Mimetic and subversive -- Mourning and warning -- The parable of misrecognition -- Writing history after jail -- On tortured life and world culture -- The debt to the dead -- The cosmopolitan way -- The tale of two turns -- The hard and the soft -- Post-Soviet hauntology -- Magical historicism.
Summary
After Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union dismantled the enormous system of terror and torture that he had created. But there has never been any Russian ban on former party functionaries, nor any external authority to dispense justice. Memorials to the Soviet victims are inadequate, and their families have received no significant compensation. This book's premise is that late Soviet and post-Soviet culture, haunted by its past, has produced a unique set of memorial practices. More than twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remains ""the land of the unburied"": t.