Invasive Species: Immunity and Community in Contemporary Outbreak Narratives

Abstract

The word contagion, derived from Latin contagio, the combination of con (“together with”) and tagio (“touch”), suggests a close relationship between the human body and community. It stands to reason, then, that contagion narratives in one way or the other attempt to reflect upon one’s being in the world, with others, whether human or non‐human, and they do so through the theme of communicable disease and shared physical vulnerability. In the last couple of decades, Russian literature has witnessed an uptick in outbreak narratives fueled by anxieties over globalization and the ever‐shrinking distances and ever‐increasing mobility of our “global village.” The paper analyzes two of such recent novels, Vladimir Sorokin’s The Blizzard (2010) and Eduard Verkin’s Sakhalin Island (2018), to examine whether these developments lead the authors to conceptualize new forms of community and communality or, on the contrary, retreat into nostalgic restoration, nationalism, and tribalism.