Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Ronald Schechter, “Gothic Thermidor: The Bals des victimes, the Fantastic, and the Production of Historical Knowledge in Post-Terror France,” Representations 61 (Winter 1998): 78–94; Joseph Clarke, Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France: Revolution and Remembrance, 1789–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also an intellectual history of the post-Terror France: Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), chap. 2. For a broader perspective on the body, performance, and mourning, see Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

2. Ruth Leys, in her Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2000), distinguishes between mimetic and antimimetic theories of trauma, and argues that mimetic theories of trauma do not stand up to critical analysis. As I argue throughout this book, mourning for the other cannot be reduced to trauma, though elements of trauma theory help to understand mourning. Emphasizing mourning rather than trauma and performativity rather than realism, my concept of “mimetic mourning” is both similar to and different from Michael Rothberg’s “traumatic realism”; see his Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

3. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 182.

4. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 248.

5. Dmitry Bykov, Kalendar’ 2: Spory o besspornom (Moscow: Astrel, 2012), 133–134.

CHAPTER 1

1. Old and new photos of the Solovetsky cathedral with onion-shaped cupolas are available in many tourist guidebooks and on Internet sites. For documentary footage (1927–1928) of the Solovetsky camp, as it functioned in the former monastery with pyramidal towers, see the film by Marina Goldovskaia, Vlast’ Solovetskaia (1988).

2. See Aleksandr Zolotorev, “Novye 500 rublei: Ispravlena sushchestvennaia oshibka,” F5 Blog, November 19, 2011, http://f5.ru/zolotorev/post/378446.

3. Yurii Brodskii, “Solovki”: Dvadtsat’ let osobogo naznacheniia (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002), 3; see also Aleksei Laushkin, “500 rublei s oshibkami,” Rodina 6 (2004) and http://www.solovki.ca/vsiako-razno/money.php (this site mentions debates about this banknote, starting from 1997). In 2004, I popularized Brodsky’s discovery in the newspapers in eight languages: A. Etkind, “Remembering the Gulag,” Project Syndicate, June 17, 2004, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/etkind2/English.

4. Pavel Nerler, Slovo i “delo” Osipa Mandel’shtama: Kniga donosov, doprosov i obvinitel’nykh zakliuchenii (Moscow: Petrovskii Park, 2010), 29.

5. The leading Russian expert on the economic history of the gulag asserts that in terms of mortality rates and overall “catastrophic” conditions, a village undergoing collectivization was a worse place to be than a gulag camp. See A. K. Sokolov, “Prinuzhdenie k trudu v sovetskoi ekonomike,” in Gulag: Ekonomika prinuditel’nogo truda (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005).

6. Cristina Vatulescu suggests that general concepts of Western origin, “police” and “police state,” could perform this function. See Cristina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 3. The use of “gulag” in its broad meaning has an opposite function; it emphasizes the singularity of the Soviet catastrophe.

7. Veniamin Iofe, Granitsy smysla (St. Petersburg: Memorial, 2002), 17. The Memorial Society is a nongovernmental organization that collects oral histories of the survivors of the gulag, publishes lists of the victims, and keeps track of local attempts to mark gulag sites with monuments and museums; it has also become a major human rights watchdog. The Memorial Society has had complex, ambivalent to hostile relationships with the Russian state. For Western histories of the Memorial Society, see Nanci Adler, Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement (Westport, Colo.: Praeger 1993); Anne White, “The Memorial Society in the Russian Provinces,” Europe-Asia Studies 47, no. 8 (December 1995): 1343–1366; and Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996).

8. Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage: Von der politischen Haftung Deutschlands (Munich: Piper, 1965).

9. See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

10. Oleg Kashin and Zakhar Prilepin, “Ad i progressivnye tendentsii v nem,” Russkii zhurnal, September 11, 2011, http://www.russ.ru/pole/Ad-i-progressivnye-tendencii-v-nem.

11. Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” Daedalus 21, no. 4 (1992): 99; see also Richard S. Esbenshade, “Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe,” Representations 49 (1995): 72–96.

12. Genocide is mass murder of an ethnic, racial, or religious group by another group or by the government; democide is a mass murder of any group by the government. For the history of the concept of genocide, see Anson Rabinbach, “The Challenge of the Unprecedented: Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 4 (2005): 397–420; and Natan Sznaider, Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), chap. 6. For a survey of the Soviet genocides, see Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). For the concept and statistics of democide, see Rudolf J. Rummel, Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1992); and Rudolf J. Rummel, Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1996).

13. For criticism of redemptive narratives of the Holocaust, see Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991); and Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

14. Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), xxvi.

15. Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia (New York: Izdatel’stvo imeni Chekhova 1970), 386.

16. For the distinction between communicative and cultural memory, see Aleida Assmann, “Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory,” Representations 56 (1996): 123–134; and Aleida Assmann, “Transformations between History and Memory,” Social Research 75, no. 1 (2008): 49–72.

17. Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: Verso, 1979), 314.

18. I benefited a great deal from reading, among other studies of mourning, Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Peter Homans, ed., Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century’s End (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Darian Leader, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and Depression (New York: Penguin, 2008); and Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).

19. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Michael Lambek and Paul Antze, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (London: Routledge, 1996); Leys, Trauma; E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Karyn Ball, Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect in and beyond Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 2007); and Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).

20. Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 103–128; Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

21. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Vintage 1975), 18:18–20; Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 63; see also Todd Dufresne, Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

22. Sigmund Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” in Art and Literature: The Pelican Freud Library (New York: Penguin, 1990), 14:447. I am using the idea of mimesis in the broad Aristotelian sense specified by two French theorists, René Girard and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. For a genealogy of the concept that leads to Girard, see Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For my reading of Girard, see A. Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), chap. 12. Borch-Jacobsen has shown that the idea of mimesis structured many of Freud’s texts, even if Freud never acknowledged it. According to Borch-Jacobsen, mimesis is rooted in Freud’s intuition of sympathy or identification with other people. This is probably a reason why Freud did not feel the need to explain mourning, which figures in some of his texts as a primary motivation. See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). On mimesis and antimimesis as conceptual dimensions in trauma theory, see Leys, Trauma.

23. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 12:151.

24. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 1984), 147–148; for analyses, see Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire, and Loss in Western Culture (London: Penguin, 1998); Anthony Vidler, Warped Space. Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001; Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); and Mikhail Epstein, “Zhutkoe i strannoe: O teoreticheskoi vstreche S. Freuda iV. Shklovskogo,” in Iz Ameriki, vol. 2 (Yekaterinburg: U-Faktoriia, 2005); also http://old.russ.ru/krug/razbor/20030314_ep.html.

25. Misinforming the relatives of victims was a policy that was consistently pursued by the bureaucracy of terror. In December 1962, the head of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastnyi, reported to the Central Committee that the majority of relatives were given false information regarding their relatives’ deaths. Introduced when rehabilitation began in 1955, this procedure was no longer necessary, wrote Semichastnyi. He proposed that relatives would be told by word of mouth the true circumstances of the death, and the death certificate would show the true date of death. However, on the certificate the cause of death would be left blank. The truth would not be told to relatives of those who had been rehabilitated before this new procedure. If information about rehabilitation was sent abroad, the procedure of falsifying the date and cause of death would continue. R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and London: Macmillan, 1997), 160–161.

26. In psychoanalytic terms, this situation of mourning is analyzed in Maria Lucila Pelento, “Mourning for ‘Missing People,’” in On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” ed. Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Thierry Bokanowski, and Sergio Lewkowicz (London: Karnac, 2009), 56–70. Revisionist readings of Freud’s works on mourning and melancholia emphasize the nonpathological character of interminable mourning or, as Jacques Derrida called it, “midmourning.” See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994); Tammy Clewell, “Mourning beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52, no. 1 (2004): 43–67; David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). However, important works follow Freud’s conceptual distinction. See, for example, Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (London: Routledge, 2004); Jean-Philippe Mathy, Melancholy Politics: Loss, Mournng, and Politics in Late Modern France (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2011).

27. See Vamik D. Volkan, Gabriele Ast, and William Greer, The Third Reich in the Unconscious: Transgenerational Transmission and Its Consequences (New York: Brunner, 2002); and Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

28. See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For criticism, see Colin Davis, “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms,” French Studies 59, no. 3 (July 2005): 373–379.

29. For a psychological approach that emphasizes intergenerational negotiations and the agency of the younger generation, see Karoline Tschuggnall and Harald Welzer, “Rewriting Memories: Family Recollections of the National Socialist Past in Germany,” Culture & Psychology 8, no. 1 (March 2002): 130–145; and Hans J. Markowitsch and Harald Welzer, The Development of Autobiographical Memory (New York: Psychology Press, 2010).

30. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 138.

31. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Pelican Freud Library, 11:245–268.

32. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 139, 189, 185.

33. Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 22.

34. Torquato Tasso, The Liberation of Jerusalem, trans. Max Wickert (New York: Oxford University Press 2009), 247.

35. Cathy Caruth, in her (now classic) study of trauma, enriches Freud’s reading of Tasso by important details, highlighting, for example, the Greek meaning of “trauma” as wound. In a critical response, Ruth Leys notes that the wound in this story is Clorinda’s, while the trauma is Tancred’s. I believe that this debate can be illuminated by the concept of mourning. Mourning evolves in the relation of one subject to another, while trauma develops within the experience of one and the same subject. The language of trauma blurs a crucial difference between its agent (Tancred) and subject (Clorinda); the language of mourning preserves this distinction. See Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 2–9; and Leys, Trauma, 292–297.

36. Born as Christian and raised as Muslim, this white Ethiopian and female warrior is a wonderful character, “a mass of overlapping and contradictory identities.” See David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 244.

37. Joseph Brodsky, “Uncommon Visage” (Nobel Lecture), in On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 48.

38. Quoted from Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 207.

39. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 126.

40. For a similar intuition, see Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of a Modern Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

41. Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 22.

42. In her research on the “post-memory” of the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch emphasizes the relevance of personal artifacts, such as photographs and family albums, for the experience of the generation that did not see the catastrophe. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Post-Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

43. On cosmopolitan memory, see Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Holocaust Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); and Natan Sznaider, Jewish Memory and Cosmopolitan Order (Cambridge: Polity 2011). For a similar concept of multidirectional memory, see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009). On generations in the twentieth century, see Mark Roseman, ed., Generations in Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Stephen Lovell, ed., Generation in Twentieth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); and Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

CHAPTER 2

1. A subtle reader, Joseph Brodsky believed that this ode was “the grandest poem Mandelstam ever wrote” and also the most significant piece ever written about Stalin: “After the ‘Ode’, if I were Stalin, I would have slit Mandelstam’s throat immediately.” See Solomon Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet’s Journey through the Twentieth Century, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Free Press, 1998), 31. For a close reading of this “Ode,” see Mikhail Gasparov, O. Mandel’shtam: Grazhdanskaia lirika 1937 goda (Moscow: RGGU, 1996); and Svetlana Boym, Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 70–73.

2. The evidence is collected and analyzed by Pavel Nerler in his Slovo i “delo” Osipa Mandel’shtama (Moscow: Petrovskii Park, 2010).

3. “Iz arkhiva Guverovskogo instituta: Pis’ma Iu. G. Oksmana k G. P. Struve,” publication by Lazar Fleishman, Stanford Slavic Studies 1 (1987): 24. For the full account of Mandelstam’s arrests, trials, and death, see Nerler, Slovo i delo. In comparison to other witnesses, Oksman dramatized Mandelstam’s ordeal, but essential details of his letter match the information that we know from others.

4. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 83; Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).

5. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (London: Collins and Harvill, 1978), part 3, chap. 7.

6. From 1948 onward, convicts working in the gulag were entitled to receive wages, which were set at 30 percent of the current salaries in the equivalent industries. However, in 1953 only 61.8 percent of convicts actually obtained these wages; the remainder were either too ill or physically incapacitated to perform the work required, or refused to work for religious or other reasons. See Sokolov, “Prinuzhdenie k trudu v sovetskoi ekonomike,” 63–64.

7. According to the numbers that were collected by the central administration of the gulag, mortality in the camps was generally four times higher than for the civilian population, but sometimes ten times higher. S. G. Wheatcroft, “The Scale and Nature of Stalinist Repression and Its Demographic Significance,” Europe-Asia Studies 52, no. 6 (2000): 1143–1159. During the construction of the Belomor Canal (1931–1933), mortality increased sixfold. Sokolov, “Prinuzhdenie k trudu v sovetskoi ekonomike,” 22.

8. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2. Goners were not the only category that was perceived as disgusting in the camps. See Adi Kuntsman, “‘With a Shade of Disgust’: Affective Politics of Sexuality and Class in Memoirs of the Stalinist Gulag,” Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 308–328.

9. “I menia tol’ko ravnyi ub’et,” a line from Mandelstam’s poem, “Za gremuchuiu doblest’ griadushchikh vekov.”

10. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, part 3, 208.

11. Hannah Arendt, “Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps” [1950], in Essays in Understanding (New York: Schocken, 1994), 233, 240–241.

12. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 56; see also Harriet Murav, Russia's Legal Fictions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 172. The torturer usually perceives torture as a means and not an end, but the tortured, and her friends and descendants, may have the opposite opinion. My definition of torture camps attempts to formulate the victims’ perspective. It does not, however, deny the perpetrators’ perceptions of the economic, political, and psychological purposes of the gulag.

13. Sokolov, “Prinuzhdenie k trudu v sovetskoi ekonomike”; Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). For an extreme example of the inefficiency of the gulag, see Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). For a fresh study of violence in the camps, see Golfo Alexopulos, “A Torture Memo: Reading Violence in the Gulag,” in Golfo Alexopulos, Julie Hessler, and Kiril Tomoff, Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 157–176.

14. See Il’ia Gerasimov, “Pered prikhodom t’my: (Pere)kovka novogo sovetskogo cheloveka v 1920–kh godakh: Svidetel’stva uchastnikov,” Ab Imperio 3 (2002): 297–320; Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 23; Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The GULAG and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), 36–41; and Julie Draskoczy, “The ‘Put' of Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin's White Sea-Baltic Canal,” Russian Review 71 (2012): 30–48. For other methods of psychological transformation, see Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Vadim Volkov, “The Concept of Kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000), 210–230; and Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). On the instrumental use of state violence as a means for ideological and aesthetic transformation of the population, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 26–30, 82–126; Peter Holquist, “State Violence as Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism,” in Landscaping the Human Garden, ed. Amir Weiner (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 19–45; and Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth, “State Violence—Violent Societies,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 133–179. On the underappreciated depths of the Soviet transformation of humans, see A. Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, trans. Noah Rubens and Maria Rubens (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996); for a particularly bizarre project, see A. Etkind, “Beyond Eugenics: The Forgotten Scandal of Hybridizing Humans and Apes,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39 (2008): 205–210.

15. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 83; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. For criticisms of Agamben’s analysis of the Muselmann, bare life, and witnessing, see Dominick LaCapra, “Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben,” in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 126–162; Davis, Haunted Subjects, 119–126; and Mark Mazower, “Foucault, Agamben: Theory and the Nazis,” boundary 2 35, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 23–34.

16. On sacrifice and its modern repercussions, see Boym, Another Freedom.

17. Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the End-games of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 6.

18. Igal Halfin, ed., Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities (London: Frank Cass, 2002); Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); A. Etkind, “Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?” Kritika 6, no. 1 (2005): 171–186; Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone, “Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective,” Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 967–986.

19. See Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1966); and Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in Concentration Camps (New York: Holt, 1996), 28.

20. Jan Plamper, “Foucault’s Gulag,” Kritika 3, no. 2 (2002): 255–280. For a perspective on the anthropology of violence, see Veena Das, ed., Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

21. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 40.

22. Istoriia Grazhdanskoi voiny v SSSR (Moscow: OGIZ, 1936).

23. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 1970).

24. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 54; for analyses of Arendt’s “boomerang effect,” see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009); and Etkind, Internal Colonization, chap. 1.

25. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and Education of Sexuality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 17.

26. Vasilii Grossman, Everything Flows, trans. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler (London: Harvill, 2010), 51.

27. In a parallel way, Friedrich Hayek called his classic book, which defended liberalism against the twentieth-century proponents of state property, The Road to Serfdom. By using the historical term “serfdom” (not slavery or servitude), Hayek derived a genealogy of Soviet-style socialism from the Russian imperial order. See Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge 1944).

28. For this concept, see Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

29. Rebellions in the gulag, which started in 1953, could also convince Khrushchev that the system was not sustainable. See Anne Appelbaum, Gulag: A History (London: Doubleday 2003), 484–507; and Igor Chubais, “Reformator ponevole,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, April 21, 2009.

30. Sokolov, “Prinuzhdenie k trudu v sovetskoi ekonomike,” 65.

31. Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev (Moscow: Novosti, 1994), chap. 4.

32. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1968), 17:245.

33. The term “contact zone” has been developed in postcolonial studies, where it describe exchanges and conflicts between the colonizers and the colonized. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Acculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).

34. Akhmatova said this on March 4, 1956, a week after the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party. See Lidiia Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Akhmatovoi (Moscow: Soglasie, 1997), 2:190; quoted here in the translation by Applebaum, Gulag, 463.

35. Ludmila Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Boston: Little Brown, 1990), 71.

36. Aimé Césaire, “Lettre à Maurice Thorez,” trans. Chike Jeffers, Social Text 28, no. 2 (2010): 145–152; I am grateful to Nancy Condee for introducing me to this document.

37. Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s ghostly poem that he wrote from 1954 to 1963, “Tyorkin in the Other World”, illustrates the surreal imagination of the period. On the culture of the Thaw, see Nancy Condee, “Cultural Codes of the Thaw,” in Nikita Khrushchev, ed. William Taubman et al. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 160–176; Jan Plamper, “Cultural Production, Cultural Consumption: Post-Stalin Hybrids,” Kritika 6, no. 4 (2005): 755–762; Susan Reid, “The Soviet Art World in the Early Thaw,” Third Text 20, no. 2 (March 2006): 161–175; Polly Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London: Routledge, 2006); Aleksandr Prokhorov, Unasledovannyi diskurs: Paradigmy stalinskoi kul’tury v literature i kinematografe ottepeli (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2008); Polly Jones, “Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories?” Slavic and East European Journal 86, no. 2 (2008): 346–371; Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap 2009).

38. Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 191–192.

39. On associations and democracy in Alexis de Tocqueville’s work, see Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina, eds., Civic Engagement in American Democracy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); and Mark E. Warren, Democracy and Association (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 29–30.

40. See Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

41. Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory 41 (2002): 179–197.

42. See Kathleen E. Smith, Remembering Stalin's Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); Leona Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of GULAG Survivors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (London: Granta, 2000). In recent years, autobiographical accounts have received more attention than other forms of memory. See Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York: New Press, 1995); Irina Paperno, “Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience,” Kritika 3–4 (Fall 2002): 577–610; and Jochen Hellbeck, ed., Autobiographical Practices in Russia/Autobiographische Praktiken in Russland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004).

43. Marietta Chudakova, “Pod skrip ukliuchin,” Novyi mir 4 (1993): 136.

44. For a critical theory of nostalgia, see Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

45. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, book 2 (Boston: Palgrave, 2009), chap. 5.

46. Since 2001, a small Museum of the History of Gulag has been working in Moscow on Petrovka. The exposition shows photos of prominent prisoners, the interior of a typical barrack, a model of the observation tower in the yard, and some interesting pieces of art created by the former convicts.

CHAPTER 3

1. “Nepmen” were small entrepreneurs who benefited from the Soviet government’s New Economic Policy (1921–1928), which allowed for some forms of private enterprise to be resumed.

2. “My father told me: crowds of prisoners were rounded up and driven into small cells where it was so crowded that it was impossible to sit down and where [we were confronted with] constant heat, intensified day and night by the blinding glare of the revolving floodlight.” Yefim Etkind, Zapiski nezagovorshchika:Barselonskaia proza (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2001), 315.

3. Grigory Etkind died of starvation twelve years later during the siege of Leningrad.

4. Etkind, Zapiski nezagovorshchika, 316.

5. During the decades of Stalin’s rule, about 20 million people returned from the gulag alive; in 1954–1957, 2.5 million people were released from the system of the camps, prisons, and settlements. Sokolov, “Prinuzhdenie k trudu v sovetskoi ekonomike,” 38, 65.

6. The memoirs of gulag survivors have been explored in Merridale, Night of Stone; Toker, Return from the Archipelago; and Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). The Sakharov Museum in Moscow has published 1,505 memoirs of the gulag at http://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/list.xtmpl. On the post-Soviet memoirs as a genre, see Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009); see also my review of this book in the Times Literary Supplement, June 11, 2010.

7. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Pierre Bourdieu, “Marginalia: Some Additional Notes on the Gift,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity (London: Routledge, 1997), 231–241; Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). For a critical analysis, see Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).

8. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus (London: Routledge, 1997); Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003). For criticism, see Simon Thompson, The Political Theory of Recognition: A Critical Introduction (London: Polity, 2006); Lois McNay, Against Recognition (London: Polity, 2008); and Terry Lovell, ed., (Mis) recognition, Social Inequality and Social Justice: Nancy Fraser and Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2007).

9. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), 1452a29–32; for exemplary analysis, see Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). On the affinity between situations of misrecognition and ghostly apparitions in Shakespeare’s comedies, see Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 159–162.

10. In Soviet film, the most popular comedies such as The Diamond Hand (dir. Leonid Gaidai, 1968) or The Irony of Fate (dir. El’dar Riazanov, 1975) were stories of misrecognition.

11. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).

12. Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Vtoraia kniga (Paris: IMCA-Press, 1972), 22. On the arrest of Osip Mandelstam and his wife’s search for him, see Vitalii Shentalinskii, Raby svobody: V literaturnykh arkhivakh KGB (Moscow: Parus, 1995), 222–256; and Pavel Nerler, introduction to Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Ob Akhmatovoi, ed. Pavel Nerler (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2007).

13. Mandel’shtam, Vtoraia kniga, 208.

14. See Nanci Adler, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002); and Stephen F. Cohen. The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin (New York: Tauris, 2011).

15. Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 36.

16. B. Okudzhava, Devushka moei mechty: Avtobiograficheskie povestvovaniia (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1988). Though the described events are similar to the actual life of Okudzhava, this is a fictional tale written as a first-person narrative. However, Okudzhava included the story in his “Autobiographical Stories”; as a result, we are entitled to read it as a memoir.

17. In the real-life story of Varlen Riabokon and his mother, Anna Abrukina, we find a similar combination of the son’s longing for his mother and his anxiety that he does not “know” her after the many years that she spent in the camp. Varlen was twelve years old when his mother was arrested in 1937. Like the mother of Okudzhava’s character, Abrukina was held in Kazakhstan, in the Karaganda women’s camp. She was released in 1946 and met her son, who was serving in the army, in 1949. Varlen wrote to his mother: “Can you imagine me, if only vaguely? I do not have a single photograph of you.” Having received such a photo in September 1947 (“you are really young and look good”), he wrote her: “it is still the same: I cannot imagine you as you really are. In any photograph, I can only guess and remember the old, now erased, features of my mama as you were in 1937. But you know me even less.” Ye. V. Riabokon’, “Pis’ma izdaleka,” available at the Sakharov Museum’s website Vospominaniia o GULAGe, http://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/auth_pages.xtmpl?Key=23975&page=0.

18. This film was produced in Berlin in 1944 under Joseph Goebbels’s supervision and was a wartime hit. It featured Marika Rökk, “the undisputed prima ballerina of National-Socialist cinema.” See Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company 1918–1945 (New York: Hill, 1996), 234. Decades later, Okudzhava remembered Marika Rökk’s name and mentioned it in his story.

19. While his family’s history served Okudzhava as a source of inspiration for his historical novels and memoirs, his mother’s years in the camp remained untouchable. In his nonfictional study “Uprazdnennyi teatr” (1995), Okudzhava describes events that preceded the arrest of his parents in 1937, including his mother’s visit to Beria. Okudzhava’s mother returned from the Karaganda camps to Tbilisi only in 1955. See also Dmitrii Bykov, Bulat Okudzhava (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia 2011), 142–143.

20. Yevgeniia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 219.

21. Vasilii Grossman, Vse techet: Pozdniaia proza (Moscow: Slovo, 1994), 283.

22. Ibid., 328, 284–285, 295.

23. Joseph Brodsky, “Three Poems by Joseph Brodsky,” trans. George L. Kline, Russian Review 25, no. 2 (April 1966): 131–134.

