Am J Cult Sociol (2019) 7:101–127
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-018-0057-y
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures
of emotional attraction in competing interpretations
of the Dyatlov pass tragedy
Dmitry Kurakin1
Published online: 22 May 2018
© Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract  Mystery plays a fundamental though not fully acknowledged role in
modernity, serving as an important means for the re-enchantment of social life.
Thus, under certain conditions, seemingly unimportant events can attract enormous
attention and emotional involvement. One of those cases is the Dyatlov Pass Tragedy
that occurred in 1959 in the Northern Urals, where nine hikers died under mysterious
and still unknown circumstances. Nowadays, a half-century later, there are thousands
of lay researchers searching for the truth and constructing competing explanatory
accounts. In this paper, I propose the ‘trigger-narrative model,’ explaining the
relation between mystery, governing narratives, and forms of sacrality, and apply it
to the Dyatlov case. I argue that mystery is a ‘complex emotional attractor’—a symbolic
mechanism shaped by the configuration of ‘elementary attractors’—‘strange’
things, symbols, or events, challenging commonsense narratives, which eventually
maintains uncertainty and emotional tension. Every pattern of perception concerning
mystery can be characterized by the tie between a trigger and its corresponding
narrative; this tie is based on the transgression of the narrative by a trigger event.
This model allows us to understand the cultural construction of mystery, which is
crucially important for explaining how deep cultural structures energize people’s
urges, concerns, and fascinations.
Keywords  Mystery · The sacred · Narrative · Hierarchy of narratives ·
Transgression · Uncertainty · Interpretation · Emotional attractor · Trigger-narrative
model · Dyatlov pass tragedy
*	 Dmitry Kurakin
	dmitry.kurakin@hse.ru
1
	 National Research University Higher School of Economics, 16 Potapovskiy Pereulok, Building
10, Office 407, Moscow, Russia 101000
102	D. Kurakin
Introduction: relevance of mystery for social theory and cultural
sociology
At the very general level, the basic question of cultural sociology concerns how culture
invokes human emotion and action. How do certain meanings and meaningful
complexes attain plausibility, affect people’s minds, and energize their urges and
concerns? Why do people leave their families and follow their gods, prophets, and
heroes? Why do people sometimes readily sacrifice their lives for their beliefs and
the symbols they adhere to? These are just some of the boldest and salient examples
of the power of culture, but they vividly represent its primary role in the understanding
of human action and social life.
It is not accidental, then, that the theory of the sacred, however it seemingly deals
with a very limited part of human experience, in fact, lies at the very core of cultural
sociology. Phenomena concerned with the sacred are recognized first of all
due to a deep and intensive effect they exert on people’s behavior, perception, and
institutions. However, as Jeffrey Alexander has asserted, ‘[E]ducation, politics, professional
organization, morality and the law… should be studied in terms of symbolic
classifications,’ which are ‘structured by the tensions between the fields of the
sacred and the profane’ (Alexander 1992a, p. 3). Consequently, in order to understand
both major and minor everyday matters such as people’s concerns, attractions,
and the broad scope of the meaning-making activities within their cultural contexts,
one should consider the structuring power of the sacred/profane oppositions within
their concrete orchestrations.
The attraction of mystery is one such everyday matter. Driven by pure interest,
non-utilitarian, and having nothing to do with the actual circumstances of people’s
lives, these abstract riddles nevertheless often heavily occupy people’s minds. The
great success of fiction genres concerned with a mystery, such as detective and spy
novels, science-fiction, and others represented by books, movies, and serials such
as ‘The X-Files’ and ‘Fringe,’ depends on the impact that the semantic figure of
mystery has on the public’s imagination. More specifically, some non-fiction, reallife
mysteries attract the interest of the general public, becoming a matter of popular
articles in newspapers, books, and movies, even turning hundreds and thousands of
people into lay researchers.1
Some examples of such mysteries are the Kennedy assassination, the disappearance
of the Mary Celeste, some of the stories about the Bermuda Triangle, and last,
but not least, the Dyatlov pass tragedy. These and many other events attract people’s
attention to such an extent that they spend days, months, and years trying to find
1
  There is a connection between fictional and real-life mysteries both at the fundamental and empirical
levels. Thus, Paul Ricoeur shows that the interweaving reference between history and fiction makes historical
narratives borrow the imaginative power from fictional narratives, and fictional narratives borrow
referential dynamics from historical narratives (Ricoeur 1984, p. 82). Empirically, these interpenetrations
are sometimes truly impressive. Thus, for example, the plot of the Agatha Christie novel, ‘The A.B.C.
