Authors

Discussion

The poetics of the French writer (but with Russian roots) Antoine Volodine is one of the most peculiar in contemporary European literary canon. This distinctiveness stems first and foremost from Volodine's unconventional approach to authorship: he conceptualizes himself not as the author of his books but as a spokesperson for imaginary writers belonging to an esoteric literary movement termed 'post-exoticism'. These fictional authors are confined to a prison within a dreamlike, dystopian, and post-apocalyptic dimension. Their imprisonment is attributed to their naive yet sincere adherence to Soviet ideology. In an effort to perpetuate their political struggle against capitalism and totalitarian regimes (particularly those representing a corruption of communist ideals), the post-exotic authors collectively and clandestinely produce novels and poems in the form of samizdat, which Volodine disseminates in our reality through his books. This imaginative framework, comprising the post-exotic writers and their prison environment, serves as the implicit frame story for the forty-seven books that Volodine has published since 1985 to date. A further hallmark of the French writer's poetics is the portrayal of his protagonists (who function as alter egos of the post-exotic authors) traversing the ruins of a weird Second Soviet Union in a hallucinatory state between life and death. The Second Soviet Union represents a retrofuturistic, anti-utopian, and uchronic chronotope that allegorizes and hyperbolizes certain tragic aspects of the 20th century and contemporary Eastern European and Asian history. These include civil wars, ethnic purges, internment camps, coerced collectivization, pervasive censorship, bureaucratic corruption, and natural calamities. The Second Soviet Union is also populated by fantastic entities that are deformed and parodic reincarnations of archetypal figures found in novels of socialist realism, Slavic folklore (bylinas and fairy tales), and shamanistic and Buddhist cosmologies. Despite the disruption of Soviet utopia and the dissolution of the distinction between reality and supernatural, Volodine's protagonists rediscover the 'radiant future' through the adoption of an ironic stance towards political catastrophes and through their collective engagement in storytelling, thus mirroring the axiology of the post-exotic writers in the frame story. 

This contribution examines Antoine Volodine's poetics and the chronotope of the Second Soviet Union. The first part of the paper explores the intellectual profile of the French writer (who is a specialist in Slavic, Eurasian, Soviet, and dissident cultures) and the salient aspects of his literary manifesto: Post-exoticism in Ten Lessons. Lesson Eleven (1998). The second part of the presentation is a thematic analysis of the depiction of the Second Soviet Union in Radiant Terminus (2014), one of the French writer's most acclaimed novels.