About the book: 2018 / This is a book about grief for the victims of Soviet repression, about the cultural mechanisms of memory and grief. The work of grief reproduces the past in imagination, text, and ritual; it brings the dead back to life, but it is not really life. Cultural memory after a social catastrophe is a complex environment in which victims, executioners and witnesses of crimes coexist. Some very strange creatures live among them - vampires, zombies, ghosts. From “The Case of the Historians” to masterpieces of Soviet cinema, from monuments to Gulag victims to post-Soviet “magical historicism,” Alexander Etkind’s new book paints a bizarre panorama of post-catastrophe culture.