Murders,’ has most likely influenced both an American serial killer in the 1970 s, who killed several girls
with their names, surnames, and the location where the corpse had been found started with the same letter,
and official and lay investigators of the so called ‘Alphabet Murders’ case.
103The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional…
the perhaps-hidden truth of such events. For instance, contemporaries of the Mary
Celeste mystery2
were so attracted by the story that several impostors were able to
gather large audiences across the United States pretending to be surviving members
of the ghost-ship’s crew. Arthur Conan Doyle, who was known to be especially sensitive
to the newest modern sources of public excitement, wrote a novel based on
the story of the Mary Celeste. Nowadays, the interest of mysteries has grown as the
scope and accessibility of media platforms has substantially increased.
In this paper, I argue that mystery is a ‘complex emotional attractor’—a symbolic
mechanism, shaped by elementary attractors—‘strange’ things, symbols, or events,
challenging commonsense narratives, and taking on a certain configuration, which
eventually maintains uncertainty and emotional tension. The effects of mystery
are thus shaped both by the effects of its elements, ‘elementary emotional attractors’
coupled with the narratives they challenge and eventually trigger,3
and by their
configuration.
The Dyatlov pass tragedy, which I have chosen as a case study, occurred in the
winter of 1959 in the Northern Urals of the Soviet Union. A group of experienced
ski-hikers, most of whom were students or recent graduates of the Urals Institute of
Technology in Sverdlovsk and led by Igor Dyatlov (who gave the name to the tragedy
and, later, to the pass), chose a route with the highest category of difficulty. The
group, passing through almost-uninhabited land, never returned. Their half-dressed
and unshod bodies were later found at distances from a half-mile to a mile from
their tent. The tent was cut from the inside in a direction opposite from the entrance.
Some of the corpses were severely injured while some were not. Some of the group
had seemingly tried to return to the tent and some had not. It is unclear why the
hikers left the tent in such a strange way, being partly undressed, which, given
the cold winter night, would have led to certain death. The cause of their deaths
remains uncertain. In addition, many details seem to be highly confusing, reinforcing
the uncertainty. The criminal case launched by the authorities was later closed
with a no-less-confusing conclusion that the hikers died due to an encounter with an
‘unknown compelling force.’
Public interest in the case was high in the region as well as among Soviet hikers
(hiking was an extremely popular hobby among intellectuals), in spite of the
attempts by the authorities to keep the incident quiet. During the decades after the
case, there have been a number of researchers who have tried to ascertain the truth,
and their articles have been published in newspapers from time to time. However,
a large wave of the interest in the case started in the 1990s, when a part of the official
materials of the criminal case, including photos, protocols, interviews, and the
reports of the forensic pathologist, were declassified and published on the Internet.
2
  The Mary Celeste was a ship found in 1872 in the ocean 400 miles from the shore with no people on
board and the cargo undisturbed. There are arguably no exhaustive plausible explanations of what might
have happened.
3
  The effect of the emotional attractor is fundamentally coupled with the narrative it challenges, in the
same way as clues are coupled with the genres they trigger in Philip Smith’s model of ‘genre guess’
(Smith 2006). I will develop this parallel in more detail below.
104	D. Kurakin
In addition, the diaries of the hikers, and six 36-cadre photographic tapes from their
cameras were uploaded to the Internet. This gave the broader public much more reliable
information than ever before, offering a rich source for hypotheses building.
The burst of interest has been sustained to this day. The number of lay researchers
has increased, and their geographical area has widened to the whole of Russia and
abroad. More than a dozen books in Russian and two books in English have been
published (Eichar 2013; McCloskey 2013), along with hundreds of articles in newspapers
and journals. Close to a dozen documentaries and one fictional movie4
have
been produced. The case’s Wikipedia web-page has been translated into 26 foreign
languages. However, in spite of a number of special expeditions to the Dyatlov Pass,
experiments and reconstructions, and several attempts by especially impressive and
scrupulous analyses having the quality and volume of a good doctoral dissertation,
there is still no single plausible version of the events that would not face serious
problems in light of the known facts. Moreover, the circumstances of the case, as
chance would have it, enable a number of different versions.
