When evil has been done, but the living keep silent, the dead begin to speak—like in the setup of “Hamlet,” when the spirit of the poisoned father appears on the castle wall to the prince. The beyond that knocks into the present, the games of ghosts—they are the voice of an impure conscience of past generations.
“TITAN,” the first collection of stories by Sergey Lebedev, is 11 stories different in time and place of action, but unified by a mystical topography in which an unquiet past and the evil legacy of totalitarian regimes are always nearby, beyond a thin border—and try to testify through the voices of objects, places, beasts, and people, demanding retribution and justice.