About the Project

Unstuck in Time is the second volume the three-book series with he unofficial title Russia’s Alien Nations.

In this book, which I am serializing on the blog as I write it, I explore fictional and ideological reconfigurations of time in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Soviet nostalgia is a familiar part of the post-Soviet landscape, as is the tendency for contemporary Russian literary fiction to focus on the past rather than the present. Unstuck in Time argues that the way time is framed in contemporary Russian cultural productions is connected to a generalized dysphoria regrading the present day, which ends up feeling “off,” if not downright uncanny.

The first chapter is devoted to the immensely popular Russian science fictional subgenre of “popadantsy”—accidental travelers in time and space. In their trips to the past, they inevitably get caught up in important historical events (most often WWII), usually in the hope of achieving a better outcome.. What looks like simple nostalgia proves to be much more complicated; the accidental time traveller's relationship with both his home time period and the world in which he arrives is one of profound dysphoria. Both in the present and in the means by which he travels to the past, he exerts little agency over his own life.  Only in the historical fantasyland that greets him does he get to play the hero. 

The second chapter examines the construction of fictional alternate Soviet Unions that either exist in the present day (because the USSR never ended) or are recreated in the future. Subsequent chapters will be about fictional and real-life attempts to reconstruct the Soviet Union in our time (as theme park, overambitious film project, or literary experiment); the persistent representation of Russia’s future in decidedly medieval terms; and possibly the Russian postapocalpse and the themes of timelessness and amnesia.

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Write to eb7@nyu.edu