Documentary evidence in the space of post-truth as a dystopian strategy in the novel “Pavel Zhang and Other River Creatures” by V. Bogdanova

About the author:

Sofya M. Krymskaya, Postgraduate Student, Department of Russian and Foreign Philology, Vladimir State University named after A. G. and N. G. Stoletovs, Vladimir, Russia; sonya.miss-sonya@yandex.ru, https://orcid.org/0009-0009-4707-5484, https://elibrary.ru/author_profile.asp?authorid=1249353

Abstract:

The article analyses V. Bogdanova’s novel “Pavel Zhang and Other River Creatures” as an artistic model of digital dystopia, which reworks the recognisable reality of the modern world based on knowledge of the latest developments in the media environment. By constructing a post-truth world as a form of total control, the writer demonstrates how physical space is transformed into an information bubble, where people become elements of a database. The media nature of contemporary documents in the context of streaming data transmission turns the act of recording into an act of falsification. The figure of the chronicler character, who simultaneously acts as a witness and a victim, intensifies the conflict between personal experience and collective memory: one’s own memories turn out to be dependent on the digital trace. Thus, V. Bogdanova’s novel, rethinking the dystopian tradition in the context of contemporary media transformations, turns the genre form into a means of philosophical reflection on the themes of memory and documentary, and criticism of the present through futurological modelling.

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