In spite of how intriguing the case sounds, there are still fundamental questions
that should be posed concerning its effects (as well as those of other similar cases).
Records show that in Russia (and earlier in the Soviet Union), a number of hikers
die on the route every year, due to the natural dangers it involves. In addition,
the Dyatlov tragedy occurred more than a half-century ago and the victims did not
include any politically or socially remarkable people, as was the case, for example,
in the Kennedy assassination. Why does this case continue to have such great resonance?
What drives people’s perceptions, and what energizes interest in cases such
as the Dyatlov tragedy?
In the absence of obvious, or seemingly obvious, answers connecting this resonance
to some acknowledged drivers of interest (such as political/economic implications,
an immediate influence on people’s lives, etc.), the case becomes a perfect
laboratory for discovering a deeper understanding of the cultural mechanisms of
perception and emotional involvement. In analyzing this case, I hope to advance the
cultural sociological explanation of the complicated cultural mechanisms that give
culture the power to energize social life.
Compositionally, this paper partly borrows the structure of a mystery story, which
necessarily begins with an extensive ‘lay’ description of a situation and the introduction
of relevant contexts. Thus, I start with a brief allocation of the research problem
within a theoretical landscape, and a primary description of the Dyatlov case. Then,
there follows a section revealing the strategic role of mystery for cultural theory.
These steps serve for setting the stage. Unlike an actual mystery story, I focus here
not on solving a mystery, but on studying the fascination it produces; however, epistemologically,
the two tasks are confusingly similar.
After these preliminary steps, in the section entitled ‘Deciphering the charisma
of mystery,’ I focus on developing a cultural sociological theory of mystery, and
introduce the notions of complex and elementary emotional attractors and the
4
  ‘The Devil’s Pass’ is a 2013 US–Russian–British movie by Renny Harlin.
105The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional…
trigger-narrative model. I then distinguish and discuss two general features of mystery—uncertainty
and tension.
Having developed a theory that allows for a cultural–sociological understanding
of mystery, I turn in the section ‘Mystery, narrative, and interpretation’ to the question
of why the Dyatlov tragedy provokes such an enormous emotional response,
and which symbolic mechanisms are responsible for this effect. Firstly, I focus on
versions as wholes and show that emotional tension in the Dyatlov case is based on
the equiplausibility of competing versions. I then turn to the inner construction of
the versions and the dynamics of fascination. Following the trigger-narrative model,
I consequentially pose several questions (what is challenged, what challenges, and
how does this challenging work?), moving from the dominant narratives involved
with the Dyatlov case to their triggers. Observing the challenged narratives, I propose
a model of the hierarchy of narratives and offer a suggestion about the dynamics
of attraction within mystery in a direction moving from general to specific narratives.
I then analyze trigger-narrative pairs and mechanisms of challenging and state
the problem of how the attraction of mystery is related to version-building.
Theoretical resources
Cultural sociology has rich theoretical resources at its disposal for solving this task,
first of all, represented by the Durkheimian legacy. Emile Durkheim and his immediate
disciples constructed explanations of how myths, attached to core sacred/profane
binaries, shape social life, and how far this deep influence can go (Durkheim 1995;
Hertz 2009; Mauss 1979). The Durkheimian influence heavily informed important
branches of a scholarship on myth, such as Levi-Straussian structuralism, and the
school of ‘College de Sociologie.’ Later on, a number of researchers, beginning with
Parsons and his followers, successfully constructed explanations of modern life by
means of revealing the mythological cores of many contemporary phenomena, such
as civic religion, political imagery, esoteric movements, and many others (Bellah
1967; Shils and Young 1953; Tiryakian 1974).
Anthropologists, such as Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz,
working under Durkheim’s strong influence, have gone much further in developing
detailed explanations of how culture shapes perception and invokes emotions. To
mention several important achievements highly relevant to the current study, one
could note Douglas’ theorizing on the connection between the impurity and the
uncertainties within symbolic classifications (Douglas 1966), her research on how
certain ideas obtain their plausibility and credibility, and essays on the cultural
mechanisms of perception (Douglas 1975; Douglas and Gross 1981). Turner’s works
on rituals, myths, and metaphors (Turner 1975) have paved the way for a number of
concrete studies on the ways culture operates, and his fundamental theorizing on
liminality and the rituals of transition has facilitated much interdisciplinary scholarship.