24. The life-story of the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky features a similar event. In the early 1950s, the former chief of the unit in eastern Siberia, in which Zabolotsky spent a large part of his gulag term (he served from 1938 to 1945), visited him in Moscow, drank vodka with him, and even spent nights in his apartment. Moreover, in 1946 Zabolotsky met in a restaurant that very critic, N. V. Lesiuchevsky, whose denunciation was the main reason for his arrest; the two men recognized each other and dined together. Telling this story to his friends, Zabolotsky said: “this is a psychological problem: why did Lesiuchevsky join my table? Do you want to resolve it? Perhaps he needed to make sure that I am not a ghost, that I am real, that I am eating soup.” See Nikita Zabolotsky, Zhizn’ N. A. Zabolotskogo (Moscow: Soglasie 1998), 321, 361. Bitov writes about Zabolotsky as his “favorite poet.” Bitov, “O literaturnykh reputatsiiakh,” Oktiabr’ (2006): 8.

25. A. Bitov, Pushkinskii dom (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1978), 49.

26. In his auto-commentary, Bitov states that he was inspired by the first rumors about Bakhtin’s life and work. See A. Bitov, “Pushkinskii dom: Kommentarii,” in Blizkoe retro (Yekaterinburg: U-Faktoriia, 2004), 472. He also knew about the repressed historians of literature from Pushkinskii dom (the Institute of Russian Literature of Academy of Sciences in Leningrad), such as Dmitry Likhachev and Yulian Oksman (see chapter 4), and also about the brothers Grigory and Matvei Gukovsky, two prominent scholars who worked at Pushkinskii dom. They were arrested in 1949. Grigory died in prison in 1950; Matvei survived.

27. Abram Tertz, Spokoinoi nochi (Paris: Sintaksis, 1984), 260.

28. In 1944, Kazarnovsky came to Tashkent to live with Nadezhda for a while and tell her his untrustworthy stories about Osip, whom he claimed to have seen in a camp near Vladivostok. On Kazarnovsky as a flamboyant poet in the Solovetsky camp in 1930, see Dmitry Likhachev, Vospominaniia (St. Petersburg: Logos, 2005), 254; on Kazarnovsky as a beggar and drug addict in the 1950s, see Gleb Vasil’ev, “Vstrechi s Iuriem Kazarnovskim,” Grani, 182 (1996); and Eduard Babaev, Vospominaniia (St. Petersburg: Inapress, 2000), 180. Babaev remembers Kazarnovsky as a ghostly figure: “Yurochka the ghost.” A leading expert on Mandelstam, Pavel Nerler believes that Nadezhda actually learned about Osip’s death from Varlam Shalamov, who received reliable information about the poet from a camp doctor, Nina Savoeva. See Pavel Nerler, “Ot zimy k vesne: Na poliakh perepiski Nadezhdy Mandel’shtam i Varlama Shalamova,” polit.ru, June 22, 2007, www.polit.ru/analytics/2007/06/22/mandelshtam.html.

29. Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia, 397.

30. The 1918 constitution of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic used the formula of “the complete elimination of class divisions in society” (Article 3). The Soviet constitution of 1936 softened the formula to “equal rights of all the citizens of the USSR” (Article 123); a similar formula appears in Article 34 of the Soviet constitution of 1977.

CHAPTER 4

1. Matvei Liubavskii, Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii (Moscow: MGU, 1996); Evgenii Tarle, Napoleon (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia 1936).

2. Complaints of chronic overcrowding are universal in the Soviet memoir literature. All the social engineering of the period—from collective farms to communal apartments to prison cells to the gulag—featured enforced sociality, the essential mechanism of Soviet disciplinary practices.

3. N. M. Druzhinin, Izbrannye trudy. Vospominaniia. Mysli. Opyt istorika (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 102.

4. N. M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest’iane i reforma Kiseleva (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1946), 1:81.

5. See Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Civilization (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998); and Lynn Viola, The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).

6. See Kathleen F. Parthé, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

7. Dmitry Likhachev (1906–1999) was the founder (in 1986) and the head (until 1993) of the Soviet (later Russian) Cultural Fund. Until his death, he was believed to be the personal friend of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev and their adviser on cultural and historical issues. I can imagine that among many other issues, his influence was crucial for choosing the image of the Solovetsky camp for the 500-ruble note, which was issued in 1995 (see chapter 1).

8. There is a large and growing literature on the Solovetsky camp. See Applebaum, Gulag, 40–58; Roy R. Robson, Solovki: The Story of Russia Told through Its Most Remarkable Islands (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004); Yury Brodsky, Solovki: Dvadtsat’ let osobogo naznacheniia (Moscow: Mir iskusstv 2008); and Michael David-Fox, Showcasting the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to Soviet Russia, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 142–175. There is also an excellent bilingual site, http://www.solovki.ca/.

9. Dmitry Likhachev, Zametki i nabliudeniia (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989).

10. Dmitry Likhachev, “Kartezhnye igry ugolovnikov (iz kriminologicheskogo kabineta),” Solovetskie ostrova 1 (1930): 32–35; Dmitry Likhachev, “Cherty pervobytnogo primitivizma vorovskoi rechi,” Iazyk i myshlenie, vols. 3–4 (Moscow-Leningrad: Institut imeni N. Ia. Marra, 1935), 47–100; Dmitry Likhachev, “Argoticheskie slova professional’noi rechi” [1938], in Razvitie grammatiki i leksiki sovremennogo russkogo iazyka (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), 311–359.

11. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990); and Etkind, Internal Colonization, chap. 8.

12. Viktor Paneiakh, Tvorchestvo i sud’ba istorika: Boris Aleksandrovich Romanov (St. Petersburg: Bulanin, 2000), 138–146. These survivors routinely used the idea of “psychic trauma.” In 1946, shortly before the end of his ten-year-long term, Yulian Oksman wrote his wife from a Kolyma camp: “A feeling of large-scale confusion, lack of confidence, doubt in everything and everyone has mastered me, and I do not recognize and understand myself. Of course, this is a psychic trauma that is common for such conditions.” M. O. Chudakova and Ie. A. Toddes, “Iz perepiski Iu. G. Oksmana,” in Chetvertye Tynianovskie chteniia: Tezisy dokladov i materialy dlia obsuzhdeniia (Riga: Zinatne, 1988), 153.

13. Boris Romanov, Liudi i nravy drevnei Rusi, 2nd ed. (Moscow-Leningrad: Nauka, 1966), 23–45, 216.

14. Likhachev, Vospominaniia, 171.

15. Ibid., 137–139.

16. Ol’ga Berggol’ts, Zapretnyi dnevnik (St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2010), 26, 31.

17. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 142; V. V. Duvakin, Besedy V. V. Duvakina sM. M. Bakhtinym (Moscow: Progress, 1996), 205.

18. On Medvedev and Liubov’ Mendeleeva-Blok, the addressee of many celebrated poems by Aleksandr Blok, see Duvakin, Besedy V. V. Duvakina s M. M. Bakhtinym, 196–197.

19. The best Russian biographies of Bakhtin state that Sukhanov was Bakhtin’s only interlocutor during the Kustanai exile. See S. S. Konkin and L. S. Konkina, Mikhail Bakhtin (Saransk: Mordovskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1993), 209–210; and N. A. Pan’kov, Voprosy biografii i nauchnogo tvorchestva M. M. Bakhtina (Moscow: MGU, 2011), 427. Sukhanov’s biography, however, does not contain any mention of Sukhanov ever having been exiled to Kazakhstan. See Israel Getzler, Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). The foremost Russian expert on Sukhanov, A. A. Kornikov, responded to my query with a very informative letter in which he also stated that Sukhanov and Flakserman had never been in Kazakhstan exile. They lived in Moscow until Sukhanov was arrested in July 1930, before being sent to the Urals and Siberia, and shot in 1940. My conjecture is that Bakhtin and Sukhanov conversed in Moscow before their arrests but that decades later, Bakhtin wrongly located their meetings in Kustanai.

20. See Duvakin, Besedy V. V. Duvakina s M. M. Bakhtinym.

21. On Bakhtin’s interest in Russian sects, see A. Etkind, Khlyst: Sekty, literature i revoliutsiia (Moscow: NLO, 1998), 155–159.

22. Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia, ed. Iurii Freidin (Moscow: Soglasie, 1999), 1:296.

23. Osip Mandel’shtam, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. Sergei Averintsev and Pavel Nerler (Moscow: 1999), 2:221. The first edition of Mandelstam’s Conversation about Dante was published in 1967 with an afterword by Leonid Pinsky, a historian of literature and survivor of the gulag. Having read this edition in the camp, Andrei Siniavsky wrote that Pinsky strove in vain to find a place for Mandelstam’s treatise in the literature on Dante, whereas in fact the right approach would be to read it in terms of Mandelstam’s “personal experience.” Andrei Siniavskii, 127 pisem o liubvi, 3 vols., ed. Mariia Rozanova (Moscow: Agraf, 2004), 1:356. Indeed, in other Soviet biographies of Dante we find a different portrait from Mandelstam’s; Aleksei Dzhivilegov presented Dante as a gallant knight in his youth, and then a proud statesman and a stoic wanderer—a far cry from Mandelstam’s tortured man. Aleksei Dzhivilegov, Dante (Moscow: OGIZ, 1933).

24. Mikhail Bakhtin, “François Rabelais v istorii realisma,” in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, 2008), 4:26–27, 43–45, 112. For a history of this text, see N. A. Pan’kov, “N. N. Bakhtin: Ranniaia versiia kontseptsii karnavala,” Voprosy literatury 5 (1997): 87–122; Pan’kov, Voprosy biografii.

25. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 53–56, 66, 119, 135–136; see also Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Tim Beasley-Murray, Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin: Experience and Form (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); and T. Bubnova, “Bakhtin i Benjamin (po povodu Gete),” in Khronotop i okrestnosti: Festschrift for Nikolai Pan’ kov (Ufa: Vagant, 2011), 54–67.

26. In the 1960s, the word “grotesque” became a cliché for describing Soviet life; shortly after her emigration, Stalin’s daughter wrote that “the history of Russia resembles the sad and uncanny grotesque.” Svetlana Allilueva, Tol’ ko odin god (New York: Harper, 1969), 247.

27. A. Anikst, “L. E. Pinskii,” in L. E. Pinskii, Magistral’nyi siuzhet (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989), 5. The essay was published as L. E. Pinskii, “Tragicheskoe u Shekspira,” Voprosy literatury 2 (1958).

28. Chudakova and Toddes, “Iz perepiski Iu. G. Oksmana,” 104, 112; G. M. Frolov, “K istorii aresta, zakliucheniia i reabilitatsii Iu. G. Oksmana,” Voprosy literatury 2 (2011): 431–473. Unfortunately, these memoirs and letters do not clarify the philosophical substance of Oksman’s new ideas, apart from their anti-Stalinist and probably anti-Marxist character.

29. Belinsky is referring to Gogol’s Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847). Belinsky’s letter is quoted from V. G. Belinsky: Selected Philosophical Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1948).

30. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, Isaiah Berlin also singled out Belinsky as one of his favorite Russian thinkers. See Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London: Penguin 1978).

31. A. L. Grishunin, ed., Iu. G. Oksman-K. I. Chukovskii: Perepiska 1949–1969 (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury, 2001), 38, 72, 115. The study was published as Yulian Oksman, “Pis’mo Belinskogo k Gogoliu kak istoricheskii document,” Uchenye zapiski Saratovskogo universiteta 31 (1952): 111–205, and in a shorter version in Yulian Oksman, Ot “Kapitanskoi dochki” k “Zapiskam okhotnika” (Saratov: Knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1959), 203–245.

32. “Donoschiki i predateli sredi sovetskikh pisatelei i uchenykh,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik 5, no. 6 (1963): 74—76, republished in M. D. El’zon, “Iskrenne Vash Iulian Oksman,” Russkaia literatura 1 (2004): 161–163; see also Lazar Fleishman, “Iz archiva Guverovskogo instituta: Pis’ma Iu. G. Oksmana k G. P. Struve,” Stanford Slavonic Papers 1 (1987): 70.

