INFERNAL ARCHITECTURES. DYSTOPIAS AND SOVIET UTOPIAS IN THE NOVEL DOOMED CITY, BY ARCADI AND BORIS STRUGATSKY

Abstract

Dystopia or negative utopia is a subgenre that English literature has made famous, particularly since the works of George Orwell (1984, 1948) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932). However, it is often overlooked that the first modern anti-utopia belongs to a Russian author, Evgueni Zamiátin: the novel We (My, 1922), a late modernity product. This work established the paradigms that would characterize henceforth dystopia. In 1968, the brothers Arcadi and Boris Strugatsky, leading figures of Soviet science fiction in those years, will rework from these bases a city no longer dystopian but infernal and obscurely irrational, axis of his novel Doomed City (Grab obrechonni), a Dystopia already in postmodern key, taking it to an authentic (and unresolved) statement about the nature of evil. From a theoretical framework that links the evolution of negative utopias with science fiction, our hypothesis implies that this novel, a curious synthesis of science, politics, esotericism and literature, defines a new type of dystopian work. The landscape of ruins that it implies, so valued to science fiction after the fall of the Berlin Wall, becomes a system of synecdoches that represents, from the aesthetics of the fragment, a deep nihilism where postmodernity takes the form of an abyss.