In Bobok by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the drunken writer dozes off in a cemetery and hears the conversations of the dead around him. The subject matter of this idiosyncratic adaptation is not so much a specific text as what has come to be known as Dostoevskian insight. Alexandra Karelina and Ivan Yakushev have isolated the macabre essence of the story’s ironic plot and made it vividly...