SUMMARY

The article by Mikhail Suslov explores the ways identities were imagined in Russian utopias at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. The author conceives of narrative utopias as forms of political intervention. The article claims that those utopias not only reflected the hegemonic structures of spatial imagination in prerevolutionary Russia but also suggested new ways of development of the geopolitical imagination beyond the imperial and colonial paradigms. At the same time, those utopias reveal self-annihilating contradictions that were a result of complexities and constraints involved in imagining a radically novel political world. Thus, even cosmic utopias with socialist programs reproduced the metanarrative of hegemonic European culture. Only those authors of utopias who lived through catharsis in the form of real or literary catastrophe and disillusionment could transgress the conventions of imperialist pleasures and imagine “communities of trauma.” These latter types of utopias refracted features of Slavophilic messianism. In the literary imagination, the community was envisioned by authors as founded on national homogeneity or a pan-national (pan-Slavic) federation. Suslov concludes that the consolidation of post-imperial society as portrayed in those utopias may be understood as a result of the process of internal decolonization. The article pays close attention to political projects by S.F. Sharapov, who was a prominent neo-Slavophile publicist and author of works of fiction. Sharapov’s works clearly demonstrate how the internal logic of Russian fin-de-siècle utopias necessarily led to the reduction of inner contradictions in the dynamically modernizing imperial society and to the self-liquidation of utopia as a literary genre.