The new media have brought with them new forms of engagement with history. Jáchym Topol’s most recent novel, which plays with a grotesque war of memorial strategies in the Czech Republic and Belarus, reacts to this challenge with intermedial references, including structural imitation and a computer game. This article describes the textual means of creating an immersive experience that include literary modelling of the narrative strategies on the first-person shooter computer games. The article shows how a critical commentary on current practices of engaging with history, from commercialisation through banalisation and political reinterpretation, is transformed into the action of the novel, and how this memory-thriller uses its borrowings from the genre of computer games to fulfil its own mission—the revitalisation of history via immersion in a fictional world, full of both hot and cold sites of memory.
Language of contribution: English