Post-Apocalypse and the Enduring Nuclear in Post-Soviet Russian Fiction (original) (raw)

This is a long, pre-print draft of an essay to appear in Toxic Immanence: Nuclear Legacies, Futures, and the Place of Twenty-First Century Nuclear Environmental Humanities, edited by Livia Monnet and Peter van Wyck, from McGill-Queen's University Press. The chapter explores generic and ideological contradictions in the post-catastrophist imaginary of the nuclear, using Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033 as a paradigmatic example of post-Soviet Russian speculative fiction, and examines the political implications of the transmedial refashioning of Glukovsky’s novel for mass consumption within international video game markets as a post-apocalyptic first person shooter (FPS). I will focus on the concept of the “enduring nuclear,” which indicates on one hand the long, seemingly imperceptible temporalities of radioactive decay and the “slow violence” of nuclear disaster, but which also alludes to the ways in which the post-catastrophic genre is bound up with a sense of impossible or blocked futurity, resulting in the contradiction that speculative post-Soviet fictions such as Metro 2033, while post-apocalyptic, seem incapable of imagining a transition to a post-nuclear modernity. If a central task of energy humanities critics is to ask, “Who gets to imagine energy futures?” comparative literary topographies are essential to the formulation of a nuclear energy humanities. A world-literary approach to nuclear environmental criticism should uncover not only imaginaries corresponding to British and American nuclear culture and the dominance of the US imperium, but also on the enduring nuclear futures imagined in post-Soviet Russia and other global contexts of nuclear development in the twenty-first century, such as China, India, and Iran. The globalization of the nuclear can be mapped “through the trace of militarized radiation.” Our capitalist nuclear modernity is above all a global modernity–singular, planetary, and world-historical –in which all forms of earthly life have been altered by the atmospheric effects of nuclear development