HOW IS THE RECYCLING OF THE FUTURE POSSIBLE? (THE CASE OF LIVING AND ADULT BY SERGEI YU. KUZNETSOV)

Abstract

My article deals with Sergei Kuznetsov’s novel The Living and the Adults, one of the literary works that were nominated for Russia’s most prestigious awards in 2019. Its plot is based on a peculiar vision of the Soviet history in the 1940s and the 1980s. In his novel, Kuznetsov mixes the genres of the so-called ‘school story’ and the fantastic horror, and seeks to recreate, in a literary form, the Soviet teenagers’ live experience. I suppose this is also the author’s attempt to revive and popularise his own memories of that time. In a certain sense, his novel belongs to the genre of autofiction and is a consequence of traumatic post-memory. In Kuznetsov’s fictional world, the theme and topoi of war dominate, referring to the period of 1941–1945. However, there is a drastic difference between Kuznetsov’s version of World War II and the real events. In Kuznetsov’s narrative, the war does not end in the 1940s but continues into the 1980s. In addition, some of Kuznetsov’s characters plan to continue their fight into the future as well. In other words, Kuznetsov is writing a piece of the war horror genre; he is describing a permanent war, i.e., one in which the past of war is united with the future, and in which the former and the latter are identical. It is therefore possible to identify Kuznetsov’s approach to the Soviet history not only as ‘recycling of the past’ but also as a ‘recycling of the future’. His recycling of history thus differs critically from what might be called, to say, ‘therapeutic recycling’, which implies healing the trauma of the past. Otherwise, Kuznetsov leaves this trauma unhealed in his novel and even reinforces it with a particular poetics and ‘rhetoric of fiction’.

Keywords: Soviet teenagers, cultural recycling, World War II, ‘school story’ genre, horror, Russian literature, post-memory, trauma