Radicalizing Life after Death: Dostoevskii’s ‘Bobok: Zapiski odnogo litsa’ (‘Bobok: Notes of a Certain Person’) and Petrushevskaia’s Nomer Odin, ili V sadakh drugikh vozmozhnostei (Number One, or in the Gardens of Other Opportunities)

The focus of this article is on Dostoevskii’s story “Bobok” [“Bobok,” 1873] and Petrushevskaia’s novel Nomer Odin, ili V sadakh drugikh vozmozhnostei [Number One, or In the Gardens of Other Opportunities, 2004]. These dialogical narratives explore the theme of life after death; they portray death as a transition to life that includes several stages, and focus on the process of dying, living in a different form, and dying again. I discuss how these radical views on death are expressed in “Bobok” and Nomer Odin (with some reference to Dostoevskii’s Zapiski iz podpol’ia [Notes from Underground, 1864] and Petrushevskaia’s Vremia: Noch’ [Time: Night, 1992]): from the “getting naked” (“zagolimsia,” “obnazhimsia”) preached and practised by the decaying corpses in Dostoevskii’s text, to transitions between different stages after death in Petrushevskaia’s novel, such as metempsychosis, as well as tropes used to denote these transitions.