The Defeated Demon

This book was conceived by the author as a textbook, but in the process of working on it, it turned into a confession of a person who dedicated their life to a doomed, yet no less interesting endeavor — the study of Russian culture. A sick byproduct of a sick system, Russian culture is doomed to perish along with the system. According to Dmitry Bykov, Russian civilization may still function for some time — institutionally or physically, but not substantively. The content of the project has been exhausted; it has come to a logical and inevitable self-destruction. Everything for which the Lord tolerated Russia has completely left, departed, or simply died out. Therefore, the author has to deal with a completed process — this is the fundamental novelty of the proposed study. Only a completed process is available for study: the optimal time for analyzing Russian culture has arrived, as evidenced by the globally increasing interest in it. Is it not the ultimate goal of all literature — biographical, in particular — to understand why it ended this way? Dmitry Bykov's new book is harshly bitter, yet so lively, so passionate and fiery, that one begins to doubt: is it truly the end?