Authors

Discussion

This paper analyses selected works by the contemporary Russian émigré writer Sergei Lebedev in order to examine how the notion of deep time (prehistoric timescales that extend before and beyond human presence on Earth) operates as a subversive model of temporality in his fiction. Lebedev’s two novels, Belaya Dama (2024) and Predel Zabveniya (2013), serve as case studies in the proposed paper. In Belaya Dama, coal mining shafts in southern Ukraine, excavated since the late nineteenth century and later misused by the German Wehrmacht to dispose of and conceal Holocaust victims, emerge as a geological counter-archive. Shaft 3/4, where geological forces preserve human remains of the victims of the civil war up until the Russian occupation of the Donbas, functions as a mnemotechnical counterpart to the unstable file archives created, falsified, and destroyed by the various political regimes controlling the Donbas. In The Border of Oblivion, the adopted grandson of a former Gulag guard uncovers bodies and material remains of the Gulag infrastructure in the Siberian permafrost, thereby confronting the state-suppressed memory of Stalinist violence through archaeological and geological knowledge.
In both narratives, remnants of contested histories that are frequently targeted by state-directed Russian historiographies are embedded within geological timescales that exceed the chronopolitical frameworks of the present. The paper draws theoretically on critical discussions of extractivism and coloniality, which have been conducted for both Russian and US forms of settler colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Bolotova 2004; Lester 2020). It adapts these with regard to the specific cultural-historical contexts of Soviet mass suppression as well as the Russian invasion of the Donbas from 2014 onwards. A broader conceptualisation of geological formations as natural archives situates Lebedev’s novels within the field of the environmental humanities (Ilerbaig 2020). From a literary-historical standpoint, the paper traces the development of geological imagery and thought in Lebedev’s contemporary prose and links it to the evolution of this trope within Socialist Realist literature of the 1950s and 1960s.
A comparative analysis of Lebedev’s prose demonstrates how the notion of deep time is employed to challenge official memory regimes and historical erasures in post-Soviet Russia by offering deep time as a model of temporality that is able to store and secure knowledge of histories that are frequently targeted by the current Russian regime.