digital Icons, Transcultural Studies, and other international peer-reviewed
journals and collective monographs.
Boris Lanin
The Clash of Civilizations in Modern Russian Anti-Utopia
Various modern writers use the utopian/dystopian genre as a channel to express their
visions and scenarios of the future that cannot be expressed in any other way. I define a
utopia in terms of a new state structure, whereas anti-utopia concentrates on the tragedy of
the individual forced to live under totalitarian pressures. Anti-utopia always includes a
description of some utopian project but verifies this ‘happiness for everybody’ through the
fate of the individual (usually a protagonist). The anti-utopias of the 1990s and 2000s
actually give a comprehensive account of life in the country where the action takes place.
The actual state, in whatever form it exists at the time of writing, is an active participant in
the anti-utopia, generally through its functionaries or ideological spokesmen.
The goal of this paper is to show the anti-utopia is turning from a literary genre into a
provocative political prognosis based on the clash of civilizations.
Boris Lanin is Head of Literature and Professor at the Academy of Education of Russia,
Moscow. After receiving his Doctorate in Philology in 1994, he served as a visiting professor
at Woodrow Wilson Center (Washington, DC), the Institute for Advanced Studies (Paris),
Hokkaido, Stanford, Waseda (Tokyo), and Saitama University, Alfried Krupp
Wissenschaftskolleg. Professor Lanin’s textbooks in literature are being widely used at
secondary schools in the Russian Federation. Recent publications include: “Les traditions
classiques et les anti-utopies russes contemporaines”, La Revue russe, 43, 2014, pp, 45-61;
“Vassilyi Grossman’s Philosophical Ideas”, Acta Slavica Iaponica, Tomus 36, 2015, pp. 25-38.
Mark Lipovetsky
Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria and Post-utopian Science Fiction
In my paper, I will analyze Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria (2013) as an example of post-utopian
science fiction (SF). A post-utopian modality, in my opinion, emerges in Western and late
Soviet SF in the 1960s and continues developing until the present day. It embraces such
genres as post-apocalyptic SF, alternative history (and steam-punk as its subgenre), and
cyber-punk. While preserving its ties with dystopia as a dominant modality of SF in the 20th
century, post-utopian SF, at the same time, restores utopian themes as restrained and self-
reflexive, but nevertheless, vital forces for the development of the humanity. While
minimizing or removing altogether a spatial and/or temporal distance between the reader’s
reality and imaginary realm, post-utopian SF blurs borderlines between past and future;
advanced and ancient technologies; the real and virtual. Telluria in certain ways summarizes
the development of this genre and emphasizes its function of political programming.
Sorokin’s novel consists of fifty chapters, each depicting one realm that supposedly
appeared on the territory of Eurasia after the collapse of the present-day states; each with
its peculiar language and lifestyle. Thanks to this structure, Telluria exemplifies a unique
synthesis of post-apocalyptic SF, steam-punk, and cyber-punk. It perfectly fulfils the
function of SF defined by Fredric Jameson as “cognitive mapping”, the need for which is
especially crucial in the postmodern condition of “incredulity toward metanarratives”
(Lyotard). Sorokin simultaneously explores multiple scenarios and possibilities (each
state=one scenario), however, they all are united by fluctuations between utopian and
dystopian modalities rather than by the belonging to either of them. I’ll demonstrate in my
presentation that Sorokin’s catalogue of political discourses embodied by each state,
highlights those which best of all accommodate mutual critique and hybridization of utopian
and dystopian visions. Most illuminatingly this oscillation is represented by the motif of a
tellurian nail that appears in each part of the narrative. By its structural function this device
reminds of “norma” from Sorokin’s early eponymous book; however, “norma” – pressed
human feces mandated for daily consumption – served as the dystopian symbol of Soviet
discursive regime. A tellurian nail, on the contrary, may be mistaken for the symbol of
utopian imagination – when hammered in the head by a specially trained “blacksmith”, it
triggers colorful and euphoric hallucination. However, it can also cause nightmarish bad
trips with no return.