These and many other works are crucial for cultural sociology, which, in turn,
has moved even further in developing detailed accounts for the widest range of complex
phenomena [see, for example, (Alexander 1992b, 2002; Jeffrey C. Alexander
et al. 2012; Smith 2006, 2008)].
106	D. Kurakin
I follow this research tradition, but in addition, there is another important, rarely
used theoretical resource compatible with Durkheimian cultural sociology that
I rely on—the theorizing of Rene Girard. His groundbreaking work on the fundamental
relation between the sacred and (widely understood) violence allows for the
acknowledgment of the power of the impure sacred in social life. As I have mentioned
elsewhere (Kurakin 2015), I find explanatory models based on the ‘dark side
of the sacred,’ i.e., the impure and the transgression, to be extremely applicable for
building a cultural explanation of the widest range of phenomena of modern life,
which moves far beyond traditionally understood ‘evil’ and is often unrelated with
it.5
Even more importantly, Girard has constructed a conceptual apparatus that allows
for the understanding of how the vacuum of meanings, created by the symbolic violence
against cultural structures (represented by a dominant narrative), transforms
into a new powerful narration based on the renewed sacred, a symbolic process
Girard calls ‘mythical elaboration.’ I use this research to theorize the connections
between narrative and uncertainty, and narrative and the trigger event that thematizes
it. This allows for a reconstruction of the cultural mechanics of mystery, with
an illustration from the Dyatlov case.
There is no established body of sociological literature on mysteries. However,
many related fields may contribute to formulating a cultural–sociological approach
to the problem. First, there are sociological and literary criticism works on literature
genres built around mystery.6
One of the most recognized among the former
is the recent book by Luc Boltanski about mystery and conspiracy in detective and
spy novels (Boltanski 2014). In the context of this study, I rely only on a part of
that scholarship, focusing instead on constructing a Durkheimian line of reasoning,
though future research must take these and other sources more seriously.
Description of the Dyatlov case
In January 1959, a group of ten ski-hikers, eight men and two women, went on
an expedition, taking the route with the highest category of difficulty at that time.
All were well-trained and highly experienced, and they had been on many trips of
comparable difficulty, successfully overcoming severities and dangerous accidents.
All known information shows that they were in perfect physical condition, and
6
 Literary criticism provides a wide scope of literature highly relevant for cultural sociology, from
Northrop Frye’s ‘Anatomy of Criticism’ (Frye 2000), to the already-mentioned radical approach of Rene
Girard (Girard 2008). The works on the sociological and cultural construction of explanation, such as
Charles Tilly’s ‘Why?’ (Tilly 2006), Carlo Ginzburg’s ‘Clues, Myths and the Historical Method’ (Ginzburg
1992), studies of ‘forbidden science,’ and STS exercises, though dealing with other segments of
rationality than mystery, nevertheless might be partly relevant. Last, but not least, parts of the widening
field of conspiracy theories are closely related to this case.
5
  In the cited work, I constructed a model of the ambivalent sacred and transgression, mainly based on
the works of Girard, Douglas, Caillois, and Turner, which aimed to reinforce the Durkheimian cultural
sociological approach developed by Alexander, Smith, and others.
107The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional…
were psychologically persistent. Nine of the ten were old friends who had traveled
together extensively.
Nine of the ten were students or recent graduates of the Urals Institute of Technology,
a prominent university7
situated in Sverdlovsk, a large industrial city in
the Urals region in the middle of the USSR. Their ages varied from 20 to 24 years
old. Igor Dyatlov, a student from the fifth course, was the leader of the expedition.
The tenth member of the group was Semyon Zolotarev, a 37-year-old instructor at
a tourist camp who joined the group at the very last moment. He knew some of the
members of the group, but only recently; it is not particularly clear why the group
accepted his participation. One of the students, Yury Yudin, developed radiculitis at
the beginning of the trip, and decided to return before the active part of the route had
started. He, thus, was the only survivor, and was the last one who had seen the other
members alive. He died in 2013 and, following his will, was buried with the other
members of the group.
