From Lazarus to the Petrashevtsy: Imagining Siberia in the Allegorical Novel Citizens of the Forest by Nikolai Akhsharumov

The article examines the phenomenon of spatial imagination in the plot and composition of the allegorical story by the critic and writer, member of the Petrashevsky Circle Nikolai Dmitrievich Akhsharumov. Turning to the most generalized Siberian topos and ignoring the numerous ethnographic information accumulated both in periodicals and in special studies, the writer constructs a dystopian plot, drawing on the novels by N.G. Chernyshevsky and F.M. Dostoevsky. Special attention should be paid to the polemic of Akhsharumov with the novel Crime and Punishment, which began in a critical article and continued beyond its borders, in a literary text. Akhsharumov begins his work from the point and coordinates where Crime and Punishment actually ends. When in a Siberian settlement, a gold digger and hunter, a former convict Lazar implements an educational project: he gives animals a language (according to the method of Robertson and Wundt) and law, teaches them the social principles of community and creates a kind of phalanstery. The social experiment gets out of control and ends in failure: “citizens of the forest” begin to worship the personified symbol of animal primal fear - the Great Fly totem. An uprising flares up to defeat a forcibly cultivated democracy, which yields to authoritarianism and totemism. By choosing the totem of the Great Fly, the forest dwellers finally lose their civic consciousness, appearing in their natural form and at the same time showing that there is no place for people, whoever they are, in their world (neither for life, nor, especially, for resurrection ). Like most dystopias, Citizens of the Forest demonstrates several phases of a social project: the formation of a civil society, its heyday and fall. Akhsharumov shows how the harmony of the animal world flings itself on mercy of one person and the word given to him; how the mass instinct (instincts of survival, reproduction, etc.) prevails over the needs of each individual (cattle or creature, as follows from the text). Citizens of the Forest creates an alternative value architectonics, due to which the life path of the protagonist, largely corresponding to the Old Testament, personifies the non-possibility of the resurrection miracle. The article attempts to describe not only intertextual links to political literature, utopias of Fourier, Cabet and Owen, dystopias in the spirit of Hobbes’ Leviathan, but also biographical lines associated with portraits of the writer’s brother, Fourierist Dmitry Akhsharumov, and M.V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky. Akhsharumov created space from scratch. Turning to the most primitive model of the Siberian text, and starting from strong texts (most likely, Voinarovsky and Crime and Punishment), Akhsharumov intuitively determined its two limits: a short novel, which begins as a story of the New World, ends with a descent into the kingdom of the dead. Siberia, which became a part of an ideological project and showed opportunities for a utopian perception, turned out to be reversible and easily transposed into a dystopia. Thus, despite the low aesthetic quality and numerous formal flaws, Citizens of the Forest remains one of the most significant evidences of spatial imagination, allowing to see in the choice of topos both ideological (from Icaria to Phalanstery) and conditionally biographical equestrianism (from family legends to political jokes). Siberia, as a space of imagination becomes the topos of an experiment continued by the writer in his fantastic story “Wanzamia”, directly replicating Cabet’s “Icaria”.

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