P. L. Dravert’s Prehistoric Science Fiction in the “Siberian Text” of Russian Literature

Abstract

This article examines The Tale of the Mammoth and the Glacier Man, an unfinished novel by P. L. Dravert. The text is analysed from the point of view of prehistoric fiction and science fiction, as well as from the point of view of the reflection of constants basic for the “Siberian text” of Russian literature. The “Siberian text” was first put forward by V. I. Tyupa. In Russian culture, Siberia is connected with several ideas. It is a place for exiles, a place of death and resurrection, a utopian paradise, and a territory where mammoths lived. Dravert’s work contains all these characteristics. At the turn of the twentieth century, in Russian literature, there appear several texts about ancient mammoth hunters. It was possible due to the development of paleontology as a science. Dravert’s texts stand out from the texts on the same topic. The writer does not show the world of the past to the reader but brings the ancient man to early twentieth-century Siberia. With the help of comparative analysis, the author identifies typical features of the paleo-fiction of Russian modernism (the figure of a mammoth, the topos of a fire, non-localisation in time), as well as the innovations introduced by Dravert. The novel considers not only the Russian traditions of depicting Siberia but also the tradition of Jules Verne. The very figure of the mammoth, extremely significant for modernism, also goes back to the “Siberian” and “Permian” texts (traditions common in Siberia). The author concludes that the text reproduces the unfinished novel of the constants characteristic of the “Siberian text” when their function changes: all established clichés begin to serve as an adventure plot in the spirit of Jules Verne.