The route ran through almost-uninhabited land, although several families of the
Mansi, an indigenous ethnic group of reindeer-breeders, lived in the area. The group
was supposed to travel 350 km during 16 days, including the ascent of a couple of
mountains. The diaries of the hikers show that after the farewell with Yudin, they
had been moving without accident from January 28 until February 1, the date of
the last records.8
The group did not return in time. Several days later, the authorities
organized rescue groups that were later augmented by army and police forces, performing
a large-scale search operation.
The first five corpses and the tent were found during the first days of the rescue
expedition. The tent was situated near the hillside pass that later was named after
the Dyatlov group. The hillside had around 15 degrees of incline combined with
horizontal grounds. Down the hillside, a mile away, there was a tall cedar tree. Two
corpses were found next to each other close to the cedar near the fire pit; they were
in their underwear and unshod. Three other bodies, including the body of Igor Dyatlov,
were found separately from each other; all of them were partly undressed and
unshod. All the bodies were situated in a line between the tent and the cedar.
All five corpses had multiple, non-fatal injuries such as hematomas, scratch
marks, and burns (found only on the first two bodies), and the forensic pathologist’s
report determined the deaths had resulted from hypothermia. One of the bodies was
injured more substantially than the others, and had a more-than-two-inch-long fracture
of the skull.
The tent was cut from the inside in the direction of the cedar (i.e., opposite to the
direction of the exit). It was partially torn down and had a 2–4 inch layer of snow on
it. All known valuables were found, including money, documents, spirits, and food.
The majority of clothes and shoes were also in the tent. There was also a ski pole
somebody had apparently tried to shorten with a knife found in the tent, which is
7
  Boris Yeltsin, the first president of Russia, was a graduate of this university.
8
  Following tradition, every hiker carried a diary in addition to one common diary. Almost all of the diaries
were found after the tragedy, except for one, which had evidently existed but disappeared.
108	D. Kurakin
puzzling considering that the hikers didn’t have extra ski poles. The rescue groups
found four or five9
hikers’ photo cameras.
The bodies of the other four hikers were found within 2 months. They were found
in a ravine 200 feet from the cedar, near a small stream, and under deep snow. There
was a covering made of small trees near the corpses, with several belongings of the
hikers in it. Three of the four bodies were severely injured, one having fatal skull
damage, and the other two having fatal multiple chest fractures. The forensic pathologist
determined that these injuries were the causes of their deaths. In contrast to
all the others, two of the damaged bodies, including the body of Semyon Zolotarev,
were almost completely dressed. The tongue was absent from the third severely
injured body, a female.
There are surprisingly many strange or suspicious circumstances involved, which
have become the source of a wide range of interpretations (at this point, there are
more than 60 or 70 versions, many of them considered within the official criminal
investigation in 1959). I will mention only several of the strange circumstances here,
with a brief mention of the versions inspired by each.
•	 A couple of the hikers’ belongings, such as a sweater and a pair of pants, were
radioactively contaminated, although the rest of their things were not. The
straightforward versions imply the testing of nuclear missiles. One of the less
obvious versions suggests that the radioactive clothing, as a part of a secret service
operation, must have been transferred by some member of the group (apparently
a secret agent) to the foreign spies who searched for information about
Soviet nuclear weaponry development, and who ended up killing the hikers.
•	 During the period of the trip, the people in the area had seen strange fireballs
in the sky. There is documented evidence based on the reports of observers and
several articles in local newspapers. The fireballs inspired a number of esoteric
versions, such as a UFO attack, but also fit several other versions, such as the
testing of new weapons that might have injured the hikers, and the attack of the
spies who landed from a warplane under the support of photoflash bombs.
•	 Some of the corpses had a strange deep-orange tan to their skin. This fact supported
a wide range of technologically informed versions, including the testing
of new weapons or the fall of a stage of a ballistic missile.
•	 Semyon Zolotarev, the strange companion, had faked his name for some reason
and presented himself to the students as ‘Alexander.’ He had participated
in WWII, and some people suggest that he had been an agent of the Soviet
military’s counterintelligence. Acting behind German lines, Semyon might
have dealt with many Nazi collaborators who unwillingly shared secrets of
life-and-death importance with him (considering that after the war, the Soviet
authorities were extremely suspicious of those who might have collaborated
9
 The official investigation materials report that four cameras were found in March, 1959. However,
there seems to be a fifth one, which is clearly seen in the photo of one of the corpses found later, in May.
