Abstract
In this article I discuss and analyze the dystopian and utopian discourses in Alisa Ganieva’s novel The Mountain and the Wall (Prazdničnaya gora, 2012; English translation 2015). My particular interest lies in the connection between geographical imagination and postcolonial themes, as well as the relationship between gender and space. The chosen approach to Ganieva’s novel leaves out many other interesting topics, such as the role of Islam in the story, and questions about national and ethnical identity, but I will only elaborate upon them whenever they appear relevant to the outlined approach. My aim is not to label Ganieva’s work as a postcolonial novel, but to discuss the possibility to read it from a postcolonial point of view and to read a postcolonial thematic in it, among many other interesting themes.
Highlights
Alisa Ganieva and her worksIn one of my previous articles (Lappela 2016), I discussed space in Ganieva’s works and argued that the space of the mountainside and the city space form an antithesis on different textual and thematic levels of the text
In this article I discuss and analyze the dystopian and utopian discourses in Alisa Ganieva’s novel The Mountain and the Wall (Prazdničnaya gora, 2012; English translation 2015)
Ganieva was born in Moscow in 1985. After her birth Ganieva’s family moved to Dagestan, where she grew up. She later graduated from a high school in Makhachkala, moved to Moscow to study literary criticism at the Gorky Literature Institute in 2002 and, as of today, still resides in Moscow
Summary
In one of my previous articles (Lappela 2016), I discussed space in Ganieva’s works and argued that the space of the mountainside and the city space form an antithesis on different textual and thematic levels of the text This analysis has shown that mountains have a central role in the utopian discourse of the novel, while the city is central to the dystopian discourse. Critical dystopia is defined as a non-existing society, often located in time and space and intended to seem worse than the prevailing society, yet including the hopeful idea that dystopia can be overcome (ibid.: 7) In this regard I prefer to discuss Ganieva’s novel as a dystopia, rather than anti-utopia, yet I could be one of those critics, mentioned by Baccolini and Moylan, who conflate the two concepts
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