Dimitri and Khalid return to the Subliminal Cinema to dissect the 1967 Soviet horror classic “Viy”, including: the murky etymology of Gogol’s eponymous “king of the gnomes”, satanic Cossacks, sleazy seminarians, getting spiritually molested by a witch, Gogol’s gift for portraying the poshlost of a poshlosty man, the shockingly ghoulish climax of the film, Khoma Brut getting dragged to Hell In A Bucket, some background on Nikolai Gogol’s life, becoming a liberal satirist superhero before doing trad autofiction and getting cancelled, Belinsky’s scorched earth takedown of Gogol’s politics, Stalin the seminarian, religious dynamics of Marxist-Leninist governments, the failure of edgelord atheism and Stalin’s soyface-inducing reconciliation with God during WW2, Aleksandr Ptushko aka “the Soviet Walt Disney”, the evolving Soviet framings of Gogol, and The Responsibility of the Artist to have perfect politics.

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