ABSTRACT
The Kingdom of Agamemnon (2018), Vladimir Sharov’s novel on Stalinism, lays bare the inner workings of the post-Soviet memory. This chapter opens with a comparison of The Kingdom of Agamemnon with Jonathan Littell’s 2006 novel about the Holocaust, Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones). Littell’s controversial novel initiated the “era of the perpetrators” – a shift of attention from the victim’s experiences to those of the perpetrator – while The Kingdom of Agamemnon epitomizes the fabrication of the post-Soviet memory of the perpetrators. Searching for the meaning of Russian history, Sharov’s protagonists reiterate the understanding of the oprichnina expressed in their creator’s historical writings: the torments and deaths of the innocent are perceived as a collective religious sacrifice for “Holy Russia,” which offers the living a chance for salvation. This “secret knowledge” of the hidden workings of history is arguably essential to the functioning of the post-Soviet mobmemory. The chapter closes by addressing an alternative strategy for dealing with memories of Stalinism in Dmitry Bykov’s novel Justification (2001).
