Imagined Riverography of Late Twentieth-Century Russian Prose

This doctoral dissertation examines imaginations of rivers and riverscapes in Russian natural-philosophical prose of the 1970s–1990s from an ecocritical point of view. It also analyses Russian environmental philosophical discussions of the same period, outlining the confluences and differences between them and the corresponding international discourse. The dissertation offers new perspectives on the interconnections of Russian literature, Russian environmental history, Russian environmental thought, and the river. The dissertation coins the term ‘imagined riverography’, which refers to the ways literary works inscribe and imagine the river, producing spaces that intersect with physical geography. The main objective is to explore representations of the river and its connection to people in late Soviet and early post-Soviet Russian natural-philosophical prose, and to analyse the ecocritical meanings they convey.

The theoretical foundation draws on spatiality, environmental humanities, and, most importantly, ecocriticism, which is interested in the ways texts mediate environmental ideas and understandings of the natural environment. The work belongs to the recent international turn in ecocriticism, where works from multiple cultures and languages have been focused on and where theories, concepts, and methods are integrated in an interdisciplinary fashion. The study expands the scope of contemporary ecocriticism by focusing on Russian literature. The research questions correspond to the ecocritical perspective, which means that the relationship of literature and the physical environment are studied from the point of view and being conscious of the environmental concern that humanity’s detrimental impact on the biosphere has generated.

The dissertation produces new knowledge on meanings of rivers in the literature written by representatives of the natural-philosophical wing of the so-called Soviet village prose movement. It shows that in their literature, environmental concern is connected closely to the river. They discuss burning environmental problems – such as the overexploitation of natural resources, contamination of natural waters, extensive submergence of lands due to damming, and draught due to excessive irrigation – in ways where the river is a main agent. Their works create an imagined riverography, where the Soviet environmental catastrophe threatens the future of Russian rivers and, consequently, the future of Russian culture. The analysed works are environmental because of their imagined riverography, where human material corporeality is inseparable from the other-than-human, where proximity to a river is essential for the fulfilment of environmental justice, where the river is an essential precondition for human culture, and where moral questions are vital.

This dissertation consists of four peer-reviewed publications and a summary, which provides the work’s background, summarizes the study and presents the conclusions. The theoretical and methodological frameworks stem from the specific research questions of each of the publications. The dissertation introduces concepts and perspectives from Russian natural-philosophical research to international ecocriticism. All the publications involve close reading, and the central theoretical concepts that permeate through the work are space, place, the river’s agency, environmental history, natural-philosophical prose, and imagined riverography. The other main concepts applied in the individual publications are trans-corporeality, environmental justice, the noosphere, the Anthropocene, ecology of culture, and literature as cultural ecology. Other theoretical concepts that the dissertation discusses include abstract space, the development of environmental thought, landscape science, the homosphere, and noosphere stories.

Publications I–III analyse autobiographical fiction. Publication I analyses the river’s cultural and material relationship with the people living in contact with it in Viktor Astafev’s novel Queen Fish (1976). It shows how the human and other-than-human spaces constitute one trans-corporeal whole, which helps to see them as inseparable from each other rather than as two distinct realms. It also discusses how metaphors of the river convey environmental meanings in the work. Publication II illustrates how the absence of the river is the cause of a deficit of environmental justice in Valentin Rasputin’s river prose of the 1970s. It also examines the ways in which changes due to modernization turn the meaningful place of the river into a meaningless, abstract space in Rasputin’s travel essay “Upstream and Downstream” (1972). Publication III concentrates on depictions of geographical metaphors and understandings of the riverine environment in Sergei Zalygin’s An Environmental Novel (1993) and states that the failure to understand the significance of Vladimir Vernadskii’s concept of the noosphere that he introduced in the 1920s–1930s is central in the novel’s critique of the Soviet state’s so-called amelioration of the natural environment. It further argues that the novel associates Lev Berg’s concept of geographical landscapes with environmentalism and contrasts it with Andrei Grigor’ev’s ideas that the Soviet state supported and that were based on dialectical materialism and the Stalinist interpretation of Engels’s dialectics of nature.

Publication IV investigates Dmitrii Likhachëv’s two non-fiction essays, both titled “Ecology of Culture” (1979, 2000). It details how Likhachëv’s ecology of culture differs from cultural ecology by emphasizing morals, traditional values, and Christian ideology instead of highlighting literature’s potential as an ecological force, despite the common premise of human cultures having evolved in close interrelationship with the material environment. Publication IV further explains how Russian natural-philosophical prose’s representations of the river illustrate its inherent connections to ecology of culture and its role as cultural ecology.

The dissertation also analyses the metaphors through which late twentieth-century Russian natural-philosophical prose produces meanings of the river. The most powerful metaphors are the ‘river of life’ and the ‘river of death’. The ‘river of life’ reflects water’s characteristic as a constituent of life that also symbolizes life. The river flow can determine the destinies of people, prevent people from taking their own life, and turn them towards dedicating their life to the protection of nature. The ‘river of life’ is an active agent and a medium between the realms of nature and culture. The ‘river of death’ confronts people with dangers. The death of a river can be depicted as a drowning, a personified dramatic turn of events that humankind has initiated, turning the freely flowing ‘river of life’ into a stagnant ‘river of death’. A contaminated river loses its life-giving character and can make a dedicated environmentalist self-destructive. Together, the two metaphors create a national awareness of Russian culture as something for which the river is indispensable.

The imagined riverography that this dissertation outlines extends to that part of the latest realist Russian literature that is often described as traditionalist and referred to as ‘new realism’. The summary of the dissertation briefly discusses Russian literary works of the twenty-first century that openly refer to the study’s research material, that draw inspiration from the studied writers, and that recycle the river tropes that they produce by bringing them to the contemporary context.

This dissertation concludes that even though late Soviet Russian natural-philosophical prose rose from national premises, it bears many similarities with international environmental literature. Its driving ideology has a conservative and nationalistic character, while the international environmental consciousness is usually associated with liberalism and internationalism. Despite this difference, the common environmental anxiety resulted in similar phenomena in the environmental literatures of different spheres. Ecocritical research is not practiced in Russia, but the Russian literary and philosophical traditions bear multiple confluences with ecocritical applications. It may not be justified to say that ecocriticism as such exists in Russia, but practices similar to those promoted by ecocriticism certainly do.