Inspired by the resonance between his 2008 novel Den’ oprichnika, and the resent
neo-conservative turn in Russian politics, Sorokin designs Telluria as a large-scale testing of
numerous political discourses with their models of culture and future. Tellurian
hallucinations serve as a litmus test for the sustainability of the each political scenario; only
at first sight this seems paradoxical and illogical. Drugs in general (and a tellurian nail is a
super-drug) have served as metaphors for literature and, generally speaking, the
transcendental in many of Sorokin’s works since Goluboe salo (1999). Hence, in Telluria
each political discourse is tested by its compatibility with the transcendental quest, on the
one hand, and its ability to hold control over the transcendental reasoning, on the other.
What are the results of this testing? Which discourses prove to be most sustainable and
which fail the test? In Sorokin’s perspectives, correct answers to these questions define the
political future of Eurasia.
Mark Lipovetsky 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. He also co-edited ten
volumes of articles on Russian literature and culture. Among his monographs are the
following: Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (1999), Modern Russian
Literature: 1950s-1990s (co-authored with Naum Leiderman, 2001 and six consequent
reprints editions), Paralogies: Transformation of (Post)modernist Discourse in Russian
Culture of the 1920s-2000s (Moscow: NLO, 2008), Performing Violence: Literary and
Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2009, with Birgit
Beumers; Russian version - 2012), and Charms of Cynical Reason: The Transformations of the
Trickster Trope in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011).
Lipovetsky’s works were nominated for Russian Little Booker Prize (1997) and short-listed
for the Andrey Bely Prize (2008). In 2009-12, worked on the jury for Russian literary prize
NOS (in 2011-12 as chair). In 2014 he received an award of the American Association of
Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages for the outstanding contribution to
scholarship.
Ingunn Lunde
Contested Ideologies: The Language Question in Valery Votrin’s Logoped
The paper offers a reading of Valery Votrin’s linguistic dystopia Logoped (2012). Logoped
(The Speech Therapist) portrays a society governed by strict orthoepic laws: a set of rules for
pronunciation meant to preserve the standard language. The sanctioned standard language
is constantly challenged by the vernacular spoken by most people (labelled variously rodnaia
rech’, razgovornaia rech’, or narodnyi iazyk). I propose to analyse the novel as a reponse to
language policies – and, in a broader perspective, the ‘language question’ – in Russian
society today. As I hope to show, Votrin challenges central concepts in the language
debates, stretching their potential and experimenting with ‘extreme versions’ of notions
such as variants, norms, purity, and, most notably, with a radical realisation of the
‘liberalisation of the language’ metaphor of the 1990s. In Votrin’s poetic treatment of
linguistic ideologies, a philosophical perspective goes hand in hand with grotesque devices,
questioning the legitimacy of power structures that get involved in linguistic regulation.
Ingunn Lunde is Professor of Russian at the University of Bergen and Professor II of Russian
Literature and Culture at the University of Tromsø. Her research interests include Russian
sociolinguistics, Slavic medieval culture and Russian literature of the nineteenth to twenty-
first centuries. She is Editor-inChief of the book series Slavica Bergensia and Associate Editor
of Scando-Slavica and Poljarnyj vestnik. Her book Language on Display: Writers, Fiction and
Linguistic Culture in Post-Soviet Russia will applear with Edinburgh University Press in 2017.
Lunde is the author of Verbal Celebrations: Kirill of Turov’s Homiletic Rhetoric and its
Byzantine Sources (Harrassowitz 2001) and editor and co-editor of eleven books, among
them (with Michael S. Gorham and Martin Paulsen) Digital Russia: The Language, Culture
and Politics of New Media Communication (Routledge 2014).
Muireann Maguire
Frozen in Time: Political Themes in Evgenii Vodolazkin’s The Aviator
The year is 1999: Innokentii Petrovich Platonov, an artist and Solovki camp inmate
cryofrozen as part of Stalin’s programme to investigate the science of resurrection, has just
been thawed back to life in a St Petersburg medical centre. Many shocks await him: as his
doctor summarizes the current state of the Russian nation, “Dictatorship has been replaced
by chaos. People steal more than ever before. An alcoholic is running the government.
That’s the general picture”. Evgenii Vodolazkin’s 2016 novel The Aviator explores whether it
is possible for an individual, born into a different age, to make his home in the present.