It is not mentioned, however, in the published parts of the official materials. Some researchers argue that
there may have been up to six cameras in the group, some of which disappeared.
109The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional…
with the Nazis; for example, every official questionnaire contained a question
about whether the applicant’s relatives had lived in the occupied territories).
After the war, he had worked as an instructor at a tourist camp, but since the
middle of the 1950s, he had moved from place to place, changing jobs, and
sometimes covering thousands of kilometers, as if he was being chased. This
led to the ‘war echo’ version, which argues that the Dyatlov group was killed
by Semyon’s personal enemies known from war times who probably had been
sent to prison and released after the amnesty of 1953. The supporters of this
version also attach significance to a strange fabric band with saber knots at
the ends, which following some witnesses, was found near the corpses. They
argue that the band might have been used as a hidden waist pack and contained
something extremely valuable, and that Semyon, who had just quit
from his last place of employment before joining the group, must have taken it
with him to transfer to a new, safer place.
•	 During the last day of their expedition, February 1, the hikers had traveled only
two kilometers before putting up the tent in the location where it was found.
They left the part of the forest that would have been much more comfortable and
reached the hillside near the pass, choosing an uncomfortable place to stay. This
fact, which the official crime investigator has called ‘Dyatlov’s mistake’ in his
records, reinforced the suspicions of the followers of almost all of the criminal
versions that the hikers were killed by people whom they might have previously
met and believed that the hikers might have affected their plans.
Many of the criminal versions propose a similar scenario. According to these, the
attackers expelled the hikers from the tent, threatened them with guns, forced them
to leave their clothes and shoes, and then chased them away. Some of the hikers
attempted a counterattack, but were severely beaten up by apparently highly skilled
wrestlers. After the hikers had gone and started a fire, the attackers realized the hikers
might survive and followed them to make sure that their mission was completed.
Thus, they arguably killed those who hadn’t died of the cold. One of the investigators,
himself an expert in battle wrestling, performed a detailed investigation of
the documented injuries, and argued that the injuries were highly typical of combat
wrestling methods. Following his calculations, up to 90 percent of the injuries
described in the official reports were situated on the left parts of the bodies, which
corresponds to the idea of right-handed attackers.
Apart from criminal versions of the events, there are also several other major
types, including natural, esoteric, and technological versions. The most popular natural
version involves avalanche damage, or, in particular, damage caused by a slab
avalanche. Although the hillside incline was small and avalanches are not typical for
that area, a slab could have caused damage to the tent as a result of the disruption
of the snowpack during the putting up of the tent. Esoteric versions include a wide
range of possibilities, from a UFO encounter, to an encounter with a Yeti, or Mansi
magic. Technological versions have been popular since 1959, and basically revolve
around secret super-weapons being tested in the area, and are supported by the suspicions
that Soviet authorities disguised the consequences or even ordered the killing
of unwitting witnesses of the secret testing.
110	D. Kurakin
The available information is extraordinarily rich, and includes: hundreds of pages
of the official investigation report, published on the Internet (including multiple protocols
of inspections and interviews, forensic medical reports, photos, formal orders,
telegrams, and other documents); hundreds of photos taken by the members of the
Dyatlov group during their last trip; a number of official and private documents of
the hikers, including their trip diaries; numerous interviews with relatives, friends of
the tourists and people they might have met, conducted by lay researchers; descriptions
of many special expeditions to the Dyatlov pass, experiments and reconstructions;
and a vast amount of other contextual information. In spite of that impressive
body of knowledge, none of the existing versions are free from contradictions with
the known facts, so that even today, in spite of activities encompassing a massive
scale, researchers of the case have little to add to the laconic official report from
1959, which stated that the hikers died because of an ‘unknown compelling force.’
Mystery and the cultural insensitivity of common sense: why is mystery
important for cultural theory?
In the same way that philosophy, following Plato, begins in wonder, culture often
enters the stage by virtue of mystery as a source of epistemic surprise. The emotion
of surprise indicates both a mystery in itself and its inherent demand for an explanation
more sophisticated than common sense can offer. This makes mystery what
Robert Merton called ‘Strategic Research Material’ (SRM)—the empirical case best
suited for building an explanation and for the advancement of theory (Merton 1987).
