“They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good … They gathered together in armies against one another, but even on the march the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting and devouring each other.”This astonishing nightmare of an entire nation infected by intelligent microbes is one of the last to torture the murderer Raskolnikov before his transformative epiphany, in the epilogue to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. An equally grotesque vision is presented in Mikhail Elizarov’s The Librarian. The novel, which won the 2008 Russian Booker Prize, tells the story of Alexei, another of Russian literature’s many anti-her