33. Kathryn B. Feuer and Martin Malia took part in this endeavor. See A. B. Gribanov, “Iu. G. Oksman v perepiske G. P. Struve 1963 goda,” in Sed’mye Tynianovskie chteniia: Materialy dlia obsuzhdeniia (Riga: 1995), 495–505.

34. Dmitrii Zubarev, “Iz zhizni literaturovedov,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 20 (1996): 145–177, quote from 146–147.

35. Chudakova and Toddes, “Iz perepiski,” 115.

36. Meletinsky’s memoirs are published in his Izbrannye stat’ i, vospominaniia (Moscow: RGGU, 1998). One of his major books is available in English: The Poetics of Myth, trans. Gue Lanoue and Alexandre Sadetsky (New York: Routledge, 2000). On Lev Gumilev, see Viktor Shnirelman, The Myth of the Khazars and Intellectual Anti-Semitism in Russia, 1970s-1990s (Jerusalem: Hebrew University 2002); and Serguei Oushakine, The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009).

37. Lev Samoilov [Lev Klein], Perevernutyi mir (Berlin: Taschenbuch, 1991) (later, the book was republished in Russia); Lev Klein, “Etnografiia lageria,” Sovetskaia ethnografiia 1 (1990): 96–108. See also his huge and informative book of memoirs: Lev Klein, Trudno byt’ Kleinom (St. Petersburg: Nestor, 2010).

38. Vladimir Kabo, “Struktura lageria i arkhetipy soznaniia,” Sovetskaia ethnografiia 1 (1990): 108–113; Vladimir Kabo, Doroga v Avstraliiu. Vospominaniia (New York: Effect Publishing, 1995). For an eloquent picture of the Russian penitentiary system in the 2000s, see a fresh collection of prison memoirs, Zakhar Prilepin, ed., Limonka v tiur’mu (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraph, 2012).

39. Likhachev, Vospominaniia, 142, 171, 217.

CHAPTER 5

1. Yefim Etkind, Zapiski nezagovorchshika: Barselonskaia proza (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2001), 383.

2. Ibid., 385.

3. Mikhail Gronas collected many examples of gulag prisoners who remembered and daily repeated poetic texts, classical or original. He argues that the rhythm and rhymes of Russian poetry helped the prisoners to memorize these texts and rely on them for ordering their mental life. Gronas believes that these “mnemonic and therapeutic” functions of poetic speech explain its significance for the Soviet convicts. See Mikhail Gronas, Cognitive Poetics and Cultural Memory: Russian Literary Mnemonics (New York: Routledge 2011).

4. Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Soglasie, 1991), 1:296.

5. Henry Orlov, “A Link in the Chain,” in A Shostakovich Casebook, ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 194–195.

6. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1968), 4–6, 10, 13, 30.

7. Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience, 24.

8. Sergei Averintsev, “Sud’ba i vest’ Osipa Mandel’shtama,” in O. E. Mandel’shtam, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1990), 1:5–64.

9. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz.

10. Nanci Adler, The Communist Within: Narratives of Loyalty to the Party before, during, and after the Gulag (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).

11. Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Vtoraia kniga (Moscow: Soglasie, 1999), 495.

12. See Valerii Yesipov, Varlam Shalamov i ego sovremenniki (Vologda: Knizhnoe nasledie, 2007).

13. V. T. Shalamov, “Tishina” (1966), in Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, Vagrius, 1998), 2:111–117.

14. For contextual readings of Shalamov, see Toker, Return from the Archipelago, chap. 6 (on “belletrization,” 150); Svetlana Boym, “Banality of Evil, Mimicry, and the Soviet Subject,” Slavic Review 67, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 342–363; and Sarah Young, “The Convict Unbound: The Body of Identity in GULAG Narratives,” GULAG Studies 1 (2008): 57–76.

15. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 73.

16. Lawrence Langer introduced the concept of redemptive narrative in Holocaust studies; see his Using and Abusing the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

17. Tat’iana Leonova, “Shalamov: Put’ v bessmertie (zapis’ O. Isaevoi),” Novyi zhurnal 245 (2006); http://magazines.russ.ru/nj/2006/245/le17.html.

18. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma.

19. Georges Nivat, Solzhenitsyn (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1984), 62.

20. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 257–258.

21. Yurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii, “Rol’ dual’nykh modelei v dinamike russkoi kul’tury,” in Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi fililologii (Tartu: TGU, 1977), 28:3–37; on the importance of purgatory for ghost stories, see Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory.

22. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987).

23. In Grossman’s Life and Fate, a prisoner kills a camp doctor, who is also a convict, because the doctor has identified him as a malingerer and refused to prescribe him a day of leave for health reasons. There is no doubt that Grossman had a real-life prototype for this doctor.

24. Sveshnikov told the story of his rescue by Steinberg to their mutual friend, the artist Dmitrii Plavinsky. See Dmitrii Plavinsky, “Zapiski o proshlom,” Novyi zhurnal 179 (1990): 127.

25. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Selected Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, vol. 2, part 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1999), 190.

26. Alexander Glezer, “The Knight of the Sad Countenance,” in Painting for the Grave: The Early Work of Boris Sveshnikov, ed. Norton T. Dodge and Jane A. Sharp (New Brunswick, N.J.: Zimmerli Art Museum, 2008), 44.

27. In one of the very first Western responses to Sveshnikov, Matthew Baigell noted some features of resemblance between Sveshnikov and Bakhtin. See Matthew Baigell, “Boris Sveshnikov,” in Dodge and Sharp, Painting for the Grave, 43.

28. Hal Foster explicated the similar dynamics in postwar west European art as an anthropological turn, which focuses on “traumatized subjects” and “sited communities.” See Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 171–204. For a relevant analysis of “unwanted beauty” in artitsic responses to the Holocaust, see Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007)

29. Igor’ Golomshtok, “Vospominaniia starogo pessimista,” Znamia 2 (2011): 139–166.

30. G. Anisimov, “Snovideniia vechnosti: Lagernaia grafika Borisa Sveshnikova,” Kul’tura 15 (7423) (April 2004).

31. Golomstok, “Vospominaniia starogo pessimista.”

32. Alexei Yurchak, “Necro-Utopia: The Politics of Indistinction and the Aesthetics of the Non-Soviet,” Current Anthropology 49, no. 2 (April 2008): 212. See also Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, chap. 7.

33. As cited by Yurchak, “Necro-Utopia,” 208, n.15.

34. Ibid., 207.

35. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 120.

36. Yurchak, “Necro-Utopia,” 211.

37. Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, 25.

38. Ibid.

39. Interestingly, the future filmmaker and émigré Andrei Tarkovsky also spent about a year in eastern Siberia as a part of the geological expedition, starting from the spring of 1953. See P. D. Volkova, Andrei Tarkovsky (Moscow: EKSMO, 2002).

40. Brodsky, “Three Poems by Joseph Brodsky,” 131–134.

41. Ibid., 26.

42. Joseph Brodsky, “Uncommon Visage. Nobel Lecture,” in On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 54–55. Andrei Siniavsky, in his Voice from the Chorus, written in the camp, realized a similar reversal of the classical relations between the hero and the chorus (see chapter 6).

43. This essay, “The Writer in Prison,” was the last written by Brodsky (New York Times, October 13, 1996).

44. The only job that Oskar Rabin could find in Lianozovo was in the camp that was still functioning nearby. From 1950 to 1956, he worked as a desiatnik, a manager who organized the work of a team of convicts on the railway. At the same time, he started an artistic career, which led to his stellar exhibitions in Paris, New York, and Moscow. See Arkadii Nedel’ and Oskar Rabin, Narisovannaia zhizn’ (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2012), 67–69.

45. Igor Kholin, “Weeping,” in A Night in the Nabokov Hotel: 20 Contemporary Poets from Russia, trans. Anatoly Kudryavitsky (Dublin: Daedalus Press, 2006).

46. For interesting speculations on the Lianozovo school as “deconstruction” of the idea of “world culture,” see Vladislav Kulakov, Poeziia kak fakt: Stat’ i o stikhakh (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999), 226–230.

47. Chertkov’s verses were published in Leonid Chertkov, Ognepark (Köln, 1987), and are available on the Russkaia Virtual’naia Biblioteka website, http://www.rvb.ru/np/publication/05supp/chertkov/ognepark.htm#verse1. For the quoted obituary, see Roman Timenchik, “Lionia Chertkov,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 47 (2001): 128–131; for analysis, see Kulakov, Poeziia kak fakt, 134–137; and Il’ia Kukulin, “Istoriia pogranichnogo iazyka: Vladimir Narbut, Leonid Chertkov i kontrkul’turnaia funktsiia,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 72 (2005): 207–223.

48. N. Tamruchi, “Iz istorii moskovskogo avangarda,” Znanie—sila 5 (1991).

49. Il’ia Kukulin, “Razvitie besposhchadnogo pokaza,” interview with Genrikh Sapgir (1999), http://sapgir.narod.ru/talks/with/with02.htm.

50. For the concept of grievability, see Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Verso, 2009).

51. I translated this couplet, which I remember from my Leningrad youth; with some credibility, similar couplets and quatrains are attributed to Oleg Grigoriev, a leader of the Mitki. Several dozen of these verses have been collected by Aleksandr Belousov, though his structuralist approach to this folklore is different from mine. See A. F. Belousov, “Sadistskie stishki,” in Russkii shkol’ny fol’ klor (Moscow: Ladomir, 1998), 545–558; see also Mikhail Lur’e, “Sadistskii stishok v kontekste gorodskoi fol’klornoi traditsii,” Antropologicheskii forum 6 (2007): 287–313.

52. Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle,” 314.

CHAPTER 6

1. Tertz, Spokoinoi nochi, 43.

2. Western works on Siniavsky tend to read him as an author of philosophical prose who was able to transcend his cultural context. See Margaret Dalton, Andrei Siniavskii and Julii Daniel’: Two Soviet “Heretical” Writers (Wurzburg: Jal-Verlag, 1973); Olga Matich, “Spokojnoj noci: Andrej Sinjavskij’s Rebirth as Abram Terc,” Slavic and East European Journal 33, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 50–63; Stephanie Sandler, “Sex, Death, and Nation in the Strolls with Pushkin Controversy,” Slavic Review 51, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 294–308; Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995); Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “Andrei Donatovich Siniavsky (1925–1997),” Slavic and East European Journal 42, no. 3 (1998): 368; Harriet Murav, Russia’s Legal Fictions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Walter F. Kolonosky, Literary Insinuations: Sorting Out Siniavsky’s Irreverence (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003). Beth Holmgren was specifically interested in the pretexts and contexts of Siniavsky’s fiction; see her “The Transfiguring of Context in the Work of Abram Tertz,” Slavic Review 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 965–977. On Siniavsky’s nonfiction, see Tat’iana Ratkina, Nikomu ne zadolzhav: Literaturnaia kritika i esseistika A. D. Siniavskogo (Moscow: Sovpadenie, 2010). The recently published massive collection of Siniavsky’s camp letters provides new material for analysis: Siniavskii, 127 pisem o liubvi (hereafter cited in the text by volume and page number). See also Yulii Daniel’, “Ya vse sbivaius’ na literaturu”: Pism’a iz zakliucheniia. Stikhi (Moscow: Memorial-Zven’ia, 2000).

3. Likhachev, Vospominaniia, 142.

4. On their relations as classmates, see Stalin’s daughter’s memoirs: Svetlana Allilueva, Tol’ ko odin god (New York: Harper, 1969), 242–249.

5. Galina Belaia, “Ya rodom iz shestidesiatykh,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 70 (2004).

6. On Klim Samgin and Gorky’s interest in sects, see Etkind, Khlyst, 496–520.

7. Alexeyeva and Goldberg, Thaw Generation.

8. Igor’ Golomstok, “Vospominaniia starogo pessimista,” Znamia 3 (2011): 155.

9. These songs include “The Tattoo,” “Bodaibo,” “The Convict Petrov and the Convict Vasil’iev,” and “Wolf Hunt.” Vysotsky’s brutality was matched by an overwhelming sense of tragedy and folkish mysticism, all familiar features of post-Stalinism. See Mark Tsybul’skii, “Vladimir Vysotsky i Andrei Siniavsky’ (2004), http://www.liveinternet.ru/community/vladimir_vysotsky/post 36284769/; Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 157–160; Christopher Lazarsky, “Vladimir Vysotsky and His Cult,” Russian Review 51, no. 1 (1992): 58–71; and Russian Bards, a volume of Russian Studies in Literature 41 (2005).

