The chapter builds on data from the international study “Will the World Ever Be the Same? Letters from the Post-Corona Future,” coordinated by Anneke Sools and Yashar Saghai from the University of Twente (the Netherlands, 2020), to illustrate changes in the dynamics of everyday time-space navigation and emplacement practices during the pandemic crisis. Letters from the Future are imaginative exercises triggered by the invitation to board a time machine to travel to the post-pandemic future in one’s mind eye and to write a letter to the past self. The Bakhtinian concept of “chronotope” – originally defined as amalgamation of temporal and spatial dimensions in human experience and narrative representation – has been applied in the analysis of the Letters from the Future conducted by the research group Narrative, Culture, Cognition at the University of Tartu (Estonia). This chapter integrates the concept of “chronotope” in a broader conceptual framework of environmental studies. The Bakhtinian perspective captures the chronotopic dynamics and triangulation between personal experience, cultural imagination, and narrative representation. Integration of chronotopes in the framework of environmental studies casts a fresh light on the open-ended and flexible Bakhtinian concept. In this new understanding, chronotopes can be seen first as functional pivots or hubs in the materiality of places and practices, with various temporalities synchronized and coalescing into spatial “envelopes.” Second, chronotopes are time-bound and embrace the imaginary dimensions of past and future experiences. Finally, chronotopes are at the hub of narratives, where things happen. They mediate the emergence of narrative events and the development of plots. The chapter shows why the revised Bakhtinian concept can be helpful in the analysis and interpretation of crisis narratives. The case study of the domestic time-space, that is the chronotope of “home,” proves that metamorphoses of the most familiar and habitual chronotopic nexuses in the letter writers’ imaginations are most revealing precisely due to the unremarkable, “tacit” status these nexuses held in everyday life before the pandemic.
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Grishakova, Marina (2025). Imaginary Places: Metamorphoses of the Familiar in Times of Crisis. In: Alber, Jan, Deborah de Muijnck, and Jessica Jumpertz (Ed.). Pandemic Storytelling. (147−162). Brill. (Narratives and Mental Health; 3).