Stalinist Fan Fiction
One of the few Russian-language genre writers to gain global fame, Sergey Lukyanenko is best known for his "Night Watch" series of novels and stories, which inspired two films by Timur Bekmambetov: Night Watch (2004), which was an international hit, and Day Watch (2008), which was not. Lukyanenko's work in English translation consists of few entries besides the Night Watch series, which could lead readers to believe that the author deals exclusively in urban fantasy. But his vast Russian catalog tells a different story. Lukyanenko has tried his hand at virtually every subgenre of Russian F&SF, except for one: the author is vehement in his disdain for historical Time Crasher stories.
Lukyanenko has no objection to sending characters to other worlds or dimensions by accident or through alien intervention, but he finds the historical tales derivative and unrelentingly conservative, if not quasi-fascist. Yet he cannot ignore them. Time Crasher stories appear to be the fastest growing variety of F&SF in Russia. Even excluding accidental travel to non-historical destinations, the genre is too large to keep track of. The 24th edition of the online Complete Encyclopedia of Poadantsy to the Past (posted on November 16, 2020 at http://samlib.ru/i/isaew_a_w/popadanec24.shtml) has 2100 entries, including 222 works that were not listed in the previous edition posted only five months earlier (http://samlib.ru/i/isaew_a_w/popdanec23.shtml, June 12, 2020). Thus it should come as no surprise that Stalin is weary of these time-traveling guests. The real shock is that Pioneer Solnyshkin was able to get a private conversation with the General Secretary. By rights, his office should have been jam-packed with Time Crashers, nattering on about how to save the Soviet Union from enemies foreign and domestic.
Lukyanenko's story is not the most likely gateway into the Time Crasher genre; characterized by bemused exhaustion rather than a sense of wonder, "Vitya Solnyshkin" reads more like a farewell. Given the backwards-looking nature of the genre, however, "Vitya Solnyshkin" proves quite appropriate: imagine Time Crasher stories as a brand new genre, with Lukyanenko dropping in from the future in order to, if not save it, then at least nudge it in the direction of self-awareness.
Which leads us to one more thing worth noting about the story: "Vitya Solnyshkin" reflects not just a generic reader's impatience with the Time Crashers, but that of the story's author. No fan of Stalin, Lukyanenko nonetheless uses the Soviet dictator as a point of authorial identification: Stalin sums up Lukyanenko's critique of the genre. This kind of authorial self-insertion can be found in any genre, but is particularly characteristic of fan fiction (fic). Perhaps inadvertently, Lukyanenko shows how much fan fiction and the Time Crashers have in common. The Time Crashers may be accidental tourists, but their creators are essentially writers of fic. Their fandom is history.
In addition to teasing out the implications of the fanfic/Time Crasher connection, this chapter examines the motifs and motivations that animate the genre. 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. Paradoxically, if the circumstances of the present are beyond his control, those of the past are not.
After some consideration, I have chosen to use the masculine pronoun to refer to the typical Time Crasher, not only because the character really is almost always male (women show up more often as part of a group that does the traveling), but to highlight the way in which historical dysphoria becomes gendered. Some of the more interesting examples of Time Crashers involve the implantation of a present-day man's mind into the body of a young girl. Others use the hero's personal timeline to represent the problem of historical origins. Time travel stories often flirt with the grandfather paradox (going back in time, accidentally killing your grandfather so that you are never born), but Time Crashers prefer the other variant, familiar to viewers of Back to the Future: the possibility of either incest (a sexual encounter with the mother in the past) or disturbing age gaps hidden by discrepancies between the hero's old mind and his young body.
But first, we need to take a look at the origins of the genre itself.