New Trends in Russian Utopia and Dystopia Under Putin

The talk examines the evolution of the anthropological model in Russian and international dystopian fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The dystopian human is approached not as an unchanging victim of the totalitarian state, but as a historically evolving subject whose body, memory, language, emotions, and ludic practices become materials of power. A comparative and typological analysis of works by Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Vladimir Nabokov, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Vladimir Voinovich, Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Dmitry Danilov, and Alexei Konakov is combined with hermeneutics, structural-semiotic analysis, and theories of discipline, biopolitics, bare life, necropolitics, cultural memory, cultural capital, and play. The talk demonstrates that the classical protagonist retains an inner distance from the system, whereas the contemporary character increasingly internalizes its rules and reproduces power through his or her own desires. The algorithm, ritual, urban space, narcotic attraction, and play constitute distinct modes of the anthropological appropriation of the human being. Dystopia therefore diagnoses not the disappearance of the subject, but the production of a subject for whom it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish coercion from choice.