10. When the KGB arrested Siniavsky, agents found in his home Vysotsky’s tapes and confiscated them. See Valerii Perevozchikov, Vladimir Vysotskii: Pravda smertnogo chasa. Posmertnaia sud'ba (Moscow: Vagrius, 2003), 69–70.

11. Vadim Tumanov, Vse poteriat’ i vnov’ nachat’ s mechty (Moscow: Novosti, 2004), 97, 279. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer provide a revealing self-analysis of a similar act: they took stones from an abandoned camp, in their case the Romanian concentration camp, Vapniarka. “This physical testimonial fragment reflects our transformation into co-witnesses, carriers of a memory we have adopted.” Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 231.

12. Vladimir Vysotskii and Leonid Monchinskii, Chernaia svecha (Moscow: AST, 1999).

13. Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China (London: Collins Harvill, 1991).

14. S. I. Simonova, “‘Maska skorbi’ Ernsta Neizvestnogo v Magadane: Istoriia stroitel’stva,” http://mounb.maglan.ru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=128&Itemid=240.

15. From the introduction to Yuly Daniel, Govorit Moskva (Moscow: 1997).

16. Arendt, On Violence, 54.

17. Tertz, Spokoinoi nochi, 43.

18. Ibid., 30, 40.

19. Mariia Rozanova, “Neskol’ko slov ot adresata etikh pisem,” in Siniavskii, 127 pisem o liubvi, 14.

20. Siniavskii, Spokoinoi nochi, 119.

21. Abram Tertz, Progulki s Pushkinym (Paris: Sintaksis 1989), 83.

22. Abram Tertz, Golos iz khora, in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Start, 1991), 1:664.

23. Quoted from G. Anisimov, “Snovideniia vechnosti: Lagernaia grafika Borisа Sveshnikova,” Kul’tura 15 (7423) (April 2004).

24. Abram Tertz, V teni Gogolia (Moscow: KoLibri, 2009), 1:8, 17, 19, 106.

25. Ibid., 1:356. Mandelstam’s Conversation was written in 1933 but published only in 1967. The afterword to Conversation was written by Leonid Pinsky who, despite or because of his own five years in the gulag, had the courage in 1966 to sign a collective letter that called upon the authorities to release Daniel and Siniavsky on bail.

26. Tertz, Golos iz khora, 1:647.

27. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

28. Andrei Siniavskii, “V noch’ posle bitvy,” Sintaksis 3 (1979): 45.

29. Tertz, Spokoinoi nochi, 323, 325–326.

30. Siniavskii i Daniel’ na skam’e podsudimykh (New York: Inter-Language Literary Associate, 1966), 107–108.

31. Tertz, Golos iz khora, 1:583.

32. Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago (Moscow: EKMSO, 2007), 606.

33. Siniavskii i Daniel’ na skam’e podsudimykh, 107–108.

34. Tertz, Spokoinoi nochi, 19; for analysis, see Murav, Russia's Legal Fictions, 208–212.

35. Tertz, Progulki s Pushkinym, 53.

36. Ibid., 54.

37. Likhachev, Vospominaniia, 142.

38. Andrei Siniavskii, Puteshestvie na Chernuiu rechku (Moscow: Zakharov, 1999), 449–450.

39. This debate is published in Oktiabr’ 4 (1989): 192.

40. Voprosy literatury 10 (1992): 80.

41. Andrei Siniavsky, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, trans. John Turnbull (New York: Arcade, 1988), xi.

42. Tertz, Spokoinoi nochi, 260.

43. Abram Tertz, “Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realism?” in Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii (Moscow: RGGU, 2003), 139, 156, 173, 175.

44. V. Shalamov, “Pis’mo staromu drugu,” in Tsena metafory ili prestuplenie i nakazanie Siniavskogo i Danielia, ed. E. M. Velikanova (Moscow: Kniga, 1989), 519. Nepomnyashchy, Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime, 179, and Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 229–240, emphasize the formative experience that Siniavsky underwent in the camps. Harriet Murav argues that the idea of the realized metaphor was the key to Siniavsky’s understanding of the Stalinist epoch and of his own trial; see her “The Case against Andrei Siniavskii: The Letter and the Law,” Russian Review 53, no. 4 (October 1994): 549–560. Stephanie Sandler has explored Siniavsky’s controversial metaphor of Pushkin as vampire; see her “Sex, Death, and Nation.”

45. Abram Tertz, “Liudi i zveri” (1975), in Siniavskii, Puteshestvie na Chernuiu rechku, 207.

46. Abram Tertz, “Puteshestvie na Chernuiu rechku,” in Siniavskii, Puteshestvie na Chernuiu rechku, 450.

47. On the “unconscious” continuity between the leaders of post-Soviet literature (Pelevin, Shishkin, Petrushevskaia) and Siniavskii, see Dmitry Bykov, “Tertz i synov’ia,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 15 (Winter 2006), http://www.uto-ronto.ca/tsq/15/bykov15.shtml; see also Alexander Etkind and Mark Lipovetsky “The Salamander’s Return: The Soviet Catastrophe and the Post-Soviet Novel” Russian Studies in Literature 46, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 6–48.

48. Bykov, “Terts i synov’ia.”

49. “Ya dazhe slyl slavianofilom,” in Siniavskii i Daniel’ na skam’e podsudimykh, 78.

50. Etkind, Khlyst, 179–189.

51. “In the camp I spent a lot of time with the representatives of various sects, and this was very interesting. I simply didn’t think that these sects still existed. I had read about them in books, but I didn’t think they had survived. . . . And for this reason this material is familiar and interesting for me to some degree. But so far I simply haven’t had time to get around to it. Artistically speaking, this will also be rendered in the style of the fantastic, of course” (Kyoko and Mitsuyoshi Numano, “Beseda s Siniavskim,” http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110004837059/en/).

52. Andrei Siniavskii, Ivan-durak, Ocherk russkoi narodnoi very (Moscow: Agraf, 2001), 383.

53. Andrei Siniavskii, Mysli vrasplokh (New York: Izd-vo Rauzena, 1966), 48.

54. Siniavskii, Ivan-durak, 420. One memoirist, Lev Khurges, writes that he met sectarians in 1940 in a Kolyma camp. Calling themselves “little crosses,” they developed an original theology that was appropriate for the torture camps. God loves human beings, but those sinful who deserve punishment, he sends to earth. They suffer here until God forgives them, makes them die, and brings them back to heaven. See Lev Khurges, Moskva-Ispaniia-Kolyma: Iz zhizni radista i zeka, ed. P. L. Polian and N. L. Pobol (Moscow: Vremia, 2012). I am grateful to Pavel Nerler (Polian) for sharing with me this source.

55. Mariia Rozanova, “K istorii i geografii etoi knigi,” Voprosy literatury 10 (1992): 156.

56. Andrei Siniavskii, “O ‘Kolymskikh rasskazakh’ Varlama Shalamova: Srez materiala” (1980), in Tertz, Literaturnyi protsess, 341.

57. Siniavskii, “Dostoevskii i katorga” (1981), in Tertz, Literaturnyi protsess, 334.

58. Siniavskii, “O ‘Kolymskikh rasskazakh,’” 339.

59. Siniavskii, “Literaturnyi protsess,” in Tertz, Literaturnyi protsess, 179.

60. Ibid.

61. Tertz, Spokoinoi nochi, 192.

62. Tertz, Golos iz khora, 1:669.

CHAPTER 7

1. The source for this scene is the memoir of Kozintsev’s friend, the playwright Yevgeny Shvarts. See Yevgeny Shvarts, Pozvonki minuvshikh let (Moscow: Vagrius 2008), 394. Kozintsev’s widow retold this story but expressed doubts in its validity. See Valentina Kozintseva, ed., Vash Grigorii Kozintsev (Moscow: Artist, 1996), 92, 241; see also Vera Kozintseva and Yakov Butovskii, “Karl Marks: Istoriia nepostavlennoi postanovki,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 18 (1993): 198–206.

2. From N. A. Kovarskii’s letter to Kozintsev, March 30, 1961, in Vera Kozintseva and Yakov Butovskii, eds., Perepiska G. M. Kozintseva (Moscow: ART, 1998), 214.

3. This filmmaker was Vladimir Ervais. See L. P. Pogozheva, “On khotel byt’ poniatym,” in Kozintseva, Vash Grigorii Kozintsev, 96.

4. Kozintsev played a crucial role in the struggle for the release of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966) to the Soviet public. In a letter to Kozintsev, Tarkovsky called Kozintsev “my only protector” (Kozintseva and Butovskii, Perepiska, 417). Sokurov expressed his gratitude to Kozintsev in a documentary film, Peterburgskii dnevnik: Kvartira Kozintseva (Nadezhda Studio, 1997).

5. Grigorii Kozintsev, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, trans. Joyce Vining (London: Dobson, 1967); Grigorii Kozintsev, King Lear: The Space of Tragedy, trans. Mary Mackintosh (London: Heinemann, 1977); Grigorii Kozintsev, “Glubokii ekran,” in Sobranie sochinenii, ed. Valentina Kozintseva and Yakov Butovskii (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1982), vol. 1; Grigorii Kozintsev, “Prostranstvo tragedii,” in Kozintseva and Butovskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4; Grigorii Kozintsev, “Zapisi po fil’mu ‘Korol’ Lir’,” in Kozintseva and Butovskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4; Grigorii Kozintsev, Vremia tragedii (Moskva: Vagrius, 2004). The last selection includes a separate collection of particularly frank and bitter notes that Kozintsev did not mean to publish; it was compiled by his widow under the title The Black, Rakish Time (363–443).

6. In 1979, musicologist Solomon Volkov published, in his transcription, a series of interviews with Shostakovich: Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). Infused by protest against the Soviet regime, this book caused much controversy. See Laurel Fay, “Shostakovich versus Volkov: Whose Testimony?” Russian Review 39, no. 4 (1980): 484–493; Allan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov, eds., Shostakovich Reconsidered (London: Toccata Press, 1998); Malcolm Hamrick Brown, A Shostakovich Casebook (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); and Elizabeth Wilson: Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (New York: Faber, 2006). On Kozintsev and Shostakovich, see John Riley, Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film (London: Tauris, 2005).

7. Kozintseva, Vash Grigorii Kozintsev, 117.

8. Benjamin Harshav, The Moscow Yiddish Theater: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008).

9. Ehrenburg launched the enormous stream of anti-Stalinist memoirs with his People, Years, Life (1961–1965).

10. Valentina Kozintseva, “Vspominaia Grigoriia Mikhailovicha,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 70 (2005), http://www.kinozapiski.ru/ru/article/sendvalues/225/.

11. Kozintsev to S. Rostotskii, May 13, 1956, in Kozintseva and Butovskii, Perepiska, 161.

12. According to his friend and correspondent Isaak Glikman, after receiving this offer Shostakovich was in a “deep hysteria,” wept “in full voice,” and lamented: “They have persecuted me, chased me for so long.” Many times he told Glikman that he would never enter the Communist Party, which “wreaks violence.” A few days later, he accepted both offers and wrote his Eighth Quartet, which he wanted to dedicate to his own memory. When he broke his leg a few months later, he said, “This is how God punishes me for entering the Party.” Isaak Glikman, Pis’ma k drugu: Dmitrii Shostakovich-Issaku Glikmanu (St. Petersburg: Kompozitor, 1993), 160–163.

13. Yevgenii Shvarts in Kozintseva, Vash Grigorii Kozintsev, 91. The idea of generation was crucial for Kozintsev’s literary friends, the formalist theorists Yury Tynianov and Boris Eikhenbaum. The leading image in Tynianov’s major novel, Death of Vazir Mukhtar (1928), is the melancholy of a brilliant generation that has outlived its time. For Kozintsev’s rendering of Tynianov’s idea, see Kozintsev, Vremia tragedii, 376.

14. Kozintseva, Vash Grigorii Kozintsev, 91.

15. Yakov Butovskii, “Grigorii Kozintsev i zolotoi vek dovoennogo Lenfil’ma,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 70 (2005), and http://www.kinozapiski.ru/ru/article/sendvalues/227/.