Besides its major psychological and philosophical themes, The Aviator contains no small
amount of political critique and social satire. My paper will discuss two different distinct
levels of critique in the novel: its sustained reflection on Russia’s destructive political
impulses (from the early Soviet period to the present), and its keyhole glimpses into modern
Russian political life in the year 1999, with cameo appearances by anonymized politicians
and oligarchs. I will also explore how Vodolazkin’s cryogenic fable resonates with other
literary fantasies about Siberia’s frozen secrets and Stalin’s secret projects, including Andrei
Platonov’s The Ether Tract, Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy and Dmitrii Bykov’s Justification.
Muireann Maguire lectures in Russian at the University of Exeter. She is currently working
on Hideous Agonies, a study of childbirth as a theme in Russian and Western literature.
Other research interests include 19th-century Russian literature, particularly Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky; science fiction; and Gothic literature. Her book on Soviet Gothic prose, Stalin's
Ghosts, appeared in 2012. She has also edited and translated a collection of twentieth-
century Russian ghost stories, Red Spectres (Overlook, 2012).
Lara Ryazanova-Clarke
Знай наших! The Global Russian Identity and the Imaginary of Londongrad
The paper discusses contemporary artistic reflection on the developing Russian speaking
community in the UK and its members’ subjectivity. The cultural and linguistic products under
scrutiny are the imaginaries of ‘Londongrad’ emerging in the context in which the sense of the
national is losing its grip on people’s imagination (Steger 2011; Ryazanova-Clarke 2014).
Taking an approach that imaginaries are discursively constructed cultural models and beliefs
the paper expands on Appadurai’s concept of the global cultural flows intrinsically linked with
the production of globalised subjectivities. It then focuses on discursive construction of ‘global
Russian’ identities by Russian speakers living in the UK, as seen through the dialogues in the
series ‘Londongrad’ scripted by Mikhail Idov and in the novel ‘Anliiskaia Taina’ (An English
Mystery) by Andrei Ostalsky. Both authors were born in the Soviet Union and are
cosmopolitan Russian-English bilingual writers of fiction and publicist texts. The paper goes
on to discuss linguistic tools and strategies that Ostalsky’s and Idov’s characters deploy in their
self-identification and performance of social roles as they interact with members of the
Russian-speaking and other London communities.
Dr Lara Ryazanova-Clarke is Head of Russian and Director of 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. Her book publications include The Russian
Language Today (with T. Wade), Routledge 1999; Collins Russian-English English-Russian
Dictionary, 2000; The Russian Language Outside the Nation, Edinburgh University Press,
2014; The Vernaculars of Communism: Language, Ideology and Power in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe (with P. Petrov), Routledge 2015; and French and Russian in Imperial
Russia, in 2 volumes, (with D. Offord et al.), Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Matthias Schwartz
The Damaged ‘Star Bridge’: Crimea, the Ukrainian-Russian Conflict and Contemporary
Science Fiction
Popular post-Soviet science fiction and fantasy literature was and is predominantly written
in Russian, mainly for economic reasons, but also due to tradition. In Soviet times the genre
developed into one of the most widely read forms of fiction because of the allegorical social
criticism and the heretical escapism it offered. Soviet science fiction works were rarely
published or translated into languages other than the common primary language. It is
therefore no surprise that many of the most successful and well-known contemporary
Ukrainian writers in the genre wrote and still write in Russian, among them Marina and
Sergei Dyachenko, Genri Layon Oldi (Dmitri Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhenski), or Andrei
Valentinov. These authors participated in a common Eastern European literary space which
was shaped by its own literary discourses, literary festivals, journals and awards. But in the
course of the events of the so-called Euromaidan in Ukraine in 2013/2014, and in particular
after the integration of Crimea into the Russian Federation and Russian intervention in the
Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine, this situation has fundamentally changed.
