SUMMARY:

The novel The Island of Crimea was written by Vasily Aksyonov in 1979, before his emigration from the USSR to the United States. Once perceived as a powerful anti-utopian piece and a satire on the Soviet regime, today this visionary book is classified as a work of alternative history, so popular with contemporary Russian readers. The actual annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 seemed to confirm the mainstream interpretation of the novel as revealing the power of Russian nationalist and populist instincts. Ilya Gerasimov suggests a different reading of this text, arguing that behind the uneven melodramatic plot of the novel lies a truly tragic story that could not be identified until very recently. Only in Putin’s post-Crimea Russia, it becomes clear that Aksyonov was telling the story of a free society surrendering not to a foreign power, but to its own troubled past. As the fictive Island of Crimea, the present-day Russian Federation falls completely under the sway of Soviet history as the only authentic (“native”) sociocultural model. This happens not out of any sympathies for dictatorship and terror, but because the real alternative implies not only democracy and prosperity. As Aksyonov demonstrates in the novel, the future of Russian modernity implies abandoning the established familiar Russian cultural code in favor of some unknown hybrid amalgamation of various national cultures (embodied by the new hybrid nation of the Yaki). Russian culture has always been transnational and open to hybridization, but a rigid cultural canon formed in the course of the twentieth century locked it in a normative identity politics. Unable to accommodate the ever changing and globalizing world any longer, this rigid cultural canon presents a dramatic dilemma – to reinvent Russianness by embracing all local forms of cultural production (confessional, linguistic, ideological, etc.) or to retreat to its most comprehensive fixed version (that of mythologized High Sovietness). The pressure of normative identity politics is so powerful, that even the Westernizer and democrat Aksyonov chose the second option and visibly manipulated the logic of the novel to compromise the prospects of the Yaki – the hybrid post-Russian culture of the free Island of Crimea. Likewise, the actual modern Russian society is scared by the prospect of abandoning normative Russian identity politics for some unknown – even if truly authentic and creative – new hybrid arrangement.