16. Boris Eikhenbaum, “Kak sdelana ‘Shinel’’ Gogolia,” in O proze (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1969); the vast literature on this classical study makes no mention of this omission. Barbara Leaming, in her Grigorii Kozintsev (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 42–48, likewise does not comment on this divergence between Gogol’s story and the film. For comparison, see Andrei Siniavsky’s perception of Gogol in his V teni Gogolia (1975) (Moscow: Agraf, 2001), discussed in chapter 6.

17. Kozintsev, Vremia tragedii, 433.

18. Ibid., 327.

19. Yevgenii Shvarts in Kozintseva, Vash Grigorii Kozintsev, 91.

20. Kozintseva, “Vspominaia Grigoriia Mikhailovicha,” 109.

21. Kozintsev, “Zapisi po fil’mu ‘Korol’ Lir’,” 178, 319; Kozintsev, “Prostranstvo tragedii,” 40; Grigorii Kozintsev, Nash sovremennik Vil’ iam Shekspir (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1962).

22. Kozintsev, “Prostranstvo tragedii,” 109; Kozintsev, Vremia tragedii, 327.

23. The historian of Soviet film Birgit Beumers discerns in this Claudius a portrait of Stalin. Birgit Beumers, A History of Russian Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 142.

24. Kozintsev, Shakespeare, 152–155, 166–168.

25. Kozintsev, Vremia tragedii, 205.

26. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 7–8, 24; for a different reading of this armor, see Leaming, Grigori Kozintsev, 114.

27. Interestingly, Richard III—according to Greenblatt, “a brilliant depiction of a radically illegitimate regime of terror”—did not receive comparable attention from the Soviet theater and film directors. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 167.

28. Maia Turovskaia, “Gamlet i my,” Novyi mir 11 (1964): 216–230. However, Vladimir Turbin criticized Kozintsev’s Hamlet precisely for the same “modernizing” that Turovskaia admired in the film. Vladimir Turbin, “Gamlet segodnia i zavtra,” Molodaia gvardiia 9 (1964): 302–313. A junior friend of Mikhail Bakhtin, Turbin later became a prominent literary scholar.

29. Kozintsev, Vremia tragedii, 432.

30. Turovskaia, “Gamlet i my,” 227

31. Smoktunovsky’s story was characteristically complex. He was born in a Belarusian family that in the late 1920s fled to Siberia from collectivization. Drafted in 1943, he was captured by the Nazis near Kiev. After a month in a Nazi camp, he managed to flee and joined the partisans. Later, some of his comrades were arrested by the Soviets because they had been in German captivity; Smoktunovsky escaped this fate and took part in many battles. As he said later, “I lived in permanent fear that I would be arrested because I was in a German camp, and I decided to get lost.” Therefore in 1946 he voluntarily moved to Norilsk, a center of the northern gulag. He acted in the theater there until a local convict, the actor Georgii Zhzhenov, recommended him to a Moscow colleague in 1954. In 1966, Smoktunovsky and Zhzhenov performed together in Beware of the Car. Elena Korenevskaia, “Innokentii Smoktunovskii: Korol’, kotoryi vsiu zhizn’ boialsia,” Argumenty i fakty, August 23, 2004.

32. Interestingly, in the highly successful Hamlet of 1971, performed by the Taganka Theater in Moscow and staged by its dissident director, Yury Liubimov, Hamlet was also played by the energetic and even brutal actor Vladimir Vysotsky.

33. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 208, 229.

34. Kozintsev, Vremia tragedii, 327. Compare this unrealized project with Greenblatt’s speculation that Hamlet’s last words, “I am dead,” would be appropriately “spoken by a ghost,” as if the spirit of Hamlet’s father had “been incorporated by his son.” Greenblat, Hamlet in Purgatory, 229.

35. Kozintsev, King Lear, 124, 161; Kozintsev, Vremia tragedii, 366.

36. Kozintseva, “Vspominaia Grigoriia Mikhailovicha.”

37. Kozintsev, King Lear, 113.

38. Ibid., 191–195, 46.

39. This distinction resembles one that Dominick LaCapra draws between absence and loss. Understanding a loss in existential terms, as absence, or in Lacanian terms, as the Real, “typically involves the tendency to avoid addressing historical problems.” LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 48.

40. Kozintsev, Vremia tragedii, 279, 295.

41. Kozintsev, King Lear, 129; Kozintsev, Vremia tragedii, 36.

42. N. N. Chushkin to Koziuntsev, in Kozintseva and Butovskii, Perepiska, 514.

43. Kozintsev, “Zapisi po fil’mu ‘Korol’ Lir’,” 4:290.

44. Kozintsev, Vremia tragedii, 290, 261, 255, 436; Kozintsev “Glubokii ekran,” 52–55; Kozintsev, King Lear, 37, 88–89.

45. Kozintsev, Vremia tragedii, 203, 436; Kozintsev, “Prostranstvo tragedii,” 55.

46. On Riazanov in a different perspective, see David MacFadyen, The Sad Comedy of El’dar Riazanov (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2003).

47. Artur Mekhtiev, interview with Riazanov: “El’dar Riazanov: ‘Kazhdaia kartina—chast’ moei dushi’,” Narodnaia gazeta (Belarus), November 28, 2008, http://www.ng.by/ru/issues?art_id=27637.

48. It is worth mentioning that Riazanov’s Carnival Night was screened about ten years after Bahktin defended his dissertation on carnival, and about ten years before he published this study.

49. Eldar Riazanov in Vash Grigorii Kozintsev, 62.

50. Moskva slezam ne verit (1980), script by Valentin Chernykh, directed by Vladimir Men’shov. This film has received rich and diverse scholarly analysis; see Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 137–139; David MacFadyen, “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears: From Oscar to Consolation Prize,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 1, no. 1 (November 2006): 45–67; and Lilya Kaganovsky, “The Cultural Logic of Late Socialism,” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 3, no. 2 (August 2009): 185–199.

51. This actor, Aleksei Batalov, grew up in the house of his stepfather, the writer Viktor Ardov, who was close to Anna Akhmatova. In fact, as a young man, Batalov was so close to Akhmatova that her son, who was imprisoned at the time, was jealous of him. See Tat’iana Khroshilova, “Goga, on zhe Gosha, on zhe Aleksei Batalov,” Rossiiskaia gazeta, no. 4025, March 24, 2006, http://www.rg.ru/2006/03/24/batalov.html.

52. Boym, Common Places, 137.

53. “Russkaia kinodvadtsatka,” Radio Svoboda, n.d., http://archive.svoboda.org/programs/cicles/cinema/russian/MoscowDistrustsTears.asp.

54. Anna Veligzhanina, “Aleksei Batalov: ‘Ia nikogda ne byl vernoi sobakoi partii,’” Komsomol’skaia pravda, November 13, 2008, http://nsk.kp.ru/daily/24197.3/402738/.

55. Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Film of 1980.

56. David Denby, “Letters from the Unknown Woman,” New York Magazine, May 25, 1981, 93.

57. In 2004, the scriptwriter of Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, Valentin Chernykh, published an eponymous novel. It does not explain Goga’s origins, though the reader learns that Goga is a Muscovite and at some point served in the air force. Like the film, the novel emphasizes Goga’s hatred of the authorities and his belief in male superiority. The novel ends like the film: the heroine’s friends from the KGB (they are described in many details in the novel) find Goga and bring him back to the heroine. It happens precisely at the moment when a television broadcast announces the death of Leonid Brezhnev, signaling a new life for the protagonists, who anticipate it with fear. See Valentin Chernykh, Moskva slezam ne verit (Moscow: Amfora, 2004).

CHAPTER 8

1. Aleksei German, a documentary film directed by Petr Shepotinnik, “Rossiia” channel, 2005.

2. For the historical context, see Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006).

3. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); Lawrence W. Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

4. For cinematic memory and mourning, see Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); Robert A. Rosenstone, ed., Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

5. Anna Lawton, “Russian Cinema in Troubled Times,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Films 1, no. 2 (2001): 98–112; Svetlana Vasil’eva, “A. German: Khrustalev, mashinu!” Znamia 12 (1999); Tony Wood, “Time Unfrozen: The Films of Aleksei German,” New Left Review 7 (2001): 99–107.

6. Mikhail Yampol’skii has compared German’s films My Friend Ivan Lapshin and Khrustalev, My Car! to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In contrast, Valerii Podoroga emphasizes the dreamlike quality of the narration, ignoring the consistent voice of the mourner behind the screen. See Mikhail Yampol’skii, “Ischeznovenie kak forma sushchestvovaniia,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 44 (1999), http://www.kinozapiski.ru/ru/article/sendvalues/656/; and Valerii Podoroga, “Moloch i Khrustalev,” Iskusstvo kino 6 (2000), http://kinoart.ru/2000/n6–article12.html.

7. For a historical account of “the inverted world” of 1953, see Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). General Klensky has several historical prototypes; one is Professor Sergei Yudin (1891–1954), chief surgeon of the Sklifosofsky Institute in Moscow and the laureate of two Stalin Prizes who was arrested in 1948 and kept in prison and exile until 1953. More than once he was brought back to Moscow for secret tasks, such as the project of creating a store of blood for transfusions in the coming World War III; using Yudin’s method, the blood was to be collected from the corpses of gulag victims. See Viktor Topolianskii, “Delo professor Yudina,” Kontinent 147 (2011): 9–56.

8. Major examples are Vasily Rozanov’s The People of the Moon Light (1911), Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister (1947), and Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik (2006). Even Joseph Brodsky believed that “the support for Stalin among the intelligentsia in the West had to do with their latent homosexuality.” Volkov, Conversations with Brodsky, 31.

9. The film’s title comes from Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Allilueva’s remembrance of Beria’s words, which he addressed to his driver and assistant, Khrustalev, after Stalin’s death was confirmed: “Khrustalev, my Car!” (this scene appears in the film). According to Allilueva, Beria said this in a “triumphant voice.” Analyzing this and other circumstantial evidence, the writer Edward Radzinsky speculates that it was Khrustalev who administered poison to Stalin. By citing these words in the title of the film, German concurs in this apocryphal speculation. See Edward Radzinsky, Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives (London: Doubleday 1996), 577.

10. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 73.

11. Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia (New York: 1970), 386.

12. See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York: Continuum, 1995); and Etkind, Internal Colonization, 244–248.

13. Freud, “Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, 142.

14. Researching camp legends about the death of her husband, Nadezhda Mandelstam struggled to distinguish the “truth” about him from the stories about his “double” in a different camp (Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia, 406).

15. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 160.

16. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 106.

17. Vladimir Nabokov’s father was murdered in 1922 in Berlin, and The Gift documents Nabokov’s work of mourning. For my reading of The Gift and other Nabokov’s novels, see A. Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii: Rossiia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh (Moscow: Novoe literaurnoe obozrenie, 2001).

18. Aleksei German, “Izgoniaiushchii diavola,” http://kinoart.ru/1999/n6–article18.html#3.

19. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 84, 37, 27.

20. German, “Izgoniaiushchii diavola.”

21. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 185.

CHAPTER 9

1. Grigorii Saltup, Barak i sto deviatnadtsatyi (Petrozavodsk: 2004).

2. In this, Yury Dmitriev resembles another enthusiast of memory, a leader of the Memorial Society, Dmitry Yurasov, who developed his interest in the repressions by reading Soviet encyclopedias. See Stephen Kotkin, “Terror, Rehabilitation, and Historical Memory: An Interview with Dmitrii Iurasov,” Russian Review 51 (April 1992): 245. For another example of excavated remains and contested memories, see Irina Paperno, “Exhuming the Bodies of Soviet Terror,” Representations 75 (2001): 89–118.

3. Yurii Dmitriev, “Belbaltlag otkryvaet tainy,” Kur’er Karelii, November 12, 2003.

4. Yurii Dmitriev, ed., Pominal’nye spiski Karelii, 1937–1938 (Petrozavodsk: 2002); see also Yurii Dmitriev, Mesto rasstrela Sandarmokh (Petrozavodsk: 1999); and Yurii Dmitriev, ed., Bor krasnyi ot prolitoi krovi (Petrozavodsk: 2000).

5. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

6. Contemporary theorists of nationalism are more interested in other forms of memory and imagination, such as newspapers (Benedict Anderson), education (Ernest Gellner), and invented traditions (Eric Hobsbawm). More sensitive to monuments is M. Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

7. See Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age, vol. 2 (New York: Blackwell, 1996).

8. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2010), 773, 826

9. On hot and cold memories, see Jan Assmann, Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und Politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1992).

10. Primo Levi, “Revisiting the Camps,” in The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, ed. James Young (New York: Prestel, 1994), 185.

11. Alexander Etkind, “Mapping Memory Events in East European Space,” East European Memory Studies (Cambridge) 1 (2010): 4–5; Alexander Etkind, Rory Finnin, Uilleam Blacker, Julie Fedor, Simon Lewis, Maria Mälksoo, and Matilda Mroz, Remembering Katyn (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

12. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity, 1984–1987).

13. Roman Jakobson, Pushkin and His Sculptural Myth (The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1975).

14. Mikhail Yampolsky, “In the Shadow of Monuments,” in Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia, ed. Nancy Condee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 93–112.

15. The monument, by sculptor Georgy Frangulian, was unveiled on May 31, 2011.

16. Nikita Khrushchev, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Moskovskie novosti 1999), 432.

17. On these fourth-century B.C. terracotta sculptures and how Bakhtin knew about them, see Nikolai Pan’kov, “Kerchenskie terrakoty i problema antichnogo realizma,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 79 (2006).

18. Dmitrii Likhachev, Vospominaniia, 346–347.

19. Anna Akhmatova, Requiem, in The Complete Poems, trans. Judith Nemschemeyer and Roberta Reeder (Boston: Zephyr, 1992), 2:115. For analysis, see Susan Amert, In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 58.

20. A monument to Akhmatova has been erected across the Neva River, about a mile from the Crosses prison.

21. One of the best films about the Russian Revolution, Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1927), presented the destruction of a fictional monument as an all-embracing idiom of the revolution.

22. See Sara Farmer, “Symbols That Face Two Ways: Commemorating the Victims of Nazism and Stalinism at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen,” Representations 49 (1995): 97–119; and Gregory Wegner, “The Power of Selective Tradition: Buchenwald Concentration Camp and Holocaust Education for Youth in the New Germany,” in Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States, ed. Laura Hein and Mark Selden (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1999), 227–243.

23. Veniamin Iofe, “Itogi veka,” in Iofe, Granitsy smysla, 52.

24. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 83.

25. Iofe, “Itogi veka,” 52.

26. On monsters, monuments, and representation in broader contexts, see Jeffrey J. Cohen, ed., Monster Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Bruce Grant, “New Moscow Monuments, or, States of Innocence,” American Ethnologist 28, no. 2 (2001): 332–362.

27. Ernst Neizvestny, Govorit Neizvestny (Frankfurt: Posev, 1984), 5.

28. James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).

29. Aleksandr Podrabinek, “Razdvoenie dnia,” grani.ru, October 31, 2011, http://www.grani.ru/opinion/podrabinek/m.192734.html.

30. Young, Texture of Memory; Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).

31. Thomas A. Kovach and Martin Walser, The Burden of the Past: Martin Walser on Modern German Identity (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2008).

32. See http://gulagmuseum.org/start.do.

CHAPTER 10

1. On Freud’s thinking about the changing regime in Russia, see Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, 225–227.

2. See, for example, Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

3. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 16.

4. Interestingly, Derrida mentions Stalinism rather than Maoism, even though Maoism was widespread among his colleagues well after 1956. See Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 2010).

5. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 87. The site where the Communist illusions were finally buried in 1968 and the place of his own imprisonment, Prague retained a dark meaning for Derrida. Speaking about the death of Michel Foucault, he mentions that he and Foucault resolved their ten-year-long conflict after he “returned from a Czech prison” in 1982. Speaking about the death of Louis Althusser, Derrida says that he learned about this event upon his return from Prague in 1990— “and the very name of that city already strikes me as so violent, almost unpronounceable.” Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michel Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2001), 80, 114.

6. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Rort (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 82.

7. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 111.

8. Ibid., 126, 67.

9. Louis Althusser, “Response to John Lewis,” in Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: NLB, 1976). Tony Judt wrote that Althusser’s example “licensed a new generation of Communist philosophers to abandon any attempt at explaining the inexplicable.” Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 228.

10. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 79.

11. Roudinesco compares Althusser to the protagonist of her book and a heroine of the French Revolution, Théroigne de Méricourt, whose descent into insanity coincided with the rise of the Terror that followed the revolution. Elisabeth Roudinesco, Madness and Revolution: The Lives and Legends of Théroigne de Méricourt (London: Verso, 1992). This study of postrevolutionary melancholy was originally published in 1989, the year of the bicentenary of the French Revolution and also the fall of the Berlin Wall.

12. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 76.

13. Julie Fedor drew my attention to a fascinating detail: the first English translation by Helen MacFarlane (1850) rendered this line as “A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe.” See, for example, “A Frightful Hobgoblin . . . ,” DACH BLOG: The British Library’s German, Austrian and Swiss Collections, February 25, 2010, http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/dach/2010/02/a-frightful-hobgoblin.html.

14. Davis, Haunted Subjects, 13.

15. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 57.

16. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 81.

17. It is important in this respect that Derrida prefers to write “holocaust” with a small “h,” alluding to the plurality of manmade catastrophes. See Eaglestone, Holocaust and the Postmodern, 292.

18. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 81.

19. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 121–122.

20. Ibid., 131.

21. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 80.

22. Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Silence,” in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, ed. Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Paragon, 1990), 145–148. For discussion of this important text, see Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 143–144; and Beril Lang, Heidegger’s Silence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 29.

23. See Ernst Nolte, “Between Myth and Revisionism? The Third Reich in the Perspective of the 1980s,” in Aspects of the Third Reich, ed. H. W. Koch (London: Macmillan, 1985): 17–38; LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, chap. 5; Jorn Rusen, “The Logic of Historicization,” History and Memory 9, nos. 1–2 (1997): 113–146; François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism, trans. Katherine Golsan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 15.

24. Aleksandra Samarina’s interview with Aleksandr Yakovlev, Obshchaia gazeta, October 18, 2001; Veniamin Iofe, “Reabilitatisiia kak istoricheskaia problema,” in Iofe, Granitsy smysla, 7.

25. On rivalry and mimesis, see René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), and other his works. On codependencies of totalitarianisms, see Furet and Nolte, Fascism and Communism; Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003) (Todorov presents Vasily Grossman as a precursor); Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler (London: Vintage, 2008); and Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (London: Bodley Head, 2010). See also Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Henry Rousso and Richard Joseph Golsan, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); and Geyer and Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism.

26. Mikhail Geller, “Predislovie,” in Varlam Shalamov, Kolymskie rasskazy (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1978), 8–9; see also his pioneering book: Mikhail Geller, Kontsentratsionnyi mir i sovetskaia literatura (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1974).

27. Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn (New York: Grove Press, 1975), 7, 14, 25.

28. Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust; Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995); Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Robert R. Shandley, ed., Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsraume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturullen Gedachnisses (Munich: Beck, 1999); James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000); Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations on the Holocaust (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); and Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

29. For more details, see my essays “Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror,” Constellations 16, no. 1 (2009): 182–200, and “The Kremlin’s Double Monopoly,” in Russia Lost or Found? (Helsinki: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2009), 186–213. See also an important analysis by Gasan Guseinov, who also approaches post-Soviet memory through the Mitscherlichs’ lenses: Gasan Guseinov, “Iazyk i travma osvobozhdeniia,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 94 (2008): 130–147.

30. Rudolf Rummel, Death by Government (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1992).

31. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), 110.

32. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 254.

33. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xviii.

34. Irina Flige, personal communication, November 2002.

35. See, for example, Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber, “Soviet Nostalgia: An Impediment to Russian Democratization,” Washington Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2005): 83–96; Maria Ferretti, “Rasstroistvo pamiati: Rossiia i stalinizm,” http://old.polit.ru/documents/517093.html; and Charles S. Maier, “Heißes und kaltes Gedachtnis: Uber die politische Halbwertszeit von Nazismus und Kommunismus,” Transit 22 (Winter 2001–2002): 53–165. For a reevaluation of this position, see Tatiana Zhurzhenko, “The Geopolitics of Memory,” Eurozine, May 10, 2007, www.eurozine.com/articles/2007–05–10–zhurzhenko-en.html.

36. Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991).

37. Osobennosti natsional’noi okhoty, 1995, directed by Aleksandr Rogozhkin.

38. For theoretical discussion of the temporality of collective trauma, see Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chap. 2.

39. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 42–43.

40. A proliferation of ghosts and zombies in high and popular culture has been observed by scholars of postsocialist transformations in Poland, East Germany, Ukraine, and Russia. For a similar effect in South Africa after apartheid, see Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 4 (2002): 779–805. While I am writing, the most recent example is a Cuban film, Juan of the Dead, described as “the blood-drenched tale of a slacker who decides to save the island from an invasion of cannibalistic zombies,” though the film is also “scattered with allusions to traumatic moments in Cuba’s recent history” (Victoria Burnett in the New York Times, December 10, 2011). See also Haunted Futures, edited by Debra Ferreday and Adi Kuntsman, a special issue of Borderlands 10, no. 2 (2011).

41. Santner, On Creaturely Life, 52; Etkind, “Post-Soviet Hauntology,” 182–200.

42. Nochnoi dozor (2004) and Dnevnoi dozor (2005), script by Sergei Luk’ianenko, directed by Timur Bekmambetov.

43. These films have been the subject of several studies: Stephen M. Norris draws analogies between these films’ plotlines and actual events in Russian politics in his “In the Gloom: The Political Lives of Undead Bodies in Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch,” KinoKultura 16 (2007), http://www.kinokultura.com/2007/16–norris.shtml; a glossy Russian volume demonstrates the “kulturologia” approach to these films and features essays by Boris Groys and Mikhail Ryklin, in Dozor kak simptom, ed. B. Kupriianov and M. Surkov (Moscow: Falanster 2006).

44. Novaia Zemlia (2008), script by Arif Aliev, directed by Aleksandr Mel’nik.

45. Smert’ Sovetskim Detiam (2008), script by Denis Karyshev, directed by Vadim Shmelev.

46. 4 (2005), script by Vladimir Sorokin, directed by Ilia Khrzhanovsky.

47. Mikhail Idov, “The Movie Set That Ate Itself,” GQ (November 2011), http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201111/movie-set-that-ate-itself-dau-ilya-khrzhanovsky?printable=true.

48. Pokaianie (1984), script by Nana Dzhanelidze, directed by Tengiz Abuladze.

49. Interestingly, the recent Katyn (2007) by Andrzej Waida, which shows the slaughter of thousands of Polish officers by their Russian “allies” in 1940, also refers to Antigone. A female character struggles to bury her brother who was murdered by the Russians; to earn money for the tombstone, she sells her hair to a Warsaw theater that needs wigs for its production of Antigone. See Etkind et al., Remembering Katyn.

50. Zhivoi (2006), script by Igor’ Porublev, directed by Aleksandr Veledinsky.

51. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16.

52. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 22; see also Carla Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); and María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds., Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (New York: Continuum, 2010).

53. Hent de Vries and Lawrence Eugene Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 3.

54. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 221.

55. Ibid., xviii.

56. Tertz, Golos iz khora.

CHAPTER 11

1. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, ix–x. In English translation, the delicious creature is rendered as “salamander.” Lost in translation, the aquatic aspect of Solzhenitsyn’s monster alludes to the gulag archipelago, which in turn comes from the Solovetsky Archipelago. In Greek myths, Triton had a man’s head, a fish’s tail, and a conch shell to raise storms. As an oceanic beast, Triton is a distant relative of the Leviathan, the symbol of the state. See Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, trans. George D. Schwab and Erna Hifstein (New York: Greenwood Press, 1996). A zoologist has identified the published source for Solzhenitsyn’s story of the triton; he believes that actually the convicts found and ate a frozen fish. Nikolai Formozov, “Metamorfoz odnoi metafory: Kommentarii zoologa k prologu ‘Arkhipelaga Gulag,’” Novyi mir 10 (2011): 154–157.

2. Anna Akhmatova, “Northern Elegies,” in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (Somerville, Mass.: Zephyr Press, 1990), 2:351.

