Epistemic Wrong in Sergei Lebedev’s 'The Lady of the Mine'

• In Event: Eco-Mnemonics as Colonial Critique in Literature and the Arts

Abstract

This paper explores the wrongful obstruction of cognitive success (epistemic wrong) in Sergei Lebedev’s 2024 novel Belaya dama (The Lady of the Mine in English translation). The novel, set in a fictional village in Donetsk, features a mysterious, preternaturally large mine shaft which never produced the ore its engineer foresaw because it became the final resting place of the physical remains of those who perished in mass atrocities in the region. As a symbol of epistemic wrong, the imagined site-specificity of this mine shaft both memorializes and masks the cognitive processes of Russian disinformation.

Author

• Sidney Eric Dement, Binghamton U