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Maya Vinokour: Everything Was Forever Until It Exploded: Apocalyptic Futures in Late-Soviet Science Fiction
April 26 @ 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Everything Was Forever Until It Exploded: Apocalyptic Futures in Late-Soviet Science Fiction
From Leonid Brezhnev’s pharmacological bids for corporeal immortality, to the continued display of Lenin’s (un)dead body in the Mausoleum, official culture in the late Soviet period was at pains to demonstrate its own permanence. Yet novels like the Strugatsky brothers’ Doomed City (1972) or films like Konstantin Lopushansky’s Letters From a Dead Man (1986) called into question the possibility of the survival not merely of individual leaders or the Soviet Union, but of humanity as such. Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the contradiction between the Russian state’s insistence on its own immutability and cultural documents testifying to the opposite—whether expressed as narratives about supernatural beings, climate change, or pandemics—has only intensified. This talk examines the creeping consciousness of human transience in late-Soviet culture and its legacy in the present, focusing on works that thematize human extinction or other apocalyptic scenarios.
Co-sponsored by the UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities; the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies; and the Russian Flagship Program