Insomnic anti-utopia in the novel Yperite by Vs. Ivanov and V.B. Shklovsky and the story The Man Who Doesn’t Sleep by A.R. Belyaev

Statement of the problem. This article provides a comparative analysis of Vs. Ivanov and V.B. Shklovsky’s novel Yperite and A.R. Belyaev’s short story The Man Who Doesn’t Sleep, part of the Inventions of Professor Wagner cycle. These works have not previously been compared in Russian literary studies. The purpose of the article is to analyze and compare these works as texts that contain typologically similar anti-utopian motifs. Review of the scientific literature on the problem. Analysis of the novel Yperite and the short story “The Man Who Doesn’t Sleep” from a selected perspective has been supported by the works of B.A. Lanin, L.A. Morshchikhina, Z.I. Plekh, S.G. Shishkina, etc. Methodology (materials and methods). This article is based on numerous studies devoted to the problems and poetics of Soviet literature of the 1920s, in particular, works devoted to the specific implementation of the anti-utopian genre in literature of the first third of the last century. Research results. The article establishes plot and motif similarities between Ivanov and Shklovsky’s novel Yperite and Belyaev’s short story The Man Who Doesn’t Sleep in terms of the authors’ creation of an insomniac anti-utopia. The anti-utopian constructs in these works arise from the idea of improving human nature through biochemical influence on the physical body. This improvement is not accompanied by moral improvement, and therefore reveals the emptiness of life for the majority and deprives their existence of meaning. Furthermore, the writers raise questions about the misuse of invention by business and the state, as well as the social responsibility of science. Conclusions. The destruction of the anti-utopian reality in both works is linked to the idea of socialist revolution. An important difference in the realization of a similar plot is Belyaev’s optimistic and partly narrow view of the consequences of the oneiric ‘castration’ of a man and the cautious but deep Ivanov and Shklovsky’s pessimism.