Apocalyptic Pandemic in Yana Vagner’s To The Lake

The article offers an analysis of Yana Vagner’s bestselling novel To the Lake (Epidemiia) focusing on the ways in which this speculative text reflects on contemporary apocalyptic anxieties and fascinations unleashed by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Following Priscilla Wald’s contention that over the last hundred-plus years the knowledge about epidemics within different realms has been shaped by the “outbreak narrative” that arrives in “scientific, journalistic, and fictional incarnations,” I consider how the novel spotlights the mutually reinforcing relation between a long-standing and increasingly globalised cultural imagination about contagion and the medical and political interpretations of an actual pandemic.