Review on: Etkind A. Warped Mouring. Stories of the Undead in the Land of Unburied. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2016. 328 p.

Abstract. The book of Alexander Etkind, Professor at the European University in Florence, “Warped Mourning. Stories of the Undead in the Land of Unburied” is an experience of the understanding post-catastrophic situation that prevailed in the Soviet and post- Soviet culture. The author focuses on mourning for the victims of repression that aims to productive work for overcoming the traumatic experience. But the cultural mechanisms of memory and mourning work in Soviet and post-Soviet culture improperly, forcing to repeat in imagination the traumatic experience of the past and translate it into cultural forms. Thus, the cultural space is populated with ghosts, spirits, monsters and other simulacra, whose existence remember us about one of the large-scale disasters of the XX century. In the review, the main theoretical approaches of the research are analyzed. The combination of mourning theory of Freud, the ideas of W. Benjamin about the second life of religious symbols in mass culture and Russian formalism allowed the author to develop his own concept of analysis post-catastrophic culture, thereby changing the already established idea of trauma studies.

Keywords: mourning, cultural memory, post-catastrophic culture, Soviet repressions, trauma.