Seven lives are consumed by the revolutionary machinery they served, each recounted with the precision of a coroner and the grief of a poet. Danilo Kiš published this collection in 1976, and it cost him dearly: Yugoslav critics accused him of plagiarism, a charge that was punishment for writing too clearly about what power does to individuals. Each story traces a figure caught in Stalinist terror, from an operative buried alive to a prisoner confessing crimes he did not commit. The prose is lapidary, compressing whole lives into pages that read like epitaphs carved in ice. Kiš understood that totalitarianism does not merely kill but revises, erasing its victims from memory, which is why literature must serve as the tomb history refuses.