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Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand (; 1978), the first widely read work of Russian fiction since the 1930s to deal extensively with Jewish life during the Soviet period, is a bold—and problematic—attempt to overcome the negative stereotype of the Jew in Russian culture and to create a memorial to the Soviet Jews murdered by the Nazis. However, governmental and self-imposed censorship, socialist realism, and the narrator's conflicted Russian-Jewish identity vitiate this rehabilitative project. Rybakov's use of socialist realism to heroize the Jews and to present their destruction as part of a larger plot to exterminate the Slavs distorts and de-Judaizes the Soviet Jewish catastrophe of the Second World War. Heavy Sand is replete with tensions and contradictions. On the one hand, the author celebrates Jewish family life and writes of a memorial to murdered Jews that includes a potentially subversive Hebrew inscription; on the other, he denies the significance of Jewish identity and provides a Russian translation of the Hebrew inscription that accords with Soviet policy and ideology. In the end, Heavy Sand conceals more than it reveals about Jewish life and death in the Soviet Union; it represents an aesthetics of—and a testimony to—not remembering but forgetting.

In his discussion of The Double,Joseph Frank remarks that Dostoevskii's decision to change the original subtitle from The Adventures of Mr. Goliadkin (Prikliucheniia Gospodina Goliadkina) to A Petersburg Poem (Peterburgskaia poema) had, among other things, the “advantage of correctly assigning The Double its place in the Russian literary tradition initiated by The Bronze Horseman.“ If The Double is truly in the Petersburg tradition of The Bronze Horseman, it is curious that no one has studied the relationship between these works, each of which features a minor civil servant (chinovnik) who goes mad. The few comparative analyses of the Petersburg theme in Pushkin and Dostoevskii have invariably focused on the more obvious relationships between The Queen of Spades and Crime and Punishment. Scholars have often compared The Double with other works—for example, the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Gogol'’s “Notes of a Madman,” “The Nose,” and Dead Souls but not with those of Pushkin.