In 2026, the American publishing house Melville House published a novel by journalist and writer Svetlana Sachkova, “The Lifeless. A novel about modern Russia" (The Undead: A Novel of Modern Russia). Its events take place in Moscow, in the late 2010s. The main character, director Maya, decides to make a horror film about Vladimir Lenin, who rises from the dead and leads an army of zombies. At the start of filming, she is completely apolitical - she does not follow the news and is completely immersed only in creativity. Everything changes when they come to search her in the morning: someone wrote a denunciation, calling her project extremist. With the permission of the publisher, Meduza publishes a fragment of the novel in which Maya hears the first - and perhaps only - review of her film from an expert hired by the court. The fragment was translated by Svetlana Sachkova herself at Meduza’s request.