Carbon Pages
A play collection by Daniel Gavilovski - 2026
Carbon Pages
Daniel Gavilovski
Unreal Press
2026
Today’s “book reviews” are nothing more than object reviews. I stand by that thesis, and will judge a book by its cover and design. If there is actual “content” in the text, likely it’s above expression.
“Alt-lit?” Well, what could have been is now in the present.
Technology has become the ultimate ventriloquist, puppeteering music into forms that pretend to be older than they are, or kitsch art that winks while it weeps. A synth pad hums with the warm imperfection of analog tape, yet it is rendered in a pristine Ableton Live environment on an expensive laptop. This is not deception; it is the new sincerity, born out of irony. The memory is flawed on purpose. So technology has made the past portable.
And how do we write new novels in 2026? We write them on a laptop that mimics the past.
“Kitsch” used to be a trend. Now an AI can generate a Bach chorale in the style of a 1970s lounge singer in seconds, then distort it through a “broken cassette” filter. It’s so advanced on this meta level that we forget any of this innovation is made in the present.
Technology does not resolve the triangle of irony, sincerity, and kitsch; it triangulates them into a perfect, unstable shape. Music pretending to be old reminds us that the past was never pure. Kitsch art, mass-produced and self-aware, confesses feelings that are often embarrassing.
And yet we go forward. Whatever “alt-lit” is, it adapts and assumes it can’t be influenced by the political environment we are in. It’s a fake type of “apolitical” ethic or “liberal” nature that denies its own existence.
Sometimes, however, the text does become aware of this conflict.
Daniel Gavilovski’s Carbon Pages presents a clean, deliberately literary design that feels both timeless and intentionally archival. The layout is classic Steampunk typography: generous white space, elegant serif body text (likely Garamond or similar), and stage directions set in italics or smaller type. Page numbers appear at the foot, headers are minimal, and the overall rhythm mimics mid-20th-century drama editions (think Grove Press or Faber & Faber scripts). It is book fetishism. And this book fetishism is what an “object review” is about.
The design is restrained yet atmospheric. The title page is stark and centered; the dedication and preface pages use simple, centered blocks. The cover page presents a moon-faced cartoon with stars and a bottom page owl colophon. The interior features Ralph Steadman-esque drawings that are raw, expressionistic, and grotesque. Distorted figures, dripping lines, horror-comedy energy that perfectly matches the Grand Guignol inspiration of “COGNITOHAZARD.” And what does that mean? It is a type of “dangerous memory.”
The thin margins, formal typography, and samizdat-inspired title consciously nod to Soviet-era carbon copies and pre-war theatrical chapbooks. It rejects modern minimalist sans-serif minimalism in favor of a tactile, “bookish” feel. Even the 2026 copyright and clean PDF rendering cannot hide the retro sensibility.
And yet all of it IS digital!
The cover page Moon Stamp instantly recalls the eccentric, hand-stamped envelopes of Kent Peterson’s mail art, while the Unreal Press logo at the bottom—an unmistakable wide-eyed owl—winks with the same sly, nocturnal mischief. And the title, “Carbon Pages,” deliberately summons the fragile, translucent sheets of Soviet-era samizdat. And yet we order it through Kindle Direct Publishing, and the Amazon megacorporation creates these pages for us. Technology is the art.
This three-piece collection drifts between cosmopolitanism and a strangely optimistic existentialism, even as the longest piece, “No Weapon Formed Against You,” asks whether the “new machine” that replaced the USSR is any different from the old one. It is a sprawling, non-linear epic drama that spans roughly from 1980 to the early 2000s, mostly in Russia. It follows three “political maximalists.” Igor Letov (a punk musician and dissident), Eduard Limonov (a volatile exiled writer), and Alexander Dugin (a mystical philosopher)—as they bond in youthful rebellion, forge a radical movement during the USSR’s collapse, seize fleeting power, and ultimately confront aging, betrayal, and the banality of their own success. The title alludes to Isaiah 54:17 (“No weapon formed against you shall prosper”), but here it drips with irony: the characters weaponize ideology only for it to turn inward, corroding their friendships and dreams.
The play opens in 1980 with two parallel scenes that establish the protagonists’ defiant energies. In Moscow, teenage Igor Letov is dragged before a KGB officer (the “Blue Suit”) for smuggling Western 8-track tapes. He urinates in defiance during interrogation and is committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he meets the shaven-headed Alexander Dugin. The boys bond over forbidden music; Igor plucks a violin like a guitar and belts out a raw, patriotic ballad about a rising “Motherland.” Meanwhile, in a bohemian Paris apartment, the flamboyant young Eduard Limonov—escorted by the elegant Countess de Lisse—crashes a literary party. He shocks the guests with crude rants against Tolstoy (“a charlatan”), Brodsky (“a sub-rate poet”), and Russian mediocrity, while charming (and horrifying) the hosts with tales of exile, bumming in New York, and anti-Western bravado. These vignettes set the tone: irreverent dialogue, black humor, and a narrator who drifts between poetic asides and stage directions.
