Russian Experimental Fiction

by Clowes, Edith W.

• ISBN13: 9780691032221
• ISBN10: 069103222X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1993-09-01
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

In the three decades following Stalin's death, major underground Russian writers have subverted Soviet ideology by using parody to draw attention to its basis in utopian thought. Referring to utopian writing as diverse as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, and Orwell's Animal Farm, they have tested notions of truth, reality, and representation. They have gone beyond their precursors by experimenting with the tensions between ludic and didactic art. Edith Clowes explores these "meta-utopian" narratives, which address a wide range of attitudes toward utopia, to expose the challenge that literary play poses to dogmatism and to elucidate the sense of renewal it can bring to social imagination. Using both structural analysis and reception theory, she introduces readers outside Russia to a fascinating body of literature that includes Aleksandr Zinoviev's The Yawning Heights, Abram Terts's Liubimov, Vladimir Voinovich's Moscow 2042, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia's "The New Robinsons."
Not advocating its own utopian alternative to present social realities, meta-utopian fiction investigates the function of a deep human impulse to imagine, project, and realize alternative social orders. Clowes examines the technical innovations meta-utopian writers have made in style, image, and narrative structure that inform fresh modes of social imagination. Her analysis leads to an inquiry into the intended and real audiences of this fiction, and into the ways its authors try to move them toward more sophisticated social discourse.

Author Biography

Edith W. Clowes is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Purdue University.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Translation
List of Abbreviations
Experimental Fiction Against Ideological Fixation
Meta-utopian Writing: The Problem of Utopia as Ideology	p. 3
Publishing the Dystopian Heritage: The Glasnost Debate about Literary Experiment and Utopian Ideology	p. 25
The Meta-Utopian Experiment in Fiction: Elements of Literary and Ideological Reanimation
Charting Meta-utopia: Chronotopes of Disorientation	p. 41
Science, Ideology, and the Structure of Meta-utopian Narrative	p. 70
The Meta-utopian Language Problem, or Utopia as a Bump on a -log-	p. 94
Meta-utopian Consciousness	p. 122
The Reader in the Text: Popularizing the Meta-Utopian Mentality
Making Meta-utopia Accessible: Zinoviev's The Radiant Future	p. 145
Utopia, Imagination, and Memory: The Strugatsky Brothers' The Ugly Swans, Tendriakov's A Potshot at Mirages, and Aksenov's The Island of Crimea	p. 162
Parody of Popular Forms in Iskander's Rabbits and Boa Constrictors and Voinovich's Moscow 2042	p. 183
Play with Closure in Petrushevskaia's "The New Robinsons" and Kabakov's "The Deserter"	p. 198
Conclusion: The Utopian Impulse after 1968: Russian Meta-utopian Fiction in a European Context	p. 208
Bibliography	p. 223
Index	p. 233
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