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The modernist fascination with time travel and temporal experimentation arose as a product of evolving conceptions of time, which were in turn prompted by significant scientific and technological developments surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. In Russia, the synchronized time, film, and quantum physics that swept through the Western world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries coincided with the Russian Revolution—an instance of massive upheaval and drastic social and political change that was critically bound up with perceptions and conceptions of time. Consequently, Russian literature of the 1910s and 1920s reflects a unique and expansive amalgamation of time-related influences. Whether for political, ideological, or artistic reasons, a fixation on controlling time predominated in Russia in the early twentieth century, and within such a context, the explicit premise of time travel necessarily takes on amplified significance.
This dissertation explores the intersections between the time travel trope and modernist narrative manipulation, in addition to identifying how such modernist time travel works reflect, support, challenge, or otherwise engage with the real-world disruption and modification of time imposed by pre- and post-Revolutionary Soviet administration and culture. With this aim, the dissertation focuses on three Russian and Soviet modernist texts of the 1910s and 1920s that employ the premise of time travel: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s novella Memories of the Future (1927), Velimir Khlebnikov’s play Mirskontsa (1912), and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s play Banya (1929).