Staging the Absolute examines the use of public ritual to interrupt the flow of history, a distinct element in Russian culture during the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

Thomas Seifrid is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Southern California.

Nancy Condee, Professor and Director of the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Pittsburgh:

"Thomas Seifrid’s Staging the Absolute offers a stunning, broad-ranging account of Russia’s trans-European commonalities (both pre-modern and modern), linking its culture from the late nineteenth-century onwards to reveal a renewed ritualized striving towards a transcendence of history in service of a re-captured absolute. The ritualized disruption of history at a moment of historical crisis – this is a timely topic, especially today."

Yuri Leving, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University:

"In Staging the Absolute, Thomas Seifrid brilliantly exposes Soviet rituals as practices that revived the medieval mystery plays and urban spectacles of centuries-old Europe. Thanks to Seifrid’s mastery in showing their extrahistorical meaning, the Russian classics that we thought we knew by heart, be it Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita or Blok’s The Twelve, gain new relevance."