Two iconoclasms took place in twentieth-century Russian history: the iconoclasm after the October revolution, and the iconoclasm after the breakdown of the Soviet Union. These two (ideologically opposite) phases of iconoclastic actions (dismantling, destruction) were incited by programmes concerning the abolition of tsarist monuments of 1918 and met by controversial reactions to the removal of the statues of the former Soviet politicians in the 1990s. The revolutionary demolition of the symbols of the imperial past was executed in accordance with a clear-cut plan and included the erection of new monuments for outstanding communist activists. The official aim of the post-soviet removal of these monuments, to delete traces of a problematic past, was confronted with a revitalized communist ideology on the one hand and with the reaction of the Human Rights Organization Memorial on the other, which criticized the insufficient demolition of soviet symbols. This multifaceted situation is complicated by the reconstruction of destroyed pre-revolutionary monuments of Russian (predominantly religious) history.

The history of mnemonic concepts encompasses utopian and sceptical views that produce either a hypertrophic memory or denounce any representation as false. Each literary text incorporates or stores other texts, thus mnemonic space unfolds between and within texts. In storing and accumulating cultural data, the literary text in its intertextual dimension functions as part of cultural memory. A fantastic text points to a silenced repressed memory, confronting culture with its oblivion. Yet the fantastic in restoring the displaced and vanished parts of culture is not merely a mnemonic memory: its speculative potential strives for arbitrary creations that erase the accepted mnemonic imagery.