For the opportunity to pursue this study, I am grateful to the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. Elizabeth Moore helped me to devise and improve this essay; our little sons, Mark and Micah, did not make this venture entirely impossible. Much appreciated are the comments and questions of Svetlana Boym, Caryl Emerson, Mischa Gabowitch, Igal Halfin, Eric Naiman, Dina Khapaeva, Piotr Kosicki, Mark Lipovetsky, Sergei Oushakine, Irina Paperno, Kevin M.F. Piatt, Gyan Prakash, Timothy J. Portice, Anson Rabinbach, Yuri Slezkine, Emma Widdis, Alexei Yurchak, and Eli Zaretsky. While struggling with previous versions of this essay, several anonymous reviewers helped me to shape it into a better work.

1. Benjamin, Walter, “A Berlin Chronicle,” One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Jephcott, Edmund and Shorter, Kinsley (London, 1979), 314 Google Scholar.

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3. Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. Osborne, John (London, 1998), 185 Google Scholar.

4. Bykov's logic of torture differs from a more familiar understanding articulated by Arthur Koesder in his Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (New York, 1941). As Koesder sees it, torture convinces die true-believer that the party really wants his confession as anodier sacrifice for its cause.

5. Among Bykov's works of die recent decade are the historical novel Orfograftia (2003) set in 1918; a satire called Kak Putin stalprezidentom SShA: Novye russkie skazki (2005); a controversial biography of Boris Pasternak diat garnered two Russian literary prizes (“Great Book” and “National Best-Seller“) in 2006; and die shocking and-utopia, ZhD (2006).

6. This construction develops the better-known Russian speculation on “literary generations“ advanced by Viktor Shklovskii. In his postrevolutionary essay on Rozanov (1921), Viktor Shklovskii stated diat in literature, “inheritance proceeds not from father to eldest son but from uncle to nephew.” Viktor Shklovskii, O teorii prozy (Moscow, 1925). Iurii Tynianov in his Arkhaisty i novatory (Leningrad, 1929) emphasized leaps in two directions, backward and forward, as mechanisms of “literary evolution.” Like these genealogical models, Bykov's characters (and Bitov's, as we shall see) avoid immediate predecessors in favor of more distant forebears.

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24. As an anonymous reviewer mentioned in an apt example, these two types of texts are as different as the inscription on Falconet's monument to Peter I in St. Petersburg and Aleksandr Pushkin's poem, Mednyi vsadnik. Both types of inscriptions are crucial for the life of the monument and some cases demonstrate the continuous character of this textual domain (e.g., the long quotations from Anna Akhmatova's Requiem that are inscribed on Shemiakin's bronze sphinxes on the Neva). On die relationship between texts and monuments in post-Soviet memorial culture, see Aleksandr Etkind “Vremia sravnivat' kamni: Postrevoliutsionnaia kul'tura politicheskoi skorbi v sovremennoi Rossii,” Ab Imperio (Kazan’), 2004, no. 2: 33-76; Etkind, “Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and Germany,” Grey Room, vol. 16 (Summer 2004): 36-59.

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45. The variations on these themes are many. In Iuz Aleshkovskii's Kenguru (Moscow, 2000), Stalinist prosecutors accuse the protagonist of raping a kangaroo and in the process, turn him into a kangaroo. Pavel Krusanov's Ukus angela (St. Petersburg, 2000) 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.

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52. Dmitrii Bykov, “Tertz i synov'ia,” Toronto Literary Quarterly, at www.utoronto.ca/tsq/15/bykovl5.shtml (last accessed 15 May 2009).

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58. The name of this storyteller, Andrei Fedorovich Platonov, resembles the name of a Soviet writer whom Shalamov probably read or knew, Andrei Platonovich Platonov. “I loved Platonov,” writes Shalamov; his tale reads like an obituary of this author. Shalamov, , Kolymskie rasskazy, 124 Google Scholar.

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61. Sergei Sobolev compiled an interesting catalogue of Russian fiction of a genre he calls “alternative history“; many of these novels have been written in the post-Soviet decades and are “magical“; see Sobolev, S. V, Al'ternativnaia istoriia (Lipetsk, 2006)Google Scholar; see also Bykov, Dmitrii, “Drugoi alternativy u nas est'!” Vmesto zhizni (Moscow, 2006)Google Scholar. Many films of the last decade, such as Nochnoi dozor by Timur Bekmambetov (2004), 4 by Vladimir Sorokin and Il'ia Khryzhanovskii (2005), and Zhivoi by Aleksandr Veledinskii (2006) experiment with various combinations of the occult and the political. For a view of post-Soviet popular culture that emphasizes themes of sex and violence rather than history and magic, see Borenstein, Eliot, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca, 2008)Google Scholar.

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63. Ibid., 66.

64. Ibid., 53.

65. Ibid., 134.

66. Ibid., 135-36.

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79. For the recognition of the influence of Latin American “magical realist” writers on Russian authors of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, see Chuprinin, Sergei, “Eshche raz k voprosu o kartografii vymysla,” Znamia, no. 11 (2006)Google Scholar. The Russian mother of a founder of Latin American magical realism, Alejo Carpentier, and her alleged kinship to the poet Konstantin Bal'mont is a subject of musings by Russian critics. An interesting example of anxiety of influence is Bykov's speculation that in One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez in his own turn emulated “Istoriia odnogo goroda” by Mikhail Saltykov- Shchedrin; see Bykov, Dmitrii, Vmesto zhizni (Moscow, 2006)Google Scholar.

80. Sharov, Vladimir, “la ne chuvstvuiu sebia ni uchitelem, ni prorokom,” Druzhba narodov, no. 8 (2004)Google Scholar.

81. Post-Soviet literature often plays with the idea of reincarnation. This idea is usually perceived as characteristically Buddhist; however, this idea was also central for Russian mystical sects such as the Khlysty; see Humphrey, “Stalin and the Blue Elephant,” for a fascinating analysis of reincarnation stories about Stalin, which are told by the Buddhist peoples of Russia, and Eddnd, Khlyst, for the reincarnadon mythology of traditional Russian sects.

82. See Fritzsche, Peter, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 203 Google Scholar.

83. Grigorii Revzin, “O Tsaritsynskom dvortse i Iurii Luzhkove,” at http://www.gq.ru/exclusive/columnists/152/44235/ (last accessed 15 May 2009).

84. Freud, , “Mourning and Melancholia,” 253 Google Scholar.

85. Agamben discusses the relevance of animals and zoomorphic monsters for the representation of the Nazi camps in his The Open.