The Return of the Dead: Haunting Traumas and Nostalgic Dreams

Abstract

Chapter 6 points out how themes and motifs of ghosts and resurrection in the work of Vladimir Sharov, Dmitrii Bykov, and Vladimir Sorokin provide ambiguous structures for fantasies about the restoration of an imperial identity. It focuses on Bykov’s much-discussed novel Justification (2001) and its mysterious “returnees,” who can be seen as either returning victims from the Gulag or the ghosts of inmates who died there. It is precisely the story’s suspended, “fantastic” nature—for most of the novel the “returnees” belong to both natural and supernatural worlds—that allows Bykov to follow two seemingly incompatible trails: as ephemeral appearances the “returnees” stand for the haunting collective traumas of the Soviet past, while as human beings they represent the hope that “the Empire” that inflicted these traumas might be restored.