Anti-utopia and heterotopia: fictional carceral city in story “The City Without Money” by Kuzma Skriabin.

Abstract

The article represents an attempt of geopoetical view on post-Chornobyl story by famous Ukrainian poet and pop-singer A. Kuzmenko (a.k.a. Kuzma Skriabin). Analyzed text is the part of Ukrainian postcolonial and at the same time postmodern discourse, coined by T. Hundorova as “postChornobyl Library”. In the article based on ideas of U. Eco, M. Foucault and M. de Certeau an analysis of spatial frames and special narrative is being conducted. It is supposed that the topical parameters of the story could be interpreted in terms of “heterotopia” (“other space” which mixes cultural semantics, effectively excluded from the order of human space) and “anti-utopia”. The City, linked for sure with its prototype, Prypiat, is composed of heterotopias of lower level: railway station, cemetery, hotel, hospital and so on. The most powerful and valuable for plot spatial frames in the story are those with semantics of graveyard: depot of contaminated machines and empty rural house, which preserved signs of pre-evacuation life. It was proven that the transformation of Alisa, the heroine of the story, is marked with those catastrophic loci. The embodiment of power in the City was also traced. Transhumanistic experiments conducted in the City are interpreted as totalitarian practice: both idea of “panopticon” (M. Foucault) and inscribing of power in skin (M. de Certeau). The post-Soviet nature of totalitarianism is at the same time an effective deconstruction of the idea of total control: unilateral transparency, effectiveness of repression machine are doubted in organization of the City. The key communist utopical idea (exclusion of money) symbolically marks the failure of total idea.