2017 11/07 Riccardo Nicolosi

Riccardo Nicolosi

Counterfactual History in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia

Riccardo Nicolosi has been Full Professor for Slavic Literatures at the LMU Munich since 2014. His publications include Die Petersburg-Panegyrik. Russische Stadtliteratur im 18. Jahrhundert (2002; Russian Translation: Peterburgskii panegirik XVIII veka, 2009) and Degeneration erzählen. Literatur und Wissenschaft im Russland der 1880er und 1890er Jahre (2017). Currently he is working on a book called Modeling Counterfactual History in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.

Graduate student inquirer: Charlie Smith, UIC Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures

Summary

The project examines the pragmatics of counterfactuals, i.e. of scenarios that take the question "What would have happened, if ..." as a starting point, on the macro level of cultural processes. In this project, cultural conditions and functions as well as structural characteristics of counterfactual narration of the past are explored. I equally focus on history, especially on its historiosophical component, and on fictional alternate histories in literature. We will examine the exemplary case of Soviet and post-Soviet culture: Its historical-cultural characteristics with the rejection of counterfactual thinking in the Soviet era followed by a strong propagation of conjectural history in post-Soviet Russia allow us to study the cultural mechanisms that foster the emergence of counterfactual models of history. Furthermore, in Russia, counterfactual scenarios are closely connected to cultural memory, whereby their social and historical-political function becomes clearly visible. Moreover, with a part of the project comprising a comparative perspective, more general literary and cultural theoretical conclusions can be drawn.