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": the events of the mid-twentieth century are still very much alive, and still contentious. Alexander Etkind shows how post-Soviet Russia has turned the painful process of mastering the past into an important part of its political present.
"Warped Mourning is pioneering and thought-provoking. It reads (or rereads) a dazzling range of texts, films, and images to reveal their obsession with the past . . . [B]rilliant close readings . . . A work of great ambition that engages a century of thinking about trauma."
Times Literary Supplement
"Etkind's brilliant and lucid work presents the first serious account of theoretical challenges to mourning theories in the context of Soviet terror. It is entirely possible that the very terms of that terror-its policies of falsification, its endemic uncertainty, its capacious inclusion of the perpetrators themselves-will undercut many of the assumptions that have governed mourning and melancholi
University of Pittsburgh
"The scope of authors the book surveys is impressively broad . . . [T]his is a provocative and intriguing book, one that offers a powerful corrective to the frequent laments regarding historical amnesia in post-Soviet Russia. It prompts scholars of memory to think more broadly and creatively about the forms that remembrance may take in culture, especially in situations when a more direct engagemen
