From corpse to ghost

This article covers previously unexplored ground, discussing allusions to corpses and the different forms of 'ghosts' embedded in landscapes within Sergei Lebedev's cycle of novels, a landmark series in contemporary memorial literature. Lebedev explores the persistence of Soviet and post-Soviet violence by intertwining family history with broader historical trauma. In his books, the dead appear as an integral part of the environment in which they lie, leaving their mark on and shaping the landscape. Dead bodies are treated as evidence of crimes perpetrated years earlier, and thus a weapon in the fight against erasure. In this respect, as this article demonstrates, Lebedev borrows from the poetics of Varlam Shalamov, a Russian writer who survived the Kolyma gulags. Both authors show how preserved corpses and spectral presences present a challenge not only to language and memory, but also to mourning practices

Poetics · Russian literature · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Religious, Philosophical, and Educational Studies