Ecologia e colonizzazione del mondo della vita nella letteratura sovietica e post-sovietica

Ecology and Colonization of the Life-World in Soviet and Post-Soviet Literature. This essay employs the concept coined by Jurgen Habermas ‘Kolonisierung der Lebenswelt’ (colonization of the life-world), to analyse the individual’s alienation from the natural environment, caused by the commodification of nature. The analysis focuses on the novels Proščanie s Materoj by Valentin Rasputin (1976) and Zona zatoplenija by Roman Senčin (2015) and seeks to highlight how literature, both during the Soviet Union and in modern Russia, deals with the critical discourse on environmental issues, the protection of nature, human freedom, and dignity. The two novels, written forty years apart, share the same subject: in order to build a hydroeletric power plant, a river will be diverted from its path, vast territories will be flooded, and the inhabitants of a Siberian village will be forced away from their home. In the light of this affinity, this essay explores in an eco-critical perspective how, in the Soviet Union as well as in modern Russia, the conflict between nature and culture can be represented (aesthetically) through the motives of the clash between the old and the new world, between civilization and wild nature, between urban and natural environment. In particular, the two novels are linked by four cultural criteria: the mythography of betrayed Eden; the representation of a world that offers no refuge from ecological disasters; the threat of a hegemonic oppression conducted either by the State or by powerful corporations at the expense of the local communities; the ‘gothicization’ of the environment represented. Zona zatoplenija can be read as a remake of Proščanie s Materoj, insofar as it denounces a system in which the technological innovations achieved over half a century do not seem to be taken into account. At the same time, however, Senčin's novel, starting from the end of the Soviet Union, highlights the environmental problems that have contributed to the end of the regime and suggests that old political models are no longer valid in the new era. This starting point plays an important role, for it defines the nature no longer as a shelter from politics, but as a potential form of civil activism.