"Incident on the Tun River" by Vs. Ivanov: a oneiric projection of the future and the enclosed space of dystopia

The short story "Incident on the Tun River" (1925) by V. Ivanov in the works of the renowned Soviet author represents one of the variants of the dystopian genre. Thus, the novel "Iprite," co-written with V. B. Shklovsky (1925), is a travesty work that simultaneously serves as a serious warning about the potential for a technical dystopia to devolve into an apocalypse. The novel "U" (1931–1933) reveals a hidden dystopia obstructed by an affectatious petty bourgeois. In this context, "Incident on the Tun River" illustrates how the future becomes a projection of the present. The object of research in the article is the dystopian and antiutopian motifs in Ivanov's "Incident on the Tun River," while the subject of the research is the specificity of the implementation of elements of these genres, considering the analysis of the motif structure of the text. Methods of genre, motif, and hermeneutic analysis are employed. The story is simultaneously classified as an antiutopia and a dystopia. It also investigates motifs of cold, violence, death, technology, and architecture, present in the current time and projected into the future. Based on the motif analysis conducted, assumptions are made regarding the specificity of the perception of the revolutionary project by both the author and the reader. The relevance of the study is determined by literary scholarship's interest in Ivanov's works, which remain not only insufficiently studied but also not fully published. The novelty of the research stems from the detailed motif analysis of "Incident on the Tun River," revealing the leading motifs that influence its semantic structure (for example, the motif of cold): he who allows his human feelings to "freeze" leads himself and others to moral and physical destruction. The image of dystopia/antiutopia in the story is created through images of murderous technology and non-human architecture. In the future, humanity has disfigured both the man-made and the natural: both emanate danger and death. The enormous sizes of buildings, the cold and crude materials from which they are made, and the tendency toward tubular and enclosed forms—all these factors respectively define the existence of future humanity.

anti-utopia, dystopia, oneiric projection, enclosed space, scientific and technological progress, literary genres, Civil War, motifs, zoomorphization, vision