A noir genre analysis of Heremakhonon explains the confusion, sensuality, red herrings, and flashbacks that permeate the novel, as well as the primacy of an investigation to the plot. Upon arriving in a newly independent West African country, protagonist Veronica witnesses the arrest of a political activist who opposed the ruling elite. When she investigates his disappearance, Veronica realizes that she is complicit with the elite perpetrators.

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Unintelligible sequences of letters or words in today’s Russian culture are omnipresent: in slogans, such as “Hair is the best remedy,” “Stop grandma’s merciless feeding!”; on social media, for example #ifnotputinthencat and “LSDUZ and IFIAU9”; in satirical songs and poems; in films by Zvyagintsev, novels by Sorokin, Tolstaya, and Pelevin, etc. The appeal of gibberish and its repression by the Soviet and post-Soviet officialdom is rooted in the belief that art and word have the power to influence people and events. Avant-garde artists who pioneered this belief in the transformative power of art cheered the Bolshevik’s promise to create a new society, but were soon crushed by the Soviet state as dangerous saboteurs. Today, gibberish is again a strategy of aesthetic defiance. Erudite and inventive, gibberish eludes the grasp of state censorship. It builds communities of resistance, and spoils the authoritative discourse like a fly in the soup.

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