{"title":"Apocalyptic Pandemic in Yana Vagner’s To The Lake","authors":"Irina Souch","doi":"10.1016/j.ruslit.2022.11.013","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The article offers an analysis of Yana Vagner’s bestselling novel <em>To the Lake</em> (<em>Epidemiia</em>) focusing on the ways in which this speculative text reflects on contemporary apocalyptic anxieties and fascinations unleashed by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Following Priscilla Wald’s contention that over the last hundred-plus years the knowledge about epidemics within different realms has been shaped by the “outbreak narrative” that arrives in “scientific, journalistic, and fictional incarnations,” I consider how the novel spotlights the mutually reinforcing relation between a long-standing and increasingly globalised cultural imagination about contagion and the medical and political interpretations of an actual pandemic.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":43192,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"RUSSIAN LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304347922001156","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, SLAVIC","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The article offers an analysis of Yana Vagner’s bestselling novel To the Lake (Epidemiia) focusing on the ways in which this speculative text reflects on contemporary apocalyptic anxieties and fascinations unleashed by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Following Priscilla Wald’s contention that over the last hundred-plus years the knowledge about epidemics within different realms has been shaped by the “outbreak narrative” that arrives in “scientific, journalistic, and fictional incarnations,” I consider how the novel spotlights the mutually reinforcing relation between a long-standing and increasingly globalised cultural imagination about contagion and the medical and political interpretations of an actual pandemic.
期刊介绍:
Russian Literature combines issues devoted to special topics of Russian literature with contributions on related subjects in Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak and Polish literatures. Moreover, several issues each year contain articles on heterogeneous subjects concerning Russian Literature. All methods and viewpoints are welcomed, provided they contribute something new, original or challenging to our understanding of Russian and other Slavic literatures. Russian Literature regularly publishes special issues devoted to: • the historical avant-garde in Russian literature and in the other Slavic literatures • the development of descriptive and theoretical poetics in Russian studies and in studies of other Slavic fields.