Variations of technical anti-utopies and local apocalypses in the novel by Vs. Ivanov and V.B. Shklovsky “Iprit”

Abstract

This article analyzes the dystopian and apocalyptic elements of Vs. Ivanov and V.B. Shklovsky’s novel “Iprit”. The primary objective of the study is to identify the book’s components of technical anti-utopies and local apocalypses, characterize their nature and specifics, outline their interrelations, and evaluate the quality of the writers’ artistic prognostications. The paper demonstrates the imaginary nature of the oppositions between the specific dystopias and the utopia of “Iprit” – Western and Soviet – and identifies the cause, nature, and consequences of the wars organized by the West against the USSR and the East liberating itself from colonialism, wars that lead to a series of localized global apocalypses, and documents the characteristics of post-apocalyptic reality. It is also established that the novel’s intertextual layer, in addition to numerous serious and parodic references to world and Soviet literature, the authors’ own works, and the socio-political situation contemporary to the writers, also contains a dialogue with V.S. Solovyov’s essay “A Short Tale of the Antichrist” from “Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of World History”. The images, motifs, and individual plots of that Solovyov work are subjected to a travesty-like modernization in “Iprit”, adjusted up to changing technical and economic realities, while retaining their warning potential.