The debut novel by a young writer from Belarus, Tatsiana Zamirovskaya, reads as a techno thriller of a Black Mirror type in the beginning, continues as a ghost mystery, but is ultimately none of the above. The protagonist carries out a rather painful investigation of her own death, and this research makes the novel the rarest attempt in today’s literature to search for a new approach to talk about life, death and the nature of things, in general. ——Galina Yuzefovich, meduza.io

In The Dead Net, a fantasy mystery thriller turns into a sequel to the popular essay What Is It like to be a Bat by Thomas Nagel, an American philosopher. Zamirovskaya develops his thesis — in her fiction world, it is not only living (or dead) people who have a form of individual consciousness, but also things, like a cactus or a stone. The novel’s universe becomes Borges’ Mirror of Enigmas, a system where each object carries a piece of information, and the signifier merges with the signified. This all could make the text too high brow, but Zamirovskaya succeeds in coining a very lively world of the dead (the pun intended) and describes it with much humor. ——《Prochtenie》

Everyone interested in the world’s current philosophical trends can find various up-to-date concepts to feed the inquisitive mind in Zamirovskaya’s novel. And it is not solely about philosophy, Zamirovskaya smartly introduces concepts and objects that will form the reality in the not-so-distant future. Essentially, The Dead- net is not a space, where a story develops and characters interact — though the author draws both the plot and characters beautifully. The novel, in the end, becomes a platform for an intellectual exchange, a channel for the mind, heart and pure art. ——Anna Berseneva , New Izvestia

With her novel Zamirovskaya strongly claims a title of the Russian China Miéville. The Dead Net is to me the best novel of the year.
——Alexander Gavrilov, A publisher and critic, for Vimbo audio publishing blog

The Dead Net, it seems, is an important cultural evidence or a symptom of modern reflections on the concept of “one” behind the speech. ——Colta.ru

★Longlisted for the National Bestseller Prize!
★Nominated for the New Literature Award!
★An uprising literary star from Belarus comes with a startling anti-utopia about the digital world of dead consciousnesses— the Dead Net. This collective space concocted from individual memories is home to digital backup copies, each activated after a person’s death. This anti-Matrix reality is striking, colorful, replete with memories, love and dreams-come- true. It’s an ineffably beautiful world that’s well worth… dying for.

The not-so-distant future, the vast majority of illnesses eradicated, human death is now caused mostly by virus outbreaks or terrorist attacks. As a coping mechanism, humanity develops a technology that creates digital copies of human consciousness. Individuals are allowed to create digital backups of themselves. Once they die, their digital copy is activated and can communicate with the world of living — but only with a limited number of family and friends.

They are isolated from others, banned from interfering with the world of the living. To compensate for the copies’ inevitable loneliness, the government decides to merge all of these dead people’s personal contexts and memories, thus creating an internet of the dead, the Dead Net. There, digital copies can interact and even form relationships.

The protagonist, a woman in her mid-forties, wakes up “resurrected” — a copy — only to learn that she has been killed in a terrorist attack. She connects with her family and friends, but her loving husband, to her utter amazement, refuses to communicate with her. Her family is clearly avoiding the subject and, after a series of failed attempts, she is forced to give up. She meets A., one of the first “inhabitants” of Dead Net, and they start a relationship.

Dead Net inhabitants continue their struggle against “bio privilege,” fighting for their rights to have a say in the real world. A revolution ensues. The dead invade the Internet of Things, taking over digital devices and appliances and wreaking havoc. This attempt is short lived. The government simply unplugs the Dead Net, cutting it off from the real world entirely. Their daring effort, however, is not entirely in vain: the dead are able to steal millions of backup copies of the living.

Among these stolen copies is an earlier copy of the protagonist’s husband. Because this copy was created before his wife’s death, the husband is totally shocked to find himself on the Dead Net and, what’s more, to find his wife involved with another man.
The murder investigation brings the protagonist to the headquarters of the Committee for the Insurrection of the Dead. They can help her hack into the otherwise cut-off real world. She manages to reach the world in the shape of an airport departure board, a robotic dog and, even a clone of the dictator of a certain Eastern European country… She does this for the sake of the Dead Net— but also, secretly, for her own personal quest.

While the protagonist’s own investigation proves fruitless, she obtains a crucial piece of information: the government plans to turn off the Dead Net server. To shut it down completely. The Committee assigns the protagonist with a mission to enable the portal for Dead Net self-download.
n a final effort to solve her murder mystery, she decides to forge a portal not only into the real world, but also through time. She will travel to the time of her murder and witness the act — in the body of her own husband. Through her husband’s eyes, she observes her “real” self fighting with her husband at a restaurant. As she rummages through his mind, however, she realizes that he has no — never had any — intention of killing her. But she also knows that if she leaves now, her real self won’t die, and none of this would have happened. There would be no resurrected digital copy of herself, no A. and their love, no new friends. She never would have become the person she is now. Moreover, the Dead Net would simply cease to exist. Her death proves to be a key to the new world, and she has a choice to make.

This quantum detective thriller and metaphysical anti- utopia is a true delight for inquisitive minds. Tatsiana Zamirovskaya takes readers on a challenging journey into the philosophical cosmos of Nikolay Fyodorov and Boris Groys, filling her work with concepts from speculative realism, in the vein of Ray Brassier and Timothy Morton. In this witty page-turner, Zamirovskaya poses audacious existential questions. Is memory a gateway to eternity? How might the resurrection of the dead inform our understanding of free will? Is a digitalized consciousness living a “real” life? Zamirovskaya also invites the reader to dwell on social issues that have gained their bitter topicality these days: life in isolation, dictatorships, institutionalized ghettos, and — most of all — the ways in which we revolt.

About the author
Tatsiana Zamirovskaya is a writer, music critic and journalist from Minsk, Belarus who currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated with a degree in Journalism from Belarusian State University (2002) and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Bard College. Her journalistic works have been published in a variety of Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian media outlets. In Belarus, she worked as a magazine editor (Jazz-Quad Magazine, Belarus, Doberman magazine), and as the arts and culture observer at Belagazeta, the most prominent Belarusian independent weekly newspaper. She also had a successful career as a music critic.

In 2015, Tatsiana moved to New York to earn her MFA at Bard College, where her thesis was an English-language novel-in- progress, Silence Fiction. In this project, she moved away from her native language, exploring the concepts of alienation and studying the effects of language insufficiency on memory, narration and representation.

Tatsiana presented excerpts from this work-in-progress were during readings at New York institutions such as Microscope Gallery (Brooklyn), Howl! Happening gallery, Printed Matter bookstore, and Leslie Lohman’s Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.In 2018, Tatsiana won a fellowship from Macdowell Colony and, in 2019, was accepted to VCCA artist colony.

Tatsiana is the author of three Russian-language short stories collections: Life without Noise and Pain (2010), Sparrow River (2010), and The Land of Random Numbers (2019), published by AST Publishing House in Moscow. Tatsiana’s short stories have been published in Russian-language magazines worldwide. In September 2018 her short story Honeyfast was awarded the Gorchev Award, a prestigious Russian prize for short fiction. The Deadnet, her debut novel, received nominations for New Literature Award and The National Bestseller Prize in 2021.

Selected Bibliography
2021 — The Dead Net, novel
2019 — The Land of Random Numbers, short stories
2015 — Sparrow River, short stories
2010 — Life without Noise and Pain, short stories