The middle sections leap forward through the chaotic 1990s. Letov confronts Limonov over the shoddy printing of his nationalist magazine Limonka. Dugin mediates, and the trio founds the National Bolshevik Party (NazBol), fusing fascist aesthetics, Soviet nostalgia, and anti-liberal fury. They squat in derelict apartments (the “Eagle’s Nest” headquarters overlooking the Moskva River), renovate by hand, debate hypnosis and banned literature around samagon campfires, and launch provocative actions. Scenes brim with absurd camaraderie: Letov’s Siberian tang, Dugin’s esoteric rants about empires from Vladivostok to Gibraltar, Limonov’s explosive charisma. Personal lives bleed in—Limonov’s affairs (including with Malina), jealousies, Parisian flashbacks, and Letov’s rock-star resentment at being sidelined. The play satirizes their bombast: swastikas and Lenin quotes on the walls, grand speeches about a “holy coalition” of Red and Brown, and petty power struggles. A “Seizure” (a stylized coup) elevates a protégé nicknamed “Ledhead” (a stand-in for a real political figure) to power, turning the radicals into uneasy insiders.
Later, Limonov becomes the regime’s revered but sidelined “Poet Father,” confined to the opulent Ak-Greucid dacha-palace—a surreal monument of shooting ranges, labyrinths, scented rooms, and apocalyptic obsessions (he offers fruit bowls to an invented muse). He wheedles for more power in memos and phone calls, rages at mediocrity, and hosts fleeting romances, but age brings frailty: a limp, failing senses, and senile erotica. Letov dies of a heart condition; Dugin retreats into private life, marrying and ritually baptizing his child in Arctic waters. Limonov attends parades in his own honor but feels forgotten. The final scenes mix melancholy and absurdity: he writes furious letters demanding conquest or honorable death; old comrades visit his “palace of entropy”; the narrator reflects on lost youthful evil and the drunken stumble of history.
Thematically, the play is a tragicomic autopsy of radicalism. It asks what happens when maximalist dreams (anti-Soviet rebellion, post-collapse nationalism) collide with reality: ideology devours friendship, power co-opts the revolutionaries, and personal pettiness undermines grand visions. Gavilovski blends real historical figures and events with fictional flair—crude banter, philosophical tangents, surreal jumps, and poetic narration—for a sweeping critique of Russia’s cycles of hope and mediocrity. The three men’s bond is the heart: loyal yet jealous, inspiring yet corrosive. No one is heroic; everyone is absurd, human, and ultimately diminished.
This is a raucous, dialogue-driven epic about three friends who tried to remake Russia and instead watched their weapons turn inward. It’s the collection’s emotional and political centerpiece—funny, furious, and elegiac.
The collection could be read as linear fiction, but it also becomes a comic without the cartoons, and we just have the speech bubbles. The text feels enlarged. Words and actions float like the works of Wyndham Lewis or William Carlos Williams. The visual flowers break on pages 77, 84, 92, 111, 117, 125, 126, and so on. It’s many cartoon influences in one. It has many tropes of gag characters, from Alexander Dugin to Eduard Limonov. I’m not so sure if this is Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello or I Wished by Dennis Cooper. I don’t know if the art references Quentin Blake, James O’Barr, or Brendan McCarthy. It’s a potpourri filled with the class distinction of knowing these things.
The “novel” becomes a novelty in itself. It is a “book” as an object. It looks like something that was made in the 1940s. It has the legitimacy of any other novel and is to be accepted in the line of existing novels found in the Library of Congress. It is getting easier and easier to design, compose, and form a “novel.”
In the age of flawless digital screens and infinite scrolling, the physical book has undergone a curious resurrection. Walk into any bookstore today—whether a gleaming chain or an independent boutique—and you’ll notice the same phenomenon: row upon row of “new” books engineered to look centuries old. Faux-leather spines with embossed gold lettering, deckled edges that mimic the rough cut of hand-pressed paper, distressed cloth covers artfully faded at the corners, even simulated foxing and water stains applied by machine. These are not reprints of Victorian first editions. They are 2026 novels, self-help manuals, and celebrity memoirs dressed in the costume of antiquity. Publishers have perfected the art of manufactured nostalgia, selling the romance of a leather-bound library without the inconvenience of actual age.
This aesthetic sleight of hand serves a larger cultural shift. People are no longer buying books primarily to read them. They are collecting artifacts. It’s props for a lifestyle performance. Vast walls of uniformly aged-looking volumes frame influencers’ faces, arranged by color gradient or thematic palette rather than alphabetical order or subject. The spines face outward, not to invite curiosity but to telegraph taste. A visitor to such a room might admire the “vintage” aesthetic, never suspecting that many of the books remain pristine inside their shrink-wrap, untouched since the day they arrived from Amazon.
The transformation is subtle yet profound. The object has become the art. Buyers speak openly about “shelf styling” and “book hauls” as interior-design decisions. A matte-black edition of Pride and Prejudice with gilded edges sells not because Austen’s prose suddenly feels urgent, but because it photographs beautifully beside a marble bust and a velvet chaise. The text inside has become almost incidental, like the blank pages of a high-end notebook marketed as a “journal.”
This is not mere decoration; it is a quiet surrender. Reading demands time, attention, and discomfort. It is the willingness to be changed by another mind. Collecting vintage-style books requires only disposable income and an eye for composition. The result is a curious inversion: the more books look like rare artifacts, the less they function as books.
We have entered a new era of “Carbon Pages.” This artifact represents that new phase we are embracing.
You can purchase the book “here.”
-pilleater
5-11-2026