Sublime

of two Russian figures—Vladimir Lenin and the much lesser known Vladislav Surkov, a former postmodernist theater director who’s been described as “Putin’s Rasputin” and the Kremlin’s propaganda puppet master—informs many of the troubling political and social dynamics at work in the post-truth era.

The old woman’s principal heir, however, turned out to be an honest man, the provincial marshal of nobility of that province,1 Yefim Petrovich Polenov.