3. Anna Akhmatova, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, vol. 2, book 2 (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 1998); Akhmatova, “Northern Elegies,” 351.

4. Akhmatova searched in vain for information about the site of her husband’s grave. According to Veniamin Iofe, Gumilev was shot in Kovalevsky Forest near St. Petersburg. See Veniamin Iofe, “Pervaia krov’: Petrograd, 1918–1921” (1997), Nauchno-Informatsionnyi Tsentr “Memorial” (St. Petersburg),http://www.memorial-nic.org/iofe/29.html.

5. Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky, 227–228. Czesław Miłosz wrote about this analysis of Requiem as “probably the deepest thing said about the creative process by anyone” (on the back cover of Volkov’s Conversations). The theme of self-estrangement in mourning echoes Hamlet, “a play of contagious, almost universal self-estrangement.” Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 212.

6. Anna Akhmatova, “Poem without a Hero,” in Complete Poems, 2:443.

7. In the European context, a number of scholars have speculated about the relations between the gothic novel and the terror of the French Revolution. See Ronald Paulson, “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution,” English Literary History 48, no. 3 (1981): 545–554; David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980); and Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). For the classic study of Gothic motifs in nineteenth-century Russian literature, see Vadim Vatsuro, Goticheskii roman v Rossii (Moscow: NLO, 2002); see also N. D. Tamarchenko, ed., Goticheskaia traditsia v russkoi literature (Moscow: RGGU, 2008). Jimmie E. Cain, Bram Stoker and Russophobia: Evidence of the British Fear of Russia in Dracula and the Lady of the Shroud (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006), lists numerous Russian allusions in central texts of the British Gothic. For Gothic metaphors in early Soviet literature, see Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Soviet Ideology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); Muireann Maguire, “Soviet Gothic-Fantastic: A Study of Gothic and Supernatural Themes in Early Soviet Literature” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2008); and Muireann Maguire, Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature (Berne: Peter Lang; forthcoming). For a Gothic reading of Putin’s political culture, see Dina Khapaeva, Goticheskoe obshchestvo: Morfologiia koshmara (Moscow: NLO, 2007); for a similar take on the Russian prose of the period, see Olga Lebedushkina, “Nasha novaia gotika,” Druzhba narodov 11 (2008): 188–199.

8. The name of this storyteller, Andrei Fedorovich Platonov, resembles the name of a Soviet writer whom Shalamov probably read or knew, Andrei Platonovich Platonov; his tale reads like an obituary of this author. Varlam Shalamov, Kolymskie rasskazy (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1978), 124.

9. In an interview with V. V. Bondarenko, Mamleev said that his father, Vitaly Ivanovich, had written a book, Freudianism and Religion (“Ya vezde—‘ne svoi chelovek’—interv’iu s Yuriem Mamleevym,” Lebed’, 562, April 6, 2008, http://www.lebed.com/2008/art5285.htm). This could only be a reference to V. I. Maiskii, Freidizm i religiia (Moscow: Bezbozhnik, 1930).

10. Aleksandr Dugin, Tampliery proletariata (Moscow: Arktogeia, 1997).

11. Analytically, this difference is close to the distinction between “acting out” and “working through” trauma, as described by LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 141. In this respect, cultural studies of horror films are inspiring: Paul Coates, The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Lowenstein, Shocking Representation.

12. Yefim Etkind, “‘Chelovecheskaia komediia’ Aleksandra Galicha,” in Psikhopoetika (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2005), 697.

13. For a pioneering attempt to read Soviet folklore as the reflection of the socialist experience, see Marina Balina, Helena Goscilo, and Mark Lipovetsky, Politicizing Magic: An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005).

14. Viktor Pelevin, “Zombifikatsiia,” Den’ i noch’ (Krasnoiarsk) 4 (1994), republished in Viktor Pelevin, Relics: Rannee i neizdannoe (Moscow: EKSMO, 2005), 297–334.

15. Iofe, Granitsy smysla, 26.

16. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 76.

17. A primitive variation on the same theme is Pavel Krusanov’s Ukus angela (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2000), which presents an alternative history of the victorious Russian Empire with a dictator of Russo-Chinese blood, a panoply of mages and miracles, a recognizable satire on “political technologists” of Putin’s era, and a cannibalistic hermaphrodite to boot.

18. Viktor Pelevin, Ampir “V” (Moscow: EKSMO, 2006), 208; for reference to Count Dracula, see 352. Pelevin also refers to Franco Moretti, whose classical study of the affinity between money and vampires is Franco Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear,” New Left Review 1, no. 136 (1982): 67–85.

19. Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 93. Basing his speculation on astrological teachings and Durer paintings, Walter Benjamin wrote that melancholy has a particular connection to dogs and stones. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 152, 154. For a history of werewolves, see Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004).

20. Oleg Kulik was Vladimir Sorokin’s coauthor on certain projects. For analysis of this post-Soviet artist-dog, see Mikhail Ryklin, “Pedigree Pal: Put’ k angliiskomu dogu,” in Vremia diagnoza (Moscow: Logos, 2003), 264–277.

21. Bykov’s logic of torture differs from a more familiar understanding, which was articulated by Arthur Koestler in his Darkness at Noon (1940). In Koestler, torture convinces the true believer that the party really wants his confession as another sacrifice for its cause.

22. Bykov’s works of the past decade include the historical novel Orfografiia, set in 1918; a satire called “How Putin Became the President of the USA: New Russian Fairytales”; a controversial biography of Boris Pasternak, which won two Russian literary prizes (“Great Book” and “National Best-Seller”) in 2006; the grand-scale anti-utopia ZhD; and the fascinating series of off- and online performances of political poetry, The Citizen Poet, which led the reawakening of Russia’s civil society in 2011.

23. This construction develops the better-known Russian speculation on “literary generations,” which was authored by Viktor Shklovsky in his O teorii prozy (Moscow: Krug, 1925). Like this genealogical model, Bitov’s and Bykov’s characters dismiss immediate predecessors in favor of more distant forebears. In a similar construction, the Hungarian writer Peter Esterházy, in his novel Corrected Edition, tells the story of a son who finds evidence in the archive that his beloved father was a secret agent who denounced his friends and even his wife. See Peter Esterházy, Javított kiadás: Melléklet a Harmonia cælestishez (Budapest: Magveto, 2002); and the discussion of the Russian translation of this novel, edited by Ilia Kukulin in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 96 (2009), including A. Etkind, “Synov’ia katastrofy: Ot Esterházy obratno k Bitovu,” 225–229. Esterházy’s Corrected Edition is the sequel to the previous novel, which is available in English translation as Celestial Harmonies (New York: Harper, 2005).

24. Aleksandr Filippov, Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, 1945–2006: Kniga dlia uchitelia (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2007), 90. Despite the public outrage, the presidential administration supported the use of a modified version of Filippov’s book in high schools.

25. Vladimir Sorokin, Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny (Moscow: AST, 1999), 122.

26. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 9.

27. This construction—managing an apocalypse by mutilating a target number of men and women—is probably taken from the central myth of the Skoptsy (castrates) sect. Mamleev’s Shatuny (1988) features a character who was a Skopets; later, Russian sects have been important for Aleksandr Dugin’s philosophical speculations. Vladimir Sharov’s Rehearsals (Repetitsii, 1992) presents a wonderful fantasy of a sectarian community that extends from the seventeenth to the late-twentieth century. Aleksei Ivanov’s Zoloto bunta (2005) describes the fight between Old Believer communities over the treasure that the eighteenth-century rebel Pugachev allegedly left before his arrest. In Pavel Krusanov’s Ukus angela (2000), a wandering Old Believer inspires the emerging dictator by citing Sigmund Freud and Johann Jakob Bachofen. For the role of sectarian themes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian literature and thought, see Etkind, Khlyst. The reawakening of sectarian themes in post-Soviet literature deserves a special study.

28. Vladimir Sharov, “Istorii moego ottsa,” Znamia 10 (2009).

29. Vladimir Sharov, interview to Chastnyi korrespondent, December 3, 2008.

30. Vladimir Sharov, “Ia ne chuvstvuiu sebia ni uchitelem, ni prorokom,” Druzhba narodov 8 (2004): 114–122.

31. Sharov’s hypothesis about Fedorov’s influence on the Bolsheviks preceded historical writings on the subject. Post-Soviet literature often plays with the idea of reincarnation. Though this idea is perceived as characteristically Buddhist, it was also central for Russian mystical sects such as the Khlysty. See Caroline Humphrey, “Stalin and the Blue Elephant,” in Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order, ed. Harry G. West and Todd Sanders (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 175–203, for reincarnation stories about Stalin, which are told by the Buddhist peoples of Russia.

32. Vladimir Sharov, “Eto ia prozhil zhizn’,” Druzhba narodov 12 (2000).

33. Erika Haber, The Myth of the Non-Russian: Iskander and Aitmatov’s Magical Universe (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003); Vitaly Chernetsky, Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).

34. Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004); see also Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres, and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism (London: Macmillan, 1998); and Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (London: Routledge, 2004).

35. See Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chap. 8.

36. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Picador, 1982), 9.

37. See Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 203.

38. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 24.

39. Grigorii Revzin, “O Tsaritsynskom dvortse i Iurii Luzhkove,” http://www.gq.ru/exclusive/columnists/152/44235/.

40. Michael Wood, “In Reality,” Janus Head 5, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 9–14.

41. For the recognition of influence of Latin American “magical realist” writers on Russian authors of the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods, see Sergei Chuprinin, “Eshche raz k voprosu o kartografii vymysla,” Znamia 11 (2006): 171–184. The Russian mother of a founder of Latin American magical realism, Alejo Carpentier, and her alleged kinship to the poet Konstantin Balmont have been the subject of musings by Russian critics.

42. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 253.

43. Freud, “Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, 157–158.

44. After Filippov’s textbook of Soviet history, which described Stalin as an “effective manager,” Russian public debates use this figure of speech with invariable irony.

45. Among many debates about this novel and its author, the most informative is the discussion at Radio Liberty: “Pechal’ i svet romana ‘Okolonolia,’” Radio Svoboda, August 20, 2009, http://www.svobodanews.ru/content/tran-script/1803941.html; and the review by Dmitrii Bykov, Novaia gazeta, August 19, 2009. For Surkov’s own review of this novel, see Vladislav Surkov, “Korrumpirovannyi Shekspir,” Russkii pioner 11 (2009), http://www.ruspioner.ru/otl.php?id_art=928; see also Peter Pomerantsev, “Putin’s Rasputin,” London Review of Books 33, no. 20 (October 2011): 3–6. Though it is possible that a ghostwriter wrote the novel, I can testify that both Kremlin insiders and the Moscow public firmly believe in Surkov’s authorship.

46. Valerii Zor’kin, “Konstitutsiia protiv kriminala,” Rossiiskaia gazeta, December 10, 2010, http://www.rg.ru/2010/12/10/zorkin.html. Zor’kin was the chairman of Russia’s Constitutional Court from 1991 to 1993 and has served again from 2003.

47. A self-proclaimed sociologist, Kordonsky worked as the head of the Department of Experts of the Russian Presidential Administration in 2000–2004.

48. Simon Kordonskii, “Na polputi k sharashke,” polit.ru, January 12, 2011, www.polit.ru/author/2011/01/12/modernization.html.

49. Gleb Pavlovsky, “Vatnaia situatsiia s zhivymi akulami,” Russkii zhurnal, December 31, 2010, http://russ.ru/Mirovaya-povestka/Vatnaya-situaciya-s-zhivymi-akulami.

50. Oleg Kashin, “Dreif v storonu literatury,” Russkii zhurnal, October 17, 2011, http://www.russ.ru/pole/Drejf-v-storonu-literatury.

CONCLUSION

1. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Lewis Hyde suggests that it is more appropriate to speak about “mourning labor” than the “work of mourning.” Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2007), 51–52.

2. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1976), 56.

3. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? trans. Max Eastman (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004), 66, 86.

4. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 11:245–268.

5. Il’ia Kalinin, “Boi za istoriiu: Proshloe kak ogranichennyi resurs,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 4, no. 78 (2011); http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2011/4/ka29.html.

6. Ellen Barry, “Medvedev Called Russian Political System ‘Exhausted,’” Herald Tribune, December 19, 2011, 3.