"NOT WHO BUT WHAT: WHAT IS SHE?"

The paper engages two works of the 20th century in a cross-temporal dialogue: the novel Yerevan (1931) written 14 years after the October Revolution by the Soviet-Armenian writer Mkrtich Armen and the novel V. (1963), written three decade and one world war later by the US-American writer Thomas Pynchon. At first glance, the two works do not make for a likely pair – on the one hand, a milestone in modern North American literary history and, on the other hand, a work from the former Soviet South, written in Armenian, banned upon publication and almost forgotten until its post-Soviet republication in 2016. The essay reads the novels for the themes of utopia, retrotopia and modernities in contest. In spite of their apparent difference in context and history of origin, it demonstrates that the plots of both Armen's and Pynchon's novel are structured around bafflingly similar disembodied quests that haunt their respective main protagonists. Set in light of the Cold War and the anti-colonial struggle, Pynchon's V. stands as a placeholder for a form of Western modernity that brought humanity to the brink of self-extinction. Armen's Yerevan, on the other hand, refers to a distinctly different, revolutionary horizon of expectation characteristic for the 1920s and early 1930s, when hopes for emancipating, socialist form of modernity were not yet obscured by the dread of Stalinism. Read together (and against each other), the paper argues that the tragic-utopian quest for Asmar in the Soviet-Armenian 1930s and the ironic-(anti-)anti-utopian quest for V. in the US-American 1960s construe a complex dialectical image of human progress, its inherent possibilities and pitfalls.