RUSSIAN LITERATURE最新文献

This article offers an analysis of a recent Russian computer game, Pathologic 2, which simulates an epidemic in a Russian provincial town. Unusually, the game has widely been called a “literary” experience by both its players and creators. By making use of theories of narration and mediation from Peter Brooks, Friedrich Kittler, and Patrick Jagoda, I ask whether the medium of the digital game can ever produce an experience that is related to or informed by the concept of “literariness” in both a Russian Formalist and broadly intellectual sense. By exploring how Pathologic 2 incorporates material from well-known texts by Fedor Dostoevskii and Aleksandr Blok, I argue that the digital game reduces Russian literature to a “trans-medial” phenomenon, and that this reduction can be understood as one impact of twenty-first-century networked computing on literary activity and institutions. Moreover, I consider the impact of contemporary geopolitics on how the global industry of digital games understands Russia and, by extension, Russian literature.

This article explores the flu as an organizing motif and metaphor in Alexei Salnikov’s novel The Petrovs in the Flu and Around It, a recent best-seller and the 2017 laureate of the prestigious NOS(E) Award. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag argues that literature reads metaphorical meanings into diseases, and specific illnesses as metaphors dominate in particular eras. As the era of coronavirus reveals, the flu is often referred to in the public discourse as a trivial illness that does not require specific precautions or compassion. Contemporary Russian literature invoking the flu plays on its meaning as a common but potentially dangerous disease. In Liudmila Petrushevskaya’s short story ‘The Flu’, the illness is used to metaphorize the intermingling of the horrible and the mundane. In Salnikov’s The Petrovs, the flu has a similar function, revealing the loss of compassion and free will in the Putin era. The Petrovs in the Flu and Around It together with Salnikov’s other novel, The Department, speak about the social and cultural condition of the Putin era, characterized by moral compromises with evil and rooted in Soviet trauma.

Since it was published, Dmitry Glukhovsky’s novel Metro 2033 (2005), in addition to sequels and other novels, has also jumped across media boundaries to spawn comic books and video games. The story takes place following a nuclear holocaust which has left Earth’s surface uninhabitable, condemning some survivors to eke out a life underground in the subway network. The novel’s basic narrative concerns this last haven, imagined as a giant organism, being invaded by “чёрные” (“blacks” or “black ones”), the homo novus better adapted to life on the harsh planet. In this paper, I argue that Glukhovsky subverts this corporeal metaphor to call attention to the troubling implications of, on one hand, the militaristic description of the immune system, and on the other, national security imagined in immunological terms. At the same time, the viral logic of contagion also allows us to glimpse the central tenet of ecological thought, that “all beings are connected,” or as Donna Haraway likewise reminds us, that we are always already infected through our relations with human and non-human others. It is only when we allow for such mutual contagions that we have any hope of confronting the dire consequences of our technological progress.

The dualistic pairs of romanticism/rationalism and nature/science have traditionally shaped readings of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. This article, building on affect theory and theories of the grotesque, examines Bazarov as a character who does not fit into either model. As an outsider, he represents a threat of infection to all the other characters in the novel. His excessive, animalistic life force elicits disgust in those surrounding him and forces them to distance themselves from him for fear of a “life contagion,” which would insert an uncontrollable, repulsive life-energy into their predictable genteel existence. Additionally, Bazarov is characterized by a grotesque affective system, that is, he experiences feelings that are contradictory and elude a definitive reading, right up to the novel’s end. After being exposed to his ambiguous and incongruous feelings, the other characters are at risk of “affective contagion”: they might start experiencing feelings as grotesquely as Bazarov does. This trend towards ambiguity rather than legibility defies the expectations of clarity in psychological prose that critics at the time demanded and that readers have been taught to look for. This article thus proposes pervasive illegibility of character as a previously unidentified trait of Russian Realism, and uses Fathers and Children’s Bazarov as a vivid case study.

As a rule, influenza is considered a dangerous infectious disease that spreads rapidly and chaotically. In his novel Petrovy v grippe i vokrug nego (The Petrovs in and around the Flu) (2016), Aleksei Sal’nikov undermines these notions by making a strong case for the salvific, albeit not immediately apparent, qualities of the flu. Much like the source of the viral infection that afflicts the Petrovs, the link between the events that aids the family’s recovery is imperceptible to them. By considering various connections between characters and events represented in the novel, I demonstrate that the spread of the flu, the characters’ interpersonal relations, and even the structure of the text are bound by the same rhizomatic logic, a concept proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The rhizome theory, I maintain, begins to explain the complexity of the novel’s structure, which is one of the main reasons for critics’ dissatisfaction with the text. As I show, according to the novel’s rationale, human relations and stories are more bound by biology than by human agency, free will, and personal choices.

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.

This paper argues that the motif of illness runs through all of Crime and Punishment and accompanies key developments and themes to such an extent that the novel merits a reading as a plague, or pandemic, narrative. The paper examines imagery of illness and infection in Dostoevsky’s novel and analyzes the way this imagery is used to underscore the danger and the infectiousness of the ideas that Dostoevsky is trying to debunk. This analysis of Crime and Punishment shows that Dostoevsky brilliantly mixes metaphors of biological and ideological infection, diagnosing ailments that still plague us to this day.

This article examines Soviet theorist Aleksandr Bogdanov’s physiological collectivism, which builds around the idea of mutual blood exchange as a method of eroding borders between individuals to increase the resilience of the social organism as a whole; and reconceptualizes community as a network of material connections between the cells of said organism. The COVID-19 pandemic increased interest in convalescent plasma (CP). This article examines the physiological collective together with theorists like Jane Bennett and Donna Haraway as a basis for how convalescent plasma can function as a first step towards establishing material community today.

This essay examines two crucial examples of twentieth-century plague writing through a psychoanalytic and political lens, arguing that psychic repression lies at the heart of both Karel Čapek’s play The White Sickness, written on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, published ten years later in 1947 but begun in 1942 during the German occupation of France. I shall argue that the nature of the calamity in both cases is political rather than biomedical: how could fascism triumph in an apparently stable democracy like interwar France or Czechoslovakia?

This cluster of articles examines Russian and Eastern European outbreak narratives and metaphors of infection. Together, these articles further the understanding of the cultural politics of contagion in Russia and Eastern Europe.