L’Immortale di Ol’ga Slavnikova: esperienze corporee del tempo attraverso gli oggetti

In the novel "The Man Who Couldn’t Die" (Bessmertnyi, 2001) by Olga Slavnikova objects of the Soviet past are used to freeze time in a dimension of illusory stability, while outside the «immortal» Aleksei Afanasevich’s room the world is changing at an incredibly fast pace. The first pages of the novel are crowded with objects that recall the veteran’s experience as an army scout in the Great Patriotic War and of everyday life in the Soviet Union. His wife Nina lives with him in the claustrophobic flat where history has stopped, while his stepdaughter Marina lives in the outside world experiencing a condition of instability in the post-Soviet ‘wild’ nineties. Here even the objects of the past era are tangible signs of the all-pervasive precarity of the new age, while the functions of new, objects and new rules remain for Marina difficult to understand. It turns out that both mother and daughter are trying to perpetuate the comforting Soviet stability, not only for the veteran’s sake, but also for themselves. I will try to show that this novel, published in 2001, was particularly prophetic in its portrayal of post-Soviet reality and its atmosphere of ressentiment and self-destructive nostalgia. Furthermore, I will argue that it has Bulgakovian-like satirical details that, with hindsight, explain the success and duration of the new political establishment in that country.