Taking this political and discursive upheaval as a point of departure, the paper focuses on
the history and memory of one of the most beloved literary festivals for fantasy and science
fiction literature in recent times, Kharkiv’s annual “Star Bridge” festival, which ran from 1999
to 2012. Furthermore, the paper will provide insight into current and former literary
(fantastic) discourses dealing with imperial dreams, rebellious uprisings, Ukrainian-Russian
romantic fantasies of contested and ambiguous borderlands, wars of civilisations, and
cultural diversities. In light of recent events, many of these utopian and dystopian narratives
read differently at an allegorical level, while recent fiction is attempting to cope with the
radical challenges posed by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict for the literary as well as the
political space.
Dr Matthias Schwartz is a research associate at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research
Berlin (ZfL) and head researcher of the project Affective Realism. Contemporary Eastern
European Literatures. His research interests include the cultural history of Russian and Soviet
adventure literature, science fiction and popular sciences; Eastern European youth cultures,
memory cultures and cultures of affect; and contemporary literatures in a globalized world.
Recent publications include Expeditions into Other Worlds: Soviet Adventure Literature and
Science Fiction from the October Revolution to the End of the Stalin Era (2014); Gagarin as an
Archive Body and Memory Figure (co-edited, 2014, both in German); Eastern European
Youth Cultures in a Global Context (co-edited, 2016).
Mikhail Suslov
‘For Faith, Tsar and Fatherland’: Science Fiction Club ‘Bastion’, Its Literary Production and
Political Stance
The paper examines the literary production and political ideas of the galaxy of the writers of
science fiction of Orthodox and monarchist persuasion, who gather around the convention
‘Bastion’ and its leader Dmitrii Volodikhin. In the paper I trace intellectual and personal
connections between ‘Bastion’ and the pro-government think-tank ‘Russian Institute for
Strategic Research’ (RISI) and the Russian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate. I argue
that ‘Bastion’ has supplied the readership and policy-makers with a kind of social
utopianism, fitting to the present-day ‘conservative turn’ in Russian politics. At the same
time, the ‘White-Guardist’ and Slavophile slant in ‘Bastion’s’ literary produce has recently
put Volodikhin and his group at odds with the ‘red-brown’ trend in politically concerned
science fiction.
Mikhail Suslov is Marie Curie researcher at the Uppsala Center for Russian and Eurasian
Studies, Uppsala University. His research focuses on Russian intellectual history,
conservative, right-wing and religiously-motivated political ideas, geopolitical ideologies and
socio-political utopias. His most recent papers dealing with (geo)political imagination
include ‘“Novorossiya’ Reloaded: Geopolitical Fandom in Online Debates,’ Europe-Asia
Studies 69, no. 2 (forthcoming 2017); “Of Planets and Trenches: Imperial Science Fiction in
Contemporary Russia,” The Russian Review 75, no. 10 (2016). Recently he edited Digital
Orthodoxy in the Post-Soviet World: The Russian Orthodox Church and Web 2.0 (Stuttgart:
Ibidem Verlag, 2016) and co-edited (with Mark Bassin) Eurasia 2.0: Post-Soviet Geopolitics in
the Age of New Media (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016).
Mattias Ågren
Historical Narratives as Utopia: Literary Anticipations of the Annexation of Crimea
For all its audacity, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 is today treated as a fait accompli by
the political establishment of Russia. However, attempts to justify this move and give it
legitimacy reaches far beyond the popular vote in the referendum on 16 March 2014. The
main political arguments have been part of a larger historical narrative where historical
“mistakes” can and should be corrected. Thus, it could be argued that by establishing new
historical narratives and making them prevalent is a form of both identity-making and
political legitimization that bears a strong resemblance with the concept of Utopia.
In this paper I will put the events of 2014 into the context of the development of the Russian
anti-utopian novel in the 2000s, where historical narratives supplanted the state-run
political utopian projects of the 20th century. In my analysis I will argue that literary works
such as Vladimir Sorokin’s Den’ Oprichnika and Telluria; Dmitry Bykov’s ZhD; or Olga
Slavnikova’s 2017, anticipated the struggle between different historical points of view that
forms an important subtext for current political debate in Russia.
Mattias Ågren is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the Department of Modern Languages at
Uppsala University. He got his PhD degree in Russian literature from Stockholm University in
2014 for a thesis on the development of the anti-utopian novel in post-Soviet Russia. Other
research interests include cross-media references in Russian prose, and Vladimir Sorokin’s
poetics.