The Atom, the Alien, and Cosmographies of the Anthropocene

Abstract

Chingiz Aitmatov’s The Day Lasts Longer than a Hundred Years (I dol’she veka dlitsia den’), published in 1980, has long been read in terms of its affiliations with socialist realism as well as its radical departures into the realms of science fiction and folklore, resulting in a range of debates about the genre of the novel and the political allegories encoded in its various storylines. This essay returns to the fantastic elements that contaminate Aitmatov’s late-Soviet text not as a historiography of the author’s present, as Fredric Jameson would put it, but as an experiment in composing parabolas of the Anthropocene. Both as a geometric figure and as a fugitive cosmopolitics, parabolas inscribe a novel spacetime in which deep histories of colonial violence and dislocation intersect with futuristic arcs of planetary devastation, rewriting the Russian and Soviet empire’s Central Asian periphery into a generative epicenter of ecological storytelling.