Thus, the unexpected, counter-intuitive, and, one could even say, over-proportionate
emotional attractiveness of certain objects or events is a classical riddle for cultural
theory, because it promises to reveal a surprising role for culture that is normally
hidden by the cover of rational-choice thinking. When people are hyper-excited
about certain things, and the causes of that excitement do not fit typically expected
motives and corresponding standard commonsense explanations, the active role of
cultural meanings in social life can be acknowledged.
A problem of cultural explanation is that it is rarely parsimonious, so more simple
and habitual explanations are coming to the fore in accordance with the principle
of Occam’s razor. When, for instance, people are striving to get better jobs, we
readily agree that it is a maximization of utility that drives them, and the reasoning
about the historically specific cultural roots of their worldview enabling both
preferred goals and suitable means sounds excessive. Merton points at the role of
‘unexpected facts’ for building a theory, exemplifying this statement with Freud’s
explanation on slips of the tongue (Merton 1987, p. 16). Likewise, to be plausible,
cultural theories often must seek special cases that obviously undermine rationalchoice
schemes, and use these special cases as an excuse to think more deeply and
more carefully about how culture, perception, and imagination operate. These cases
reveal the prominence of culture in the same way as blackouts reveal the normally
neglected prominence of electricity in everyday life. The Dyatlov tragedy is exactly
such a special case—representing strategic research material for the advancement of
cultural sociological explanation.
111The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional…
Luc Boltanski, in his book on mystery and the origin of detective novels (Boltanski
2014), shows that mystery manifests itself as a singular anomaly within a stable
social world, which paves the way for narrative and excitement. In the absence of
obvious reasons, something must go wrong. The emotional effect of detective stories
exploits this anomaly to create a place for mysterious causality, fear, and (normally
suppressed) curiosity, which temporarily squeezes common sense.
It is not surprising that historically cultural sensitivity grows simultaneously and
interconnectedly with the growth of the genre of the novel (Chaney 2012). Both
processes must deal with the growing role of the masses, cultural diversity, and the
decoupling of the link between social position and the cultural symbols of status.
In turn, following Luc Boltanski, detective and spy novels, literary genres built on
mystery, are enabled by the development of the same social and political institutions
which have enabled sociology, as well as by sociology itself. The argument is that
the construction of mystery is critically dependent on the stability of ‘social reality,’
seen almost as reliable and intelligible as physical reality, and known by statistics,
political economy, and sociology (Boltanski 2014, p. 11).
The essay of Roger Caillois on children’s secret treasures is a typical illustration
of mystery as strategic research material, which reveals the hidden role of culture
(Caillois 2003). Caillois directs our attention to the strange phenomenon of children
creating treasures every now and then, treating them with great worship, cherishing
them, and hiding them. Neither the ‘objective’ values of those treasures nor the
reasons why children do so are clear. Commonsense accounts of these phenomena
are helpless. Caillois shows that children’s treasures represent early experiences
of encounters with the sacred, both perceived (worship and imagined or real danger,
associated with those things) and performed (treasures are either being stolen
from the world of adults, or miraculously acquired, which often implies overcoming
dangers). In creating the treasure, children establish their own autonomous person-
alities10
by means of strengthening the sacred dimension of themselves. Here, the
Durkheimian principle of homo-duplex (Durkheim 1973), far from being just a pure
theoretical abstraction, allows an explanation of something that is otherwise hard to
explain, and reveals the role of culture at the core of social life. In these and other
cases, it is a ‘disproportion’ of emotional excitement that serves as a first clue to the
cultural insensitivity of common sense.
10
 Similarly, Eduard Nadtochiy shows how the figure of mystery creates the dimension of internal life
and autonomous personality in literature (Надточий 2014, pp. 92–93). He even goes so far as to assert
that the early Soviet anthropological construction of childhood, created by means of literature based on
mystery, became the ‘prosthesis’ of social solidarity and an island of human dignity in the symbolic universe
of the Stalin era (Надточий 2014, p. 96).
