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12 Russo-Soviet Topoi MIKHAIL EPSTEIN Translated by Jeffrey Karlsen In attempting to apply the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope to Soviet civilization, one discovers a curious pattern: chronos is consistently displaced and swallowed up by topos. Chronos tends toward zero, toward the suddenness of miracle, toward the instantaneousness of revolutionary or eschatological transformation. Topos, correspondingly , tends toward infinity, striving to encompass an enormous land mass and even the earth itself. This is, to a certain extent, a long-standing Russian tradition. The very history of this nation, as V.O. Kluchevsky wrote, has been one of the continuous colonization of new lands, of the conquest of space on all four sides of the earth and then—as Nikolai Fedorov insisted, referring to the exposure and meteorological capacity, or “skyness,” of the Russian plain—in the direction of the cosmos. The very history of Russia is the otherness of its geography; historical periods are marked not by purely temporal changes but rather by dislocations and expansions in space: The periods of our history represent the successive stages traversed by our people during that people’s occupation and development of such country as it acquired up to the time when natural growth plus assimilation of non-Russians brought it about that the Russian population not only overspread the whole plain but passed beyond its boundaries. Also, the periods represent, in sequence, the series of halts or rests which . . . [interrupted] for a time the Russian population’s movement over the plain.1 This spatial orientation also shapes the eschatological tendency in Russian consciousness, a strange mixture of geography and eschatology that leads toward the topoi of an otherworldly realm. That which 277 resides outside of and above time is itself assimilated as a new region, as an “other” continent (supplementing Europe and Asia) that Russian eschatological consciousness wants to annex to the imperial domain— so that world history might gradually begin to provide glimpses of other, more lofty lands and provinces. Eschatology is the geography of new land and new sky to which the nation, on the basis of its experience and previous territorial conquests, would have the right to migrate. Because Russia had become accustomed to solving its historical problems geographically, it came to occupy an area so large that finding its place in time became somewhat difficult. Over the last three centuries, Russia fervently strove to enter history, but merely in order to overcome it, to outstrip instantaneously the Western nations, which were proceeding steadily along their historical paths, with the result that Russia would end up on the “other side of history,” in the realm of the frozen moment and boundless space. Amid nations conventionally categorized as either historical or ahistorical, Russia chose a special “suprahistorical ” path: even as it enters history, it is already preparing its exit. Time in Russia is displaced by physical and metaphysical space— this is the Archimedean law of the immersion of a large geographical body in history. The vaster Russia became, the more slowly historical time flowed within it; conversely, as it shrank in space, it accelerated in time. Burdened by its new space, Russia would lapse into historical prostration, as it did following its two victorious European campaigns , in 1812 and 1945. Conversely, following unsuccessful wars—the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, World War I—Russia lost portions of its territory and immediately received a stimulus to historical acceleration: reforms and revolution. The failure of the Afghan war exposed the limits of communism’s spatial expansion and, having nudged the empire on to internal changes, stimulated its disintegration . In relinquishing its republics and Eastern Europe, Russia, having discarded the unwieldy space of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, became the most dynamic (and perhaps the most volatile) region of the world. In this chapter I offer some thoughts on the methods of organization of Soviet space. I wrote all of the following sketches in 1982–83 in Moscow, that is, from within the space they describe; they bear the stamp of “intralocality” (vnutrinakhodimost’). One of the peculiarities of Soviet space was its topological impermeability, the notion that it could be understood only “from the inside.” It was assumed to be impenetra278 MIKHAIL EPSTEIN ble to those located outside of it. I was able to fulfill this condition— existence within the described space—because I was not allowed to travel outside the USSR until 1986. Perhaps the chief paradox of Russian-Soviet space, a paradox that in one...

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