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This dissertation establishes a category of early Soviet “exodic” literature, which consists of works published in Yiddish or Russian between 1917 and 1935. Reading together texts by Peretz Markish, Andrei Platonov, Moyshe Kulbak, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, Yiddish texts are placed on equal footing with Russian texts to underscore the singular role of Jews in the early Soviet period and demonstrate shared anxieties and practices of resistance to hegemony among groups seemingly separated by language and culture. These anxieties and modes of resistance are what make the Soviet exodic a literature of revolution as it grapples with the complexity of the Soviet period and Soviet identity formation. Drawing upon political theorist Michael Walzer and his text Exodus and Revolution as well as the critical response from Edward Said, this dissertation uses the biblical book of Exodus as a theoretical matrix for the identification and elaboration of narrative sequences and thematic material that constitute a revolutionary genre and applies it to the study of early Soviet literature. Because they are written and published between 1917 and 1935, exodic texts are positioned between the Bolshevik Revolution and the crystallization of high Stalinism. Therefore, they are situated within what is commonly known as the “interwar period.” Such a definition relies upon absence (the absence of war). The Soviet exodic provides this historical moment and its attending texts a positive definition in deference to the revolutionary framework that guides it. This dissertation also considers how the texts enact revolution with the help of critical and queer theory, most notably Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and Mary Rubenstein’s Pantheologies. These theoretical supports serve to articulate the various queer—that is, non-normative—ways that the selected texts engage pluralism to resist ideological regimes and forces of control as they re-evaluate social and political categories and norms. Queer theory also serves to express the entanglement of self, other, and place, and in so doing, brings ecological anxieties to the fore. Resistance in the Soviet exodic thus takes shape through the queering or misalignment of categories like space, language, or gender performance, and culminates in the figure of the Soviet trickster, who, by means of their unfinalizability, is the embodiment of revolution.

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Present Perfect is part intellectual history of the discourse of humanism in twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Russian culture, and part cultural history of the New Man in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, looking primarily at works of Soviet and post-Soviet fantastika (science fiction and fantasy). The study employs a critical posthumanist methodology drawn from the work of Jean-François Lyotard, and his concept of “rewriting” modernity (here transformed into “rewriting humanism”), and the posthumanist theorization of scholars like Rosi Braidotti and Stefan Hebrechter. The first chapter covers the pre- and post-revolutionary periods, the second chapter the post-Stalinist period, and the third the post-Soviet. The first chapter looks at critiques of humanism in the non-fictional works of religious philosophers and writers (Fedorov, Berdiaev, Ivanov, Merezhkovsky), Soviet ideologues and writers (Lunacharsky, Trotsky, Bukharin, Gorky), and some writers who fall between the two poles (Blok, Mandelshtam, Lezhnev), and covers texts published between 1906 and 1934. The second chapter deals with the works of the Strugatsky brothers’ Noon Universe series (1961-86) and the figure of the “Progressor” as the New Man. The third chapter looks at novels by three authors: Petrushevskaya’s Nomer Odin (2004), Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F. (2011), and Sorokin’s Ice trilogy (2002-05). These works attest to the inextricable interpenetration of the posthuman with the human, of posthumanism with humanism, of the post-Soviet with the Soviet. The study demonstrates how humanism and posthumanism function dialectically: in the best-case scenario, they negate one another to come to a more whole understanding of the human; in the worst-case scenario, this dialectic creates an increasingly more exclusive humanism that reserves the title of ideal subject for fewer and fewer. Moreover, Present Perfect argues that the New Man (that “ideal subject”) in Soviet and post-Soviet fiction is best conceptualized as a field of competing discourses, which fall along three lines of development: the animal-man, the machine-man, and the god-man, each with their own critical orientation toward humanism. In both the Soviet and post-Soviet context, writers like the Strugatsky brothers, Petrushevskaya, Pelevin, and Sorokin employ a critical posthumanism to demonstrate, on the one hand, how the New Man is used as a tool for discursive domination that denies otherness, and on the other, how the New Man can be reconceptualized as a tool for a liberatory ethics that affirms it.

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