Description
Book SynopsisIn 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, reali
Trade Review"Clowes advances the provacative hypothosis that the certain recent Russian novels constitute a special category of 'meta-utopian' works by virtue of their playful skepticism toward political and social 'realities' of the past, present, and future... Clowes' highly theorectical study has much to offer."--Choice
Table of ContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsNote on Transliteration and TranslationList of AbbreviationsPt. 1Experimental Fiction Against Ideological FixationCh. 1Meta-utopian Writing: The Problem of Utopia as Ideology3Ch. 2Publishing the Dystopian Heritage: The Glasnost Debate about Literary Experiment and Utopian Ideology25Pt. 2The Meta-Utopian Experiment in Fiction: Elements of Literary and Ideological ReanimationCh. 3Charting Meta-utopia: Chronotopes of Disorientation41Ch. 4Science, Ideology, and the Structure of Meta-utopian Narrative70Ch. 5The Meta-utopian Language Problem, or Utopia as a Bump on a -log-94Ch. 6Meta-utopian Consciousness122Pt. 3The Reader in the Text: Popularizing the Meta-Utopian MentalityCh. 7Making Meta-utopia Accessible: Zinoviev's The Radiant Future145Ch. 8Utopia, Imagination, and Memory: The Strugatsky Brothers' The Ugly Swans, Tendriakov's A Potshot at Mirages, and Aksenov's The Island of Crimea162Ch. 9Parody of Popular Forms in Iskander's Rabbits and Boa Constrictors and Voinovich's Moscow 2042183Ch. 10Play with Closure in Petrushevskaia's "The New Robinsons" and Kabakov's "The Deserter"198Conclusion: The Utopian Impulse after 1968: Russian Meta-utopian Fiction in a European Context208Bibliography223Index233
