Moral Choices Under the Leviathan: Conscience and Complicity in Svetlana Satchkova’s Novel “The Undead”

Svetlana Satchkova in person, in conversation with Maxim Matusevich!

Svetlana Satchkova’s remarkable new novel, The Undead: A Novel of Modern Russia, released by Melville House in January 2026, has already sparked intense interest and searching conversations. A gripping page-turner, the book follows a young filmmaker whose promising career is derailed by the heaving Leviathan of an oppressive system. It is the story of a society overtaken by dark forces that many had desperately hoped would never return.

The Undead confronts both its characters and its readers with stark moral choices. It revisits enduring questions of personal responsibility and culpability, and the torturous compromises with conscience that have long haunted Russian and Russophone literature—from Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Mikhail Bulgakov, from Mikhail Zoshchenko and Chinghiz Aitmatov to Sergei Dovlatov. Two and a half decades into the twenty-first century, these dilemmas remain painfully unresolved.

What draws readers to Satchkova’s novel is the universality of its central tragedy: the struggle to live and create as an artist in a country where one is relentlessly confronted with impossible, morally corrosive choices. Is this tragedy specific to Putin’s Russia, which has made a mockery of once-cherished hopes for the “end of history”? Is Russia forever trapped in a cycle of violence, abuse, and betrayal? Or is this pathology less unique than we might wish to believe?

A glance at the day’s headlines suggests that Maya’s dilemma transcends the borders of the world’s largest nation. That recognition—unsettling and sobering—is what gives The Undead its broad appeal. It is also what makes the novel necessary: it demands a difficult conversation and compels us to look deeply within ourselves in search of meaning, responsibility, and perhaps even atonement.

On Thursday, April 2, Svetlana Satchkova will discuss her novel and its historical and moral contexts with historian and writer Maxim Matusevich. 

Svetlana Satchkova is a Russian-born journalist and novelist who immigrated to the United States in 2016. She covers culture and politics, with bylines in the Rumpus, Newsweek, LARB, the Independent, and others.

Currently a research fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU, she holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn. Svetlana has published three novels in Russian; her English-language debut, The Undead: A Novel of Modern Russia, was released by Melville House in January 2026.

Maxim Matusevich is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Seton Hall University. A specialist in African–Soviet encounters and the history of race during the Cold War, he is the author of two scholarly books as well as numerous articles and book chapters exploring the global dimensions of socialism, decolonization, and racial politics in the twentieth century.

In addition to his academic scholarship, Matusevich is a fiction writer. His short stories, novellas, and essays have appeared in literary journals in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Israel, including The Kenyon Review, New England Review, BigCityLit, San Antonio Review, Statement of Record, and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, among others. His debut collection of short fiction, Six Trains of No Return (Academic Studies Press, 2026), brings together stories shaped by historical upheaval, displacement, and memory.

 Admission: $10 (all proceeds support the White Rabbit).
Please note: our venue is small, so advance ticket purchase is strongly recommended.