“TO LEARN ABOUT ONESELF is the toughest among the challenges of learning,” wrote Alexander Etkind, one of the most perceptive scholars of the post-Soviet cultural experience. He was writing about the particular horror of the Soviet legacy: Victims and perpetrators were mixed together in the same families, ethnic groups, and lines of descent. . . . If the Nazi Holocaust exterminated the Other, the Soviet terror was suicidal. The self-inflicted nature of Soviet terror has complicated the circulation of three energies that structure the postcatastrophic world: a cognitive striving to learn about
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