The paper considers the position of “inexhaustibility” as shared by many economists and businessmen. This view assumes that, in the long term, shortages in natural resources will be compensated by economic growth and the development of technology. The “shallow” environmentalism that is set against this position is concerned with the problems of global warming and pollution and defends the conservation of natural resources solely for utilitarian purposes. It also implies no severe reduction in standards of living and does not welcome radical social change. Of the four radical forms of environmentalism, the most influential outside of academic circles is deep ecology where the well-being and prosperity of human and non-human life on Earth has an independent value and can be achieved once the population is significantly reduced. The second trend, ecofeminism, blames the destruction of the environment on androcentric dualism. Man is associated with culture as immaterial, rational and abstract; woman is associated with nature as material, emotional, and individual. The third movement, social ecology and ecomarxism, share the key principles of the supporters of inexhaustibility, but radically disagree with their politics. They believe that changing the political structure of society will result in creating new forms of production that do not exist merely for the accumulation of wealth. The fourth direction is based on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger with its criticism of industrial modernity. This view combines poetic reverence for the existence of the Earth with a complete deconstruction of the program of world domination that has as its end the denial of death, a program which we are accustomed to calling “progress”.

   The task of the author’s project “ecology without nature” is to use deconstruction to counteract prevailing normative ideas about nature for the sake of sentient beings suffering under catastrophic environmental conditions. Timothy Morton sees in the very idea of nature itself one of the obstacles to truly ecological politics, ethics, philosophy, and art. He calls for a thorough study of how nature is defined as a transcendental, unified and independent category. The study of how art represents the environment makes it possible to see that “nature” is an arbitrary rhetorical construct, devoid of a truly independent existence outside or beyond texts about nature. The rhetoric of nature itself depends on an ambient poetics, that is directed toward the evocation of the surrounding atmosphere or the world through text. Morton shows that people at different periods of time put various ideological meanings into the concept of “nature”; the historicization of this poetics makes obvious its vacuity of inner being and independent value. The history of ambient poetics depends on certain forms of identity and subjectivity, which are also historical. Without stopping at historicization, the author calls for the politicization of ecological art and the use of the rhetorical effect of “nature” as a slogan in order to strengthen environmentalism. The ecological thinking that Morton calls for does not operate with “nature” as a kind of ready-made, ideological concept and thus emerges as an ecology “without nature”. On the other hand, a non-conceptual image in environmental literature can be a convincing point of attraction for an intensive conceptual system — namely, an ideological one.

   This article attempts to fix Dmitry Morozov’s Geological Trilogy between three poles or three paradigmatic models. The author takes recourse to Anson Rabinbach’s theory and his account of how the mechanisms characteristic of the 18th century stand in opposition to the motor and electric machines of the 19th century. The ever-renewing processes of Morozov’s installations share with 18th century mechanisms the fact that their the source of movement is not electromagnetism and its conversion but the workings of interrelated parts. Yet Morozov’s machines are distinct from those of the 18th century in the absence of the mimetic. The article also draws a distinction, following Matteo Pasquinelli, between carbon and silicon-based machines. The third theory, on which the author bases his own conclusions, takes an interpretation of the 16th century Kabbalist Isaac Luria and compares it with Pasquanelli’s theory. The material point where this transformation took place is ascribed to occult practices of manipulation. Hypothetically, Morozov’s machine amounts to a machine of the third type: a motive, technical potential of the 18th century while being also a particular transformation of that potential. A machine of the third type is a machine of location which is able to transform the situation as a whole. The basic functionality of such machines is a quadripartite gestural code and general principles of the calculus of environments which allow one to put different socio-cultural aspects together and examine the question of their connection with the paradigm of the “soviet”. The author suggests that Morozov’s machines act to change the past (the Soviet past, especially that of the period of stagnation). However the resolution of other issues raised by Morozov’s machines require a new ontology and new mathematics.

   This essay analyses the individual’s alienation from the natural environment prompted by the commodification of nature. The analysis focuses on the novels “Proshchanie s Matyoroi” (Farewell to Matyora, 1976) by Valentin Rasputin and “Zona zatopleniya” (Flood Zone, 2015) by Roman Senchin and demonstrates how literature, both in the Soviet Union and in contemporary Russia, deals with the critical discourse on environmental issues, the protection of nature, human freedom, and the dignity of living beings. The two novels, written forty years apart, share the same subject: to build a hydroelectric power plant, a river is diverted from its path, vast territories are flooded, and the inhabitants of a Siberian village are be forced away from their homes. In the light of this affinity, this essay explores an eco-critical view as to how the conflict between nature and culture in Soviet and in present-day Russia can be represented through the motives of the clash between the old and the new world, civilization and wild nature, the urban and the natural environment. In particular, the two novels are linked by four cultural criteria: the mythography of a betrayed Eden, the representation of a world that offers no refuge from ecological disasters, the threat of a hegemonic oppression conducted either by the State or by powerful corporations at the expense of the local communities, and the ‘gothicization’ of the environment. Zona zatopleniyia can be read as a remake of Proshchanie s Materoi insofar as it denounces a system in which the technological innovations achieved in over half a century do not seem to be considered. At the same time, however, Senchin’s novel, starting from the end of the Soviet Union, highlights the environmental problems that have contributed to the end of the régime and suggests that old political models are no longer tenable in the new era. This starting point plays an important role for it defines nature no longer as a shelter from politics, but as a potential form of civil activity.

   The Geological Trilogy by Dmitry Morozov (::vtol::) is a contemporary interaction with the Soviet colonial project. The artist explores the ambiguity of the Soviet through construction of robotic models that turn out to be models of social processes: the production of the present on the material process of the ancient or recent past. Each of the installations of the trilogy is based on a physically repeatable process: the phase transition and cooling of a meteorite (Guest), the drying and filling of takirs with water (Takir), the drilling of solid earth (“12,262”). Spatially, the works construct a model of the Soviet modernist project of the colonization of nature: from the cosmic heights to the earth to 12 thousand kilometres deep. Each of these objects is transported to the original site in order to verify the accuracy of the physical model of the place and transcend its abandonment. We must be careful when we examine parts of the trilogy for we may find ourselves looking upon an abandoned future.

   The first part of this autobiographical essay by Svetlana Boym was published in the previous issue of the magazine Versus (see: Boym S. My significant others: Zenita, Susana, Ilanka (part 1) // Versus. 2022. Vol. 2. No. 3. P. 126–152).

   As is well known Walter Benjamin devoted his unfinished magnum opus to arcades, the covered shopping galleries that emerged in the mid 19th century, as the central image revealing the economic, socio-political, and cultural features of that era. From Benjamin’s point of view these were the direct material embodiment of self-consciousness, or rather, of an unconscious society fascinated by the capitalist spectacle unfolding before its eyes. Arcades reflect all the errors and shortcomings of bourgeois consciousness — commodity fetishism, reification, taking the world as a “thing in itself”, they reflect its utopian fantasies (fashion, prostitution, and gambling). In addition, they represented the first truly international style of modern architecture that became a commonplace for a whole generation of metropolitan residents the world over. By the end of the 19th century, arcades had become an integral element of any «modern» metropolis, and were imitated from Cleveland to Istanbul, from Glasgow to Johannesburg, from Buenos Aires to Melbourne. And, as Benjamin well knew, they could be found in each of the cities that had become vectors of his intellectual compass: Naples, Moscow, Paris and Berlin, setting points of intersection between vectors leading from west to east and from south to north. If the first vector indicates the movement of historical progress in terms of the realization of social and technological potential, the second evaluates history retrospectively, seeing in it mainly the ruins of an unrealized past.