Loudspeaker(s)

Dmitry Zakharov is a writer and journalist, the author of the novels “The Middle Edda,” “Cluster,” and “The Bridge Preservation Committee.”

The Border Union is a fragment of a once-great empire: a strip of land hemmed in by a ring of anomalous, infected spaces. Everything that survived the catastrophe.

Or maybe even the end of the entire world? No one is sure whether anything exists beyond the Transformer Fields…

Here people live side by side with the indigenous inhabitants of these places—intelligent bears.

Here it isn’t customary to recall aloud what happened back then; still less to discuss what came before.

Here the Old District Council carefully rationes the permissible picture of reality, shaping language and implanting the “correct” understanding of what’s going on through the Reproducer—a huge broadcasting organism that merges radio, television, and archives.

…and yet, through the approved backdrop, strange signals break through—the mysterious “buzzing thing.” Does it mean that someone is still left beyond the edge of the land?..

The global catastrophe in which most of humanity perishes in apocalyptic fire is the usual starting point. Hundreds of authors have asked themselves: what comes next? But Dmitry Zakharov manages to surprise. He claims there is something that will outlast any end of the world—above all, the Kafkaesque grotesque of the Great Institution, capable of blooming and reproducing even amid the ruins of a post-apocalyptic future.
Vasyl Vladymyrskyi, literary critic

Zakharov was bitten by Verkin, and now the text has grown “snarks”—that is, intelligent bears; but even before the bears, the “Dead Hand” eventually reaches into the story…
Aleksei Salnikov, writer

Hell in Zakharov’s “Reproducers” is unmistakable: with briefings, career maneuvering and backroom evaluations, vacations, a board of honors, and a souvenir department for gifts…
Yana Wagner, writer