Valery Podoroga was one of the most important thinkers of his generation. Here his most famous
work is translated into English for the first time. In it he gives a panorama view of Russian
writing focusing in on the work of Nikolai Gogol Fyodor Dostoevsky and Andrei Bely. He
identifies these authors as pioneers in creating an 'other literature'. This constituted a new
form of mimesis or vision of the world in opposition to the Imperial and national myths. In
Mimesis Podoroga develops and elaborates his analytic anthropological approach on these authors
with startling effect excavating the identities and forms of Russian literature and society.
He places an emphasis on how a literary work is a process of world building: both internally by
creating a fictive world but also how it reflects the wider world in which it was produced
and the power with which it changes the world. Finally the literary work's ability to exist in
a time that is other than its own time a time where it does not have a contemporary reader and
an author who exercises his will but where it nonetheless continues to mean something. Mimesis
is rightly seen as the masterwork of one of the world's leading literary thinkers.
