Roman Sans-Gêne: Revolutions in the Early Soviet Alternate Histories

• In Event: Revolutionary Life beyond the State

Abstract

This presentation investigates how the first alternate histories written in the USSR in the 1920s re-imagined the revolutionary events, contemplated on the notion of historical progress, and made predictions for the future of the newly-built Soviet state. I primarily focus on two works - The Cardboard Emperor (1924) by Georgy Gaidovsky and THE UNCEREMONIOUS ROMAN by Veniamin Girshgorn, Boris Lipatov and Iosif Keller (1928) - and the drastic differences in their usage of the counterfactual past in order to reflect on the unpredictable present.

Author

• Alexandra Sasha Portice, Middlebury College