Etkind, Alexander. Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 551 to say that, in the case of those chapters that are primarily surveys of a topic, the sheer amount of detail tends to overwhelm. Every contribution, however, testifies in its own way to the continuing and seemingly endless fascination with the complex relationship between two nations and two cultures, the discussion of which resists any attempts at arriving at glib conclusions. In so far as the influence of Russian culture on a British audience is concerned, we are reminded above all not only of its transformative effect, but of its paradoxical nature. Keynes’s remark that ‘almost everything one can say about [Russia] is true and false at the same time’ (p. 209) rings true, despite the hyperbole. There is much more waiting to be said in this absorbing narrative, not least a continuation of the story up to the present. University of Exeter Roger Cockrell Etkind, Alexander. Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2013. 300 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $25.95 (paperback). ‘Warped mourning’ is Alexander Etkind’s term for Russian culture’s engagement with the Soviet past, above all the state violence of the Stalin years. He begins with the contention that ‘the leading cultural genres in Russia […] manifest unusual, maybe even perverted, forms of mourning for the past’ (p. 2). Etkind has studied banknotes, school textbooks, late Soviet and postSoviet prose, labour camp memoirs, films, paintings, monuments. His close readings of well-known and less well-known works and objects have something new to tell, even to the erudite. But thoughtful textual scholarship is not the author’s main ambition here: Warped Mourning is an attempt at developing a coherent theory of mourning, tailor-made for the Russian context and based on the broadest possible selection of cultural phenomena. The theoretical frameworks Etkind has chosen to support his interpretation of these cultural phenomena cover as wide and colourful a field as possible, drawing on myth, history, psychoanalysis, literary and cultural theory. He combines them in such a way that they support his conclusion — or is it a contention after all? — that Russia is a post-catastrophic society trapped in a cycle where the past is compulsively re-enacted in mimetic form, since society is incapable, for a variety of reasons, of constructively re-appraising the trauma it has suffered. Some constructs are intriguing, for example Etkind’s use of the Tancred and Clorinda myth as a leitmotif that tells us that when the living fail to honour their debt to the dead, the dead will return in monstrous form and the present will be lived out in the shadow of the past (e.g. pp. 169, 218). Another example SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 552 is the sustained exegesis of the themes of mourning and vengeance through the concept of the ‘ghost of the father’ that is developed in the discussion of Kozintsev’s Shakespeare films (chapter 7). Other applications of theory are predictable, e.g. the heavy use of the Freudian terminology of the ‘uncanny’ and the ‘return of the repressed’. Etkind’s speciality is the appropriation and adaptation of established twentieth-century concepts to suit his specific context. His definition of ‘tortured life’ in the Gulag (p. 29) draws on G. Agamben’s ‘homo sacer’ and E. Santner’s ‘creaturely life’. ‘Magical historicism’, the term Etkind uses to describe the fiction of authors such as Pelevin and Sorokin, crosses ‘magical realism’ à la Garcia Marquez with the critical current of ‘historicism’, and his use of ‘hauntology’ to replace ‘ontology’ is borrowed from Derrida and based on a rather convoluted exposition of the latter’s ‘Spectres of Marx’ (p. 197 ff.). The excellent chapter nine on the ‘hard- and software of memory’, which analyses the interplay of temporal and spatial aspects of memory, the role of individuals and institutions and the respective functions of texts and monuments, develops ideas voiced by Pierre Nora, Jürgen Habermas et al. Some of Etkind’s finer points, such as the suggestion that monuments are ‘stakes that nail a mythological vampire to the ground’ (p. 183) may seem farfetched , and the near-identification...