title: Hyperreality in the Black Sea: Fictions of Crimea in novels by Lev Tolstoy and Vasily Aksyonov
abstract: During and immediately after the crisis that resulted in Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a number of commentators in the US media referenced Lev Tolstoy's Sebastopol Sketches and Vasily Aksyonov's The Island of Crimea as works of literary fiction that helped to explain or even predicted present-day events. Although there is some superficial truth to such statements, both works are actually far more interested in exposing and undermining processes that distorted the reality 
journal: Shima