Authors

Discussion

My paper aims to investigate literary formation of national narratives in the period of industrialization of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. The action of Valentin Kataev's Time, Forward! takes place at a construction site in Magnitogorsk, uniquely located on the border of Europe and Asia. Asia as a geographical space, as well as an exotic and economically backward cultural space, is at the center of reflections on industrialization, national politics and modernity in this novel. Since the time of the novel’s creation, in the USSR the words "Asia" and "Asian" became synonymous with backwardness and technical illiteracy the purpose of my paper is to illuminate the possible role of the writer in creating the myth of the Soviet "Asian". Despite the fact that the writer sought to show that national conflict does not exist in a country where communism won, the presence of this conflict is noticeable at the narratological level. The methodological basis of the proposed paper is the approach of narrative interpretation developed by Fredric Jameson. Most of his method is directed at bringing out political meanings latent in works that would appear to be unpolitical. In this paper, I want to show that using his theory about the political subconscious could be fruitful for analyzing texts, that were politically biased but attended by implicit ambiguities.