Phantoms of the Future and Nostalgic Vision (Shamil Idiatullin’s Novel The Return of “Pioneer”)

Abstract

The article analyzes the plot of Shamil Idiatullin’s novel The Return of “Pioneer”. The author considers the correlation of the verbal and the visual in the text and makes a conclusion about the cinematic layer of imagery in the novel’s plot. Nostalgia, memory and reminiscences of the Soviet past organize complex narrative optics through a special cinematic code in the novel. Among the main source pre-texts are the novel by Kir Bulychev One Hundred Years Ahead (1978) and the film A Guest from the Future (1985). The visual text presented in the novel narrative with diverse motifs, from visual puzzles and visual memes taken from classical fantasy fiction to the film text, problematizes the genre of utopia and dystopia from the point of view of “teenage” and “adult” socio-critical fiction. The plot presents a “deception” story that cannot be read straightforwardly either as “hard fiction” or as another fantasy on the theme of time travelers: dreams of the future turn into nostalgic dreams, and the “teenage” adventure fiction elaborates the theme of “Krapivin pioneer boys» as a way to detect the symptoms of modernity and goes on to the register of the tradition of social fiction, partly socio-satirical and socio-philosophical.

Keywords

• shamil idiatullin
• kir bulychev
• soviet science fiction
• young adult fiction
• nostalgia
• film text