This work's title, translated as Counterfactual Interventions in Time and their Functions in Cultural Memory, is a remarkable contribution to a topic that due to its increasing importance in epistemology and cultural studies provokes one to discard some of the idées recues concerning history and its representation. The approach to the problem appears to be the same in all contributions: a combination of dealing with the concept of counterfactuality as such (including its controversial interpretations) with analyses of texts, films, games. Sixteen contributors, historians, specialists in media-theory, and literary scholars explore texts that have not been dealt with from this perspective, or texts that help to sharpen the notion of alternate history, un-history. Most of the articles refer to recent conceptual contributions in this field (Catherine Gallagher [2018], Gabriel D. Rosenfeld [2014], Daniel Nolan [2013], Kathleen Singles [2013]) as well as to Charles Renouvier's Uchronia—the founding concept of the “what-if.” The mnemonic aspect of the counterfactuality project is the main target of the articles devoted to texts by prominent counterfactualists like Philip Roth, Vladimir Sorokin, Christian Kracht, and to the predominantly Polish and Russian postsocialist narratives. The interpretations, without explicitly taking recourse to chance theory, concentrate on strategies of dissolving cultural heritage, undoing historical facts, remembering non-facts, and following strategies like bifurcation, fork, or loop.
In the opening article, Kay Kirchmann, referring to Gilles Deleuze's discussion of the limits of the incompossibility concept, that is, sequentiality of alternative plots, detects in films by Orson Welles and Alain Resnais the simultaneity of the incompossible, a synchronicity, leading to an instability of temporal horizons, an indiscernibility of perspectives, and finally—to an “epistemological skepsis towards any master narrative” (32). Alexander Demandts's Un-History, concluding the volume, offers a nearly ludic version of this statement. It is a historian's (carnivalesque) fantasy of credible/incredible alternatives—an exercise in “what-if”—which represents an overwhelming estrangement of the historical world we know.
Some texts are radical versions of counterfactuality that seem to denounce the clear cut what-if formula. This is the case with novels by Jacek Dukaj, Pawel Majka, Wojciech Orlinski, which Malgorzata Sugiera reads as the exploration of diverse possibilities to invent history, a hybrid of myths and science-fiction elements (in Majka's case) and the invention of a machine (replacing the what-if) as a regulator of history that destabilizes the foundation of world perception. Another form of counterfactual complexity appears in Georg Witte's analysis of alternate imagination within the narrative (on an intradiegetic level), which turns out to be the subject of the novel itself. Witte refers to Roth's “method of a retro-active opening of the past” (55), whereas Kracht's re-imagining of another history is characterized as a spiral of alternations culminating in “Verungültigung” (66) of history (invalidation) that in turn generates “Vergültigung” (validation).
The dynamics of the counterfactual makes one forget that there is factography. It is Magdalena Marszalek who outlines the confrontation of fact and counterfact in reflecting the epistemological, ethical, and mnemonic aspects of post-traumatic testimony. She states that counterfactual narratives react to documentary testimonial literature, and try to render “parahistorical simulations” (36) as plausible as possible, consequently: “There are latent alliances between the testimonial and the counterfactual” (37).
Alternate constructs of history reflect contemporary Russia in different ways: in Brigitte Obermayr's interpretation Andrej Lazarchuk's bifurcation (Soviet Russia's victory over Germany) refers to a 1991 situation of utmost uncertainty, Sorokin's “metadiscursive loop” (77) seems to be time resistant (Stalin is the perpetual figure of Russian history) and Pavel Kursanov's “neoimperialistic loop” (81) projects a positive future. Matthias Schwartz asks what happens when knowledge of facts disappears because of the exclusive reign of pop-cultural myths. In Szczepan Twardoch's Wieczny Grunwald, he discovers a (brutal) decomposition of the national myth, a de-temporalization, “an eternal play of all worlds” (113). Here again the simple what-if seems to have lost its significance. Less so in Alexander Prokhorov's illustration of it in the Russian TV entertainment serial, Al’ternativnaia istoriia, with turning points in Russian history as its subjects, excluding traumatizing events, such as “taboos in postsoviet cultural memory” (204). Riccardo Nicolosi's crucial question, What are the “preconditions of counterfactual thinking”? (139) is not answered but echoed in Aksenov's Ostrov Krym (1979), which is defined as an allegory of the impossibility of coexisting diverse political systems but also as a seminal discussion of counterfactual categories of thinking and narrating under the conditions of the late Soviet Union. The novel is characterized as “a carnivalesque reversal of soviet historiosophical postulates” (161). Part of the popadancy genre in Nina Weller's view affirmatively reconstructs history: there are time travels into the glorious past that “save history from a perspective of official politics” (169); the “re-enactment elements” she reveals (189) are not meant to undo history.
Computer games in Russia follow the same pattern, as Gernot Howanetz states, since the reversal of history is all but critical, the possibilities if creating alternatives are limited. The strategy of modifications (mods), part of the game, cannot be developed in Russian games; the “hegemony of play” (223) makes the players follow given schemes. Johannes Dillinger sees steampunk recapitulate science-fiction categories with two opposite functions: “chauvinistic and critical” (277), that is, the affirmation of technology celebrating the triumphant figure of the mad scientist vs. the “u-chronically-interpreted” presentation of technical devices and their obnoxious consequences. Steampunk is a phenomenon in Russian subculture but marginal in literature. Il΄ia Kukulin discusses from a philosophical perspective strategies and functions of steampunk in texts by Boris Akunin, Vadim Panov, and Viacheslav Rybakov. He discerns highly skeptical as well as affirmative attitudes towards science and technique in the interrelatedness of contemporary lexemes and science fiction objects of the nineteenth century. Hans Richard Brittnacher's interpretation of Leo Perutz's time travels and dislocation of history shows that this author belongs to the fantastic and neo-fantastic tradition. This provokes a critical remark concerning the volume as a whole: a clear distinction between the “counterfactual turn” of thinking and fundamental (Aristotelian) philosophemes, including rhetorical concepts (paradox, adynaton) that represent counterfactual thinking since antiquity, as well as a reflection of its revival in theories of the fantastic and those of the neo-fantastic, are missing.
