Dystopia and Utopia as Expressions of the New Dissent: The Case of Post by Dmitrii Glukhovskii, the ‘Inoagent’ (Foreign Agent)

Dmitrii Glukhovskii achieved great popularity with his work Metro 2033, which later turned into a series that has now grown to over 100 novels with contributions from other authors around the world. This article attempts to examine Glukhovskii’s recent duology Post in the light of the main trends in contemporary Russian literature. In Post, Glukhovskii creates a fictional world using all the tools of dystopia and the post-apocalyptic, following in the footsteps of what has happened in Russian literature since the collapse of the Soviet Union, from the use of the fantastic in all its forms in the 1990s to the dystopian literature in recent years. Employing the tools of the so-called paraliterature, often considered as pure entertainment, the author addresses extremely serious issues. What results is a critical dystopia, as Tom Moylan calls it, open to the realisation of utopian possibilities. Describing a future world to talk about the present and taking a highly critical stance on contemporary Russia, Glukhovskii offers readers a key to interpreting the world around them, here and now; and this at a high personal cost: he was in fact sentenced in absentia to eight years in a penal colony.