The New Barbarism. Novel about the Russian Guilt

In times of a new barbarism, with heads of state and government dividing up the world like mafiosi, Viktor Jerofejew paints a garishly dazzling panorama of human and political abysses, in which truth becomes a game and morality an attitude.

While Putin appears as a “ponchik” – an oil-baked doughnut with a hole in the middle, symbolizing a bloated emptiness – the opposition poses as martyrs. At the center is "Russian Guilt", a female allegory of the country and object of the protagonist’s desire. With her, Jerofejew’s alter ego sets off for "Heavenly Moscow", a surreal landscape between dream, memory, and farce, where history and the present collide. There, Stalin and Rilke, Tsvetaeva and Merkel meet, and even the great Russian classics – from Pushkin to Tolstoy – appear as witnesses to an endless recurrence of violence. In this alchemical mixture of autobiography, essay, and allegory, the image of a country that is breaking apart under the weight of its own mythological lust emerges – and at the same time draws the reader into the maelstrom of its language. The New Barbarism is Jerofejew’s most radical book: satire, poetry, and a tragicomic declaration of love to a Russia that has lost itself.

“A novel about the nature of the new barbarism that is replacing liberal values in both Russia and America. Europe, too, finds itself at an impasse, and its political forces are unable to change the situation, helpless and lacking in clear ideas.” – Viktor Jerofejew