Dartmouth Events

The philosophical fictions of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, the so-called "Soviet Borges," are a relatively recent discovery for scholars, having languished unpublished in Soviet archives for a half-century after being written by the then-unknown writer in the 1920s and 1930s. This talk focuses on the author's 1929 science-fiction novel Memories of the Future—specifically, how the novel repurposes the conventions of the time-travel narrative in order to challenge the era's reigning ideological and scientific conceptions of time. In contrast to the deterministic unfolding of events assumed in Marxist teleology and theoretical physics of his era, Krzhizhanovsky imagines the future to be an ontologically distinct temporal realm of overlapping (im)possibilities and indeterminacies—making him, in a sense, the first writer of the dawning quantum age.

Reed Johnson received his MA and PhD as the John S. Lillard /Jefferson Fellow in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia, where he also earned his MFA as a fellow in the university’s fiction writing program. After growing up in the Upper Valley, he spent most of a decade living and working in Russia, from investment banking to a drug-prevention program; from an initiative to bring the internet to public libraries in the Russian Far East to coordinating a study-abroad program out of the American Councils office in St. Petersburg. His research interests straddle Soviet and post-Soviet literature and culture, and he is currently at work on a monograph on Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s scientific and metaphysical imagination.

Sponsored by the Russian Department and the Arts and Humanities Dean of Faculty Office

Free and open to the public!