It may never achieve the acclaimed status of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We or Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita but, like those 20th-century satirical masterpieces, a novel about a zombie apocalypse in Moscow has earned the wrath of Russian censors. In a sign of the intensifying crackdown on artistic creativity under Vladimir Putin, prosecutors have demanded that Ivan Filippov’s book Mouse should be withdrawn from sale in Russia on the grounds that it threatens public order.
Mouse tells the story of an infected rodent that escapes from a scientific institute where experts are developing a serum to prolong Putin’s life. In the ensuing chaos, most of Moscow’s residents turn into zombies that behave like mice. It is light-hearted stuff and, as a critique of contemporary Russian society, short of the standards set by weightier novels such as Sergei Lebedev’s Oblivion, published in 2011.