Specters of the past. Antiutopian history and the dystopian reception of the present in Sergei Lebedev’s Untraceable

Jaworski, Mateusz (2026) Specters of the past. Antiutopian history and the dystopian reception of the present in Sergei Lebedev’s Untraceable. STUDIA SLAVICA ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARUM HUNGARICAE, 71 (2). pp. 155-161. ISSN 0039-3363

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Abstract

This paper examines the use of dystopian narrative strategies in Sergei Lebedev’s novel Untraceable ( Дебютант , 2020), arguing that the text reconfigures dystopia not as a projection of the future, but as a mode of engaging with the traumatic legacy of the Soviet past. Drawing on a distinction between dystopia and antiutopia, the article situates Lebedev’s prose within contemporary Russian literature that employs speculative genres to interrogate historical experience rather than to imagine alternative social orders. While the world depicted in Untraceable lacks the overt futuristic imagery typical of classical dystopias, its narrative structure relies on analogous mechanisms: the depiction of total systemic control, the erosion of moral responsibility, and the subordination of individual life to an abstract ideological project. The analysis focuses on the figure of Kalitin, a scientist involved in the development of an undetectable chemical weapon within a closed research town. Through free indirect discourse and retrospective narration, Lebedev portrays dystopia as a condition that has already been realized – embedded in everyday routines, professional ambition, and the internalization of a distorted scientific ethos. The Town functions as a metonymic space of totalitarian power, whose collapse exposes the persistence of dystopian structures beyond the formal end of the Soviet system. The paper argues that Untraceable reverses the traditional temporal vector of dystopia: instead of warning against a possible future, it reveals how unresolved historical violence continues to shape the present. In this sense, dystopia becomes an interpretive tool for examining post-Soviet memory, responsibility, and the afterlife of totalitarian utopias.

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