Mamleev's America

Yuri Mamleev (1931-2015) is known today in his native Russia and in some parts of Europe as the founder of an original literary genre known as Metaphysical Realism. While reputed for his uniquely uncanny and disturbing literary investigations of death, metaphysical matters like the Self, and what he called "the Abyss," little attention to date has been paid to one of Mamleev's formative spiritual trials: his exile in the United States and the body of writings he produced on the mysterious aura of America.

Mamleev's America marks the first English-language publication of his American writings while also framing an alternate version of the author - the "Other Mamleev" - who both created and was created by New York City in the 1970s, as well as its latent double, the sleepy college hamlet of Ithaca, New York. This unprecedented volume brings together Mamleev's American Stories (dating to the early 1980s), the roman à clef entitled Wanderings (published posthumously in 2022), and an extensive introduction to Mamleev's relationship with America, written by Charlie Smith.

In these blackly disquieting visions, Mamleev probes the dead-end of Modernity, exposing the underbelly of America's sanitized Mammonite pseudo-religion and its cult of "winners." In a sea of psychically uninhabited bodies, televised faces, dislocated mutilations, and self-guided knives in search of lives, Mamleev conjures characters stripped not only of identity, but of Being as such. In Mamleev's scrying mirror, the surface depravity and spiritual desolation of American life become strangely inverted: what upon first glance seems like a scene from hell is instead revealed to be a singular moment of encounter with the radical Other, a portal opening up to the breath of the Abyss. Mamleev's America transports the reader into the world lurking behind the façades of our cities, which we otherwise only glimpse through a glass, darkly.