Warped Mourning Summary

For Etkind, historicism is a tradition that seeks to understand the current state of the world as a result of its development in the past and denies other ways of understanding the present (such as free will) (Etkind, “Warped Mourning”). Magical historicism emerges from the “instructive imagery that has evolved out of post-catastrophic, post-Soviet culture” (Etkind, “Magical Historicism” 632), which, like post-traumatic consciousness, “cyclically returns to the overwhelming event in the past” (Etkind, “From Fiction to Non-Fiction” 2). The imaginative figures, places and metamorphoses in magical historicism are the result of the attempt to understand “the central trauma, or rather the catastrophe, of the Soviet period (Etkind, “From Fiction to Non-Fiction” 2). The distinctive traits of magical historicism are uncanny landscapes, zombies, walking animals, mutations of and manipulations with human bodies, contact with supernatural, discovery of knowledge that leads to superpower (Etkind, “Warped Mourning”).

In his article “Representing the Holocaust: Reflections on the Historians’ Debate”, LaCapra says that ‘working-through’ requires one’s “recognition that we are involved in transferential relations to the past” (LaCapra 125), and constant “rework, invent” (LaCapra 125) of those relations. In other words, working-through is a process of permanent and conscious work of rethinking of the traumatic past, and our relationship to it. LaCapra opposes the notion of working-through to the one of acting-out, which he sees as “reprocessing of the past through which we deny its features” (LaCapra 125). The magical historicism, with its attempts to understand the trauma of the Soviet period, is a form of working-through, which tries to compensate the previous unsuccessful attempts of working-through during the post-Soviet