Warped Mourning

"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." - Polly Jones, Times Literary Supplement "Etkind presents a rich, intelligent, and profound account of responses to the devastating loss of human life in Russia's Soviet period... This brilliant book will be indispensable for scholars of mourning theories." - C. A. Rydel, CHOICE "There is undoubtedly much that is new and exciting in this study of the impact of state violence on the form and content of art and scholarship in post-Stalin Russia." - Victoria Donovan, The Russian Review "Mr. Etkind ranges expertly through cultural theory, finding in film, literary criticism, linguistics, art and philosophy the effect of the Stalinist trauma on later Soviet and now Russian generations." - The Economist "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 melancholia for the last hundred years." - Nancy Condee, University of Pittsburgh