This article examines the effects of translingual wordplay, Russian names, and cultural allusions in Olga Grushin's novel. The Dream Life of Sukhanov. Applying Wolfgang Iser's concepts of the implied reader and the repertoire of the text, the analysis considers various interpretative possibilities which may be actualized by bilingual and monolingual readers. The article concludes that while Russian elements in the text may elicit recognition on the part of the bilingual reader, they potentially serve as a device of defamiliarization for the monolingual reader, creating a parallel between the reading process and the protagonist's disorientation in the Soviet Union during glasnost'.
While post-Soviet cultural revisitations of the Soviet period have assumed various forms and approaches, ranging from nostalgic to critical, recent examples of Russian historical fiction appear to indicate a different turn. They neither seek primarily to establish historical facts in order to work through traumatic experiences, thereby relegating them to the past, nor do they express a nostalgic longing for a lost world, now remembered in a positive light. Rather, these texts focus on individual and collective memory processes, problematizing attempts to understand and come to terms with the past. This paper examines such a problematization with regard to the Stalinist period in the novel Kamennyi most by Aleksandr Terekhov (2009), which has received much critical attention as well as second prize in the Bolshaia kniga awards. The narrative is based on an actual event in 1943, when the son of Stalin’s Minister of Aviation is believed to have murdered his girlfriend—the daughter of the Soviet ambassador to Mexico—because she refused to remain with him in Moscow. In the novel, this case is reinvestigated by the narrator-detective, whose findings suggest a number of possible alternative interpretations of the event. However, the text, which can be described as faction in that it mixes documentary and fictional narrative modes, ultimately raises more questions than it answers—about the nature of the case itself, as well as the nature of human memory and historical knowledge. Drawing upon Linda Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction as a prominent feature of postmodern texts, I will examine how this novel functions as a site of negotiation between past and present. I will also show how it offers a commentary—not only on the Stalinist period, but, more significantly, on post-Soviet Russia and its relation to the past.
This paper examines an example of the influence of the Soviet space program on the cultural imagination beyond Russia: the Swedish novel Tredje flykthastigheten The Third Flight Speed, 2004; ?????? ??????????? ????????) by Lotta Lotass. The novel depicts scenes from the life of Yuri Gagarin up through the launch of Vostok 1 in 1961, as well as other events from the early history of Soviet space exploration. This paper will analyse the depiction of Gagarin and the space program in the novel, focusing on narrative style. I will argue that the polyphonic character of the novel serves to both undermine and supplement official Soviet accounts of the space program.