The poisoned legacy of the Soviet past: landscapes in Olga Slavnikova’s fiction

Ol’ga Slavnikova’s novels "The Immortal" and "2017" are set in ‘provincial’ cities of the present Russian Federation, each identifiable with Ekaterinburg, which was renamed Sverdlovsk in Soviet times. Although the city has long since returned to its pre-revolutionary name, its urban landscapes bear the indelible traces of the Soviet period: the dilapidated housing structures in the background, in the case of the novel "The Immortal", or the monstrous abandoned industrial plants that do not cease, however, to deface the landscape and pollute the waterways, as in the case of "2017". Even the natural environment of the ‘Ripheian’ mountains, that is to say the Urals, does not escape such contamination. Here the predatory actions of humans literally dig into the depth of the ground in search of precious materials, poisoning the mountain territory with the use of chemicals designed to extract valuable minerals. Even the ‘hunters’ (khitniki) of gems are victims of their devastating effects. In Slavnikova’s novels these omnipresent residues of the Soviet era signal deep wounds not yet healed. They also symbolize, in particular in "2017", the sense of an inescapable return to the past, of cyclical repetition of the same historical errors, as evidenced by the ‘masked revolution’ of the denouement of the novel, which is particularly prophetic in the light of the most recent events.