"That science-fiction future in which technology would make everything very good-or very bad-has not yet arrived. From our vantage point at least, no age appears to have had a deeper faith in the inevitability and imminence of such a total...

Hellebust's literary examples range from the famous (Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago") to the forgotten (early Soviet proletarian poets). To these he adds a mix of non-Russian references, from creation myths to comic book superheroes and medieval alchemy to Moby-Dick. He includes readings of posters, sculpture and political discourse as well as cross-cultural comparisons to revolutionary France, industrial-age America and Nazi Germany. The result is an insightful portrait of the ultimate symbols of dehumanizing modernity, as refracted through the prism of utopian humanism.