Moscow Metro as the Leviathan: Corporeal and Political Infections

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.