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A Summary Of Alexander Etkind's Warped Mourning Essay

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I started looking for Alexander Etkind’s “Warped Mourning. Stories of the Undead in the Land of Unburied” in Kyiv’s bookstores right after I’d finished the “Portraits in the Barbed Frame” by Vadim Delaunay. The autobiographical fictionalised diary of Delaunay's journal goes back to the beginning of the 1968 protest in Red Square, where young people under the slogan “For your freedom and ours” came out to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In my mind, the pictures from the "Portraits" went side by side with the letters and news reports from the Crimean political prisoners - Kolchenko and Sentsov. And at some point, very clearly, I sensed the need to look at this from the perspective of history, including the main themes of the “Warped Mourning” and …show more content…

This has always been a problem, and this has been happening in Russia all the time because the state historically has been excessively large. But I'm afraid the same applies to other countries, such as Poland and Ukraine. The state’s role in the economy is still a matter of disputes. But much less is said about the role of the state in history and cultural policy. And involving the state in these affairs leads to the citizens’ distrust of this state. TB: Is it a part of the authoritarian legacy or this still may occur without any relation to authoritarianism? AE: This is not necessarily related to authoritarianism. In Poland, for example, it has to do more with nationalism. I mean simple things: it's completely normal from a historian’s perspective, or any social science researcher’s perspective, to argue over some facts, specific moments because there are always different points of view. For example, someone thinks the document is fake, other thinks that it’s not. These disputes last for decades and even centuries and it’s good. But everything changes when the state intervenes. TB: Can a local initiative change or affect this

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