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 It met with a firestorm of criticism and was withdrawn.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.