In 2015, Erin James united narratology and ecocriticism under the concept of econarratology, focusing on ecological issues in nonrealistic texts that do not directly represent the environment. She proposed that analyzing narrative structures offers new ways to understand ecocritical discourse. This is useful for Russian non-mimetic literature, such as dystopia and science fiction. 

This roundtable examines Russian post-Soviet dystopia through econarratology, considering Russia’s tendency to revisit history. Contemporary Russian literature often revisits past traumas, making the concept of memory central. Astrid Erll (2009) develops narratology at the intersection of structuralism and the sociology of memory. Drawing on Augustine’s definition of storytelling as “an act of memory” (2009: 213), she identifies three intersections of memory and narrative: blending actual past traces with imagined elements, selection and structuring, and amplification of memory through narrative. 

Erll highlights the link between cultural memory and national identity, with German scholarship framing stories as “founding myths.” She underscores the “memorial power of literary form” (2009: 220), aligning with ecocriticism. Recent interest focuses on memory across “deep time” – how literature processes memory on a planetary scale. Building on Timothy Morton, I suggest Erll’s “memorial narratology” can evolve into a method for narrating the Anthropocene, adapting poststructuralist narratology to a planetary, post-humanist context. Eduard Verkin’s Island Sakhalin (2018) exemplifies this as both Chekhov’s travel paraphrase and climate fiction, a postcolonial narrative interrogating geography and history ecologically. 

Recent issues such as Textual Practice’s “Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction” and Parallax’s “Memory after Humanism” reflect this ecological turn. Erll’s narratology of cultural memory, combined with cognitive and ecological approaches, offers a toolkit for analyzing post-Soviet and Anthropocene literature. It treats memory as a dynamic process linking narrative, history, and the planet. 

Lotman (Vnutri Mysljaschikh Mirov) argues that history is “to imagine the past,” while memory is “the instrument of thinking in the present” (1996: 384). History is an active mechanism of the present. Hubert Zapf sees literature as an ecological force: “a sensorium and imaginative sounding-board for hidden conflicts… and a source of creative renewal” (2016: 28). Placing post-Soviet literature within this framework shows environmental discourse’s main force is history and memory. Russian writers reconstruct past events through varied narrative techniques; this paper thus investigates the specificities of Russian environmental narrative by understanding the past as an active agent.