SOVIET BOOK OF THE DEAD

Abstract

Russian writer Yevgeny Lyvovich Shiffers (1934-1997) at the time of writing the book Смертию смерть поправ/Death by Death Defeated*(1966-1967) was lean on giant and powerful subtext of Antiquity, Christianity and Buddhism. This sophisticated thanatologist represents the ideal form of death as a universal principle that pervades the universe. By means of the fundamental estrangement and deconstruction of religious syntagm "in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit" Shiffers frees the reader from superficial automatism
of a believer and introduces him into rethinking the theological symbolism, in the spirit of religious modernism and post-atheistic searching for God. The main character, “Thomas the writer” presents in his writings the torment growing up in the Soviet Union, when the sons, building dubious careers, betrayed their fathers. Accepting blame for stealing his father's scientific manuscripts (symbolic patricide) Thomas took over his specific flock to escort it to the voluntary death. He continues his dynamic learning on Holy Trinity and the participation of man in this process, as well on the ideas about the resurrection-through-acceptance-of death. We have here a kind of soviet Book of the Dead. Смертию смерть поправ/Death by Death Defeated is novel of metaphysical realism, with excursions into the diverse discourses, from religious through intimate to science fiction, and that we can successfully understand and evaluate it according to its own rules.