THE IMPERIAL UNDERGROUND: COAL MINING NARRATIVES OF DONBAS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE.

This article examines narratives of coal mining written in the 1890s by Aleksandr Serafimovich and Aleksandr Kuprin that illuminate the temporal and existential disorientation accompanying the decade's flourishing study of deep earth geology and its practical applications in the exploitative extraction of resources that propelled industrialization and Russia's modernization. These coal mining narratives elaborate a unique paradox that emerged from the clash of time's arrow pointing both to the future and the inscrutably deep past: public sentiments of awe and excitement about scientific and industrial progress (conjoined with temporal futurity) clashed with the writers' and their characters' horror of coming face to face with the material record of unfathomably vast geological time (time past) and their feelings of alienation. The article highlights how the Russian imperial project of colonizing the resource-rich underground in today's Ukraine was a form of vertically expanding empire into the geological depths, and how the writers documenting it unwittingly acted as colonial agents by facilitating their Russophone readership's assimilation of imperial territory into their mental maps. The sketches and works of fiction examined here typically fall under the rubric of neo-realism, but the article suggests that they feature radically altered perceptions of temporal and spatial reality, which unites them with the experimental representational strategies of literary modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]