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"More than 700 'utopian' novels are published in Russia every year. These utopias - meaning here fantasy fiction, science fiction, space operas or alternative history - do not set out merely to titillate; instead they express very real Russian anxieties: be they territorial right-sizing, loss of imperial status or turning into a 'colony' of the West. Contributors to this innovative collection use these narratives to re-examine post-Soviet Russian political culture and identity. Interrogating the intersections of politics, ideologies and fantasies, chapters draw together the highbrow literary mainstream (authors such as Vladimir Sorokin), mass literature for entertainment and individuals who bridge the gap between fiction writers and intellectuals or ideologists (Aleksandr Prokhanov, for example, the editor-in-chief of Russia's far-right newspaper Zavtra). In the process The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia sheds crucial light onto a variety of debates - including the rise of nationalism, right-wing populism, imperial revanchism, the complicated presence of religion in the public sphere, the function of language - and is important reading for anyone interested in the heightened importance of ideas, myths, alternative histories and conspiracy theories in Russia today."--Bloomsbury Publishing Introduction, Per-Arne Bodin, Mikhail Suslov -- PART 1. (GEO)POLITICAL IMAGINATION -- Chapter 1. Provinces, piety, and promotional Putinism: -- Mapping Aleksandr Prokhanov's counter-utopian Russia, Edith W. Clowes -- Chapter 2. Othering Russia: Eduard Limonov's retrofuturistic (anti- ) utopia, Andrei Rogatchevski -- Chapter 3. Telluro-cosmic imperial utopia and contemporary Russian art, Maria Engström -- PART 2. SCIENCE FICTION, IDEOLOGY AND POLITICS -- Chapter 4. Conservative science fiction in contemporary Russian literature and politics, Mikhail Suslov -- Chapter 5. Religio-political utopia by Iana Zavatskaia, Anastasia Mitrofanova -- Chapter 6. "Respectable xenophobia:" Science fiction, utopia and conspiracy, Viktor Shnirel'man -- PART 3. ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES, ALTERNATIVE GEOGRAPHIES -- Chapter 7. Alternative Russian revolution: Viacheslav Rybakov and Kir Bulychev, Go Koshino -- Chapter 8. Ressentiment and post-traumatic syndrome in Russian post-Soviet speculative fiction: Two trends, Maria Galina -- PART 4. LANGUAGE IN/OF UTOPIA -- Chapter 9. Church Slavonic in Russian dystopias and utopias, Per-Arne Bodin -- Chapter 10. Contested utopias: Language ideologies in Valerii Votrin's Logoped, Ingunn Lunde -- Chapter 11. 'Londongrad' as a linguistic imaginary: Russophone migrants in the UK in the work of Michael Idov and Andrei Ostalsky, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke -- PART 5. POST-MODERN UTOPIA -- Chapter 12. Parameters of space-time and degrees of (un)-freedom: Dmitry Bykov's ZhD, Sofya Khagi -- Chapter 12. Lazarus on the ark: Heterotopias in the novels of Vladimir Sharov and Evgenii Vodolazkin, Muireann Maguire -- Chapter 14. The new "norma": Vladimir Sorokin's Telluria and post-utopian science fiction, Mark Lipovetsky.
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