Only the End of the World Again
The post-Soviet Russian imaginary has had plenty of room for the apocalypse; the end of the world as we know it is always around the corner.* There is something dreary about invoking it, on a number of levels: first, there is the prevalence of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic storytelling throughout the entire world at roughly the same time; second, there are the potentially diminishing returns of destroying civilization on a regular basis; and third, there is the fact that I have personally written on this topic on several occasions. It is telling that the best example I can give of the iterative nature of the apocalypse is one that I have already given in Plots against Russia: Marian and Sergei Dyachenko's 1999 novel Armaged-dom, which I suggested be best translated as "Sweet Home Armageddon." In this novel, everyone has come to expect the intermittent apocalypse known as the mryga, which is usually scientifically predicted and announced in advance on television. Many will die, but a few will always survive to face the next mrygato come their way.
When post-Soviet Russia imagines the world's end, it is partaking in a longstanding cultural tradition of apocalypticism while also engaging in a conversation with popular exemplars from around the world. Perhaps as a result, Russian apocalyptic and postapocalytic storytelling is one of the country's more successful exports; it may not be quite as popular as the family friendly cartoon sensation Masha and the Bear, but it does have the virtue of a much higher body count. Apocalypticism comes naturally to post-Soviet culture, perhaps because, like the Dyachenkos' iterative catastrophes in Sweet Home Armageddon, the end of the world is arguable a familiar experience. The Soviet collapse is the obvious example, to be sure, but it is not the only one.
For writers of Russian fiction, the post-Soviet apocalypse is heralded by an event that turned the key elements of Soviet science-worship into the stuff of nuclear nightmare: the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Atomic Power Station. Chernobyl establishes a compelling pattern for late- and post-Soviet catastrophe tales. Modernity itself fails ordinary people, destroying institutions, compelling mass evacuation, and threatening public health in mysterious and unpredictable ways. Most important, catastrophe is largely invisible: we see its results (death, societal breakdown), but the event itself is always offstage. World War II may have been the formative trauma for generations of Soviet citizens, but it was a different type of horror: ubiquitous, unrelenting, and impossible not to see. It is the intangible Chernobyl that introduced Russia and the Soviet Union to postmodern catastrophe.
Even a cursory look at some of the most notable examples of Russian (post)apocalytpicism reveals several important patterns. First, we see the reinforcement of the Chernobyl model in the writers most directly concerned with catastrophe. Second is the reassertion of a cyclical model of history, in which the often dystopian future is established as a repetition of a familiar past. Third, we find an insistence on the inexplicable, often metaphysical nature of catastrophe, divorced from easily identifiable politics or recent history. And, finally, there is a self-referential or metafictional element to catastrophe, either using an apocalyptic scenario to comment on the fate of Russian literature, or showing literature’s vulnerability to the collapse of supporting institutions. All of these patters are in the service of a darkly pessimistic view not just of the future, but of the eventual human condition: the inhabitants of the postapocalypse are often barely literate and superstitious, the combination of both nineteenth-century anxieties about degeneration and twentieth-century fantasies of mutation and degradation.
Our main examples will consist of two well-known works Tatyana Tolstay's 2000 novel The Slynx (Kys'), and Dmitry Glukhovsky's transmedia juggernaut, the Metro 2033 franchise. The Slynx was the long-awaited first novel by an acclaimed highbrow writer, while Metro 2033 began its life as a videogame before spawning a multimedia empire. Yet they share a set of presumptions and preoccupations that defy any critical desire to keep them hygienically separate.
Note
*The end of this post, and the contents of the next few posts to follow, are based on my article “Dystopias and Catastrophe Tales after Chernobyl.” Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky (eds.). Russian Literature since 1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 86-103