This panel explores how under-examined Eastern European cultural forms reconfigure historical time beyond established linear, teleological, or isolationist models of development. Across digital games, consumer culture, and modernist literature, the papers focus on how twentieth-century utopian projects and their afterlives generate alternative temporalities, which are structured by repetition, play, and fragmentation, while often remaining uncompromisingly utopian and experimental.
Existing scholarship has focused on dominant cultural narratives representing either the teleologies of authoritarian hegemony associated with either Soviet or post-Soviet authoritarianism, or the teleologies of resistance to such authoritarian hegemony. We are interested in alternatives to these dominant narratives and to the spaces and times described by such scholarship. Papers at this panel seek to map the paralogical chronotopes shaped by queerness, subalternity, and alter-historicity. For us, the driving motive is to document and understand those cultural phenomena that do not fit into the dominant models operating in Slavic studies, precisely because such phenomena consciously elide easy documentation and refuse facile legibility, representing illicit or dissident voices both within post-socialist nations and outside them, borne by the new wave of displacement and immigration that followed Russia's invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.
We intend to present our work in the form of short lectures with visual support, allowing for at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion with the audience.
The first paper analyzes contemporary Eastern European video games that reenact, reimagine and queer twentieth-century utopian ideologies. Focusing on the avant-garde Russian video games Pathologic (2007-2026) and Indika (2024) it argues that games transform utopia into a replayable practice, where political catastrophe becomes a tactical problem rather than a moral endpoint, and prompting sovereign and resistant practices in players.
The second paper theorizes Belarusian historical consciousness as structured by queer temporality: through consumer culture, political slogans, and poetry, it demonstrates how “Golden Ages” and “revivals” function as recursive technologies of survival rather than linear national progress. This article argues that Belarusian historical experience is structured by a queer temporality that resists linear, teleological narratives of national development. Rather than unfolding as a progressive movement toward sovereignty, Belarusian time operates through repetition, belatedness, and retrospective meaning-making.
The third paper turns to Ukrainian modernism, examining Maik Iohansen’s Journey of the Learned Dr. Leonardo through the lens of a “hunting chronotope,” where narrative time becomes prey to be pursued, suspended, and rearranged. Maik Iohansen’s 1932 novel not only lends itself to an analysis through Bakhtinian chronotope, but arguably challenges and plays with the concept of “chronotope” years before Bakhtin published the term.
Our papers offer a cross-cultural exegesis of aesthetic and political problems in Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian cultures, offering a diverse perspective on the crucial issues hedging the brutal war between these nations.
Taken together, these papers propose a shift from teleological history to ludic, queer, and chronotopic models of time. By bringing queer theory, game studies, and Bakhtinian poetics into conversation, the panel rethinks Eastern Europe as a site of theoretical innovation in the temporal imagination of modernity and its aftermath, proposing that there is a teleological multiplicity whose stakes are to challenge the hegemonic models represented by both authoritarian East European regimes and their neoliberal alternatives.