Combining ideas from cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this essay proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the emerging field of post-Soviet memory studies. Sociological polls demonstrate that approximately one-fourth of Russians remember that their relatives were victims of terror, yet the existing monuments, museums, and rituals are inadequate to commemorate these losses. In this economy of memory, ghosts and monsters become a prominent subject of post-Soviet culture. The incomplete work of mourning turns the unburied dead into the undead. Analyzing Russian novels and films of the last decade, Alexander Etkind emphasizes the radical distortions of history, semihuman creatures, fantastic cults, manipulations of the body, and circular time that occur in these fictional works. To account for these phenomena, Etkind coins the concept “magical historicism” and discusses its relation to the magical realism of postcolonial literatures. The memorial culture of magical historicism is not so much postmodern as it is, precisely, post-Soviet.

In this article, Paul Manning explores the metaphoric and metonymic valuations of western brands as symbols of revolutionary change during the recent Rose Revolution and especially during the transition of the early 1990s in Georgia. Using an ethnographic reading of a Georgian novel about the early 1990s, The Dogs of Paliashvili Street by Aka Morchiladze, Manning examines in detail how a single ubiquitous western brand of cigarettes, Magna—often deployed in opposition to local socialist brands like Kolkheti (“brand totemism“)—came to stand metaphorically as a “meta-symbol” for the period of the transition in Georgia as a whole, “the Epoch of Magna.” At the same time, the new capitalist conditions of consumption and the proliferation of western brands of cigarettes made differences between brands into metonymic resources for indexing emergent forms of social differentiation and transformed certain brands, like Marlboro, into indexes of the general collapse of public urban order after socialism (“brand fetishism”).

A future revolutionary, Alesha Karamazov is, at nineteen, an inexperienced boy who lives in a monastery and who has been considered strange since birth. Fedor Dostoevskii endows him with hysteria—then a serious psychopathology with convulsions that were clinically seen as analogous to epilepsy, the morbus sacer from which Dostoevskii himself suffered. Recognized as an epidemic problem, hysteria in this novel is elaborately deployed as a symbol of Russia's social ills and the underlying cause of farreaching personality changes in Alesha (for better or worse), preparing him for a heroic destiny. Although hysteria was soon altered and later eliminated as a clinical syndrome, James L. Rice enables us to read the novel for the first time in the light of documented medical history.

In this article Barbara Walker examines the theme of (samo)zhertvovanie in the Moscow human rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Some participants in that movement have expressed emotional satisfaction in the belief that they were motivated by the desire for self-giving; but that belief has sometimes been received with doubt. Walker uncovers the social phenomenon of a charity movement for the benefit of political prisoners that, she argues, lies near the social and emotional heart of the human rights movement. An important theme of the charity movement, whether real or constructed, is emotional purification of a sense of personal and social contamination stemming from participation in what some experienced as corruption in Soviet state and society. This article draws on ideas of spiritual atonement and salvation through altruism as explanatory cultural factors in this phenomenon.