112	D. Kurakin
Deciphering the charisma of mystery: toward a theory of emotional
attractors
Emotional attractors and triggers of narratives
I argue that mystery is one of the basic forms of what could be called ‘emotional
attractors.’ I define emotional attractors as symbols or cultural complexes, which
for certain reasons, engender people’s emotionally charged involvement. In much
the same way that attractors are defined in physics as limiting the infinity of the
random trajectories of objects to certain, more-probable locations and trajectories,
emotional attractors shape the gravity of the landscapes of meanings, and
energize behavioral patterns.
The theoretical background of this definition is the Durkheimian theory of
collective emotions (Durkheim 1995), which describes how culture condenses
socially created emotions, and, in turn, energizes collective and individual action.
The sacred symbol, such as the churinga, is a classic example of an emotional
attractor. People can behave differently toward it, with worship or with anger, but
they act respectively; even neglect becomes a meaningful gesture. The fear of the
impure is another elementary form of emotional attractor, though in this case, the
attraction might be negative. Striving for a reward and fear of punishment are the
other essential examples of emotional attractors, which, combined with meanings
and circumstances, energize people’s actions.
I will distinguish, further, between elementary and complex emotional attractors.
The elementary emotional attractor cannot be further divided into elements
without losing its specificity both in terms of its effect, which is the ability to
invoke emotionally charged involvement, and in terms of the mechanism underlying
this effect. The complex emotional attractor consists of several elementary
attractors, and its effects might be caused not only by a sum of the effects of the
elementary attractors it contains, but also by configuration of its elements (plot
twist, double binds, etc.).
The elementary emotional attractor, whether a symbol, object, or event, doesn’t
exist in itself—its effectiveness is rooted in relations with existing and possible
cultural structures. It is the relation between an attractor and a cultural structure
that invokes emotions. In this paper, I limit myself to only one type of such a
relation, prominent and widespread but not unique. This is the challenging of a
dominant narrative by means of its transgression—a symbolic mechanism known
by its ability to invoke intensive emotions (Bataille 1986).
Indeed, there are special elements in culture, which we call emotional attractors,
which are potentially able to transgress existing symbolic structures, such as dominant
narratives. If such a transgression occurs in actual discursive interactions, I call
this actualized emotional attractor a trigger, meaning that it thematizes a narrative
by challenging it. The emotional effect caused by this is thus rooted in a triggernarrative
relation. I call this explanation the ‘trigger-narrative model’.’
The crucial part of the trigger-narrative model is that neither facts, things,
or events recognized as ‘strange,’ nor the narrative they challenge, cannot by
113The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional…
themselves cause an emotional effect of mystery. It is their combination, a triggernarrative
pair that produces the effect. Indeed, it is those triggers that ‘turn on’ or
‘highlight’ particular narratives, but the triggers themselves gain such emotional
responses only because they are seen through the optics of these narratives. The
most precise term to describe this relation is the Kantian ‘Affizierung.’
The described dynamic connection between a challenged narrative and a trigger
is much like the connection between a genre and a clue in the process of the ‘genre
guess,’ conceptualized by Philip Smith in his book ‘Why War?’ (Smith 2006). Following
his model, clues, such as remarkable events or widely discussed facts, under
certain conditions effectively switch public perception to a particular genre, and
thus, powerfully affect interpretation and even political decision making. For example,
low mimetic genres determine peaceful conflict resolution, whereas apocalyptic
narratives push countries toward war.
The very choice of the term is telling, and points to an implicit affinity between
Smith’s scheme and the model of mystery as a paradigm of the event-interpretation
link. Sure enough, ‘clues’ directly refer to detective novels—a basic literary genre
representing a mystery. The basic difference between clues and triggers is that the
latter refers to more specific entities; a genre can include multiple narratives. Thus,
the trigger-narrative model aims to develop and specify the cultural sociological
explanation introduced by Smith.
In addition to elementary emotional attractors, there are complex emotional
attractors, such as entire conceptions, artistic maneuvers, and narrative moves. For
example, the dogma of predestination toward salvation that energized Weber’s Protestants
in their this-worldly activities, constitutes a complicated set of impetuses and
incentives (elementary emotional attractors), motivating them to act in a seemingly
illogical way (Weber 2003). Another example is certain plot twists, such as those
used in horror movies, which strongly affect our imagination. Those movies do not
frighten the spectators merely with the use of scary symbols (elementary emotional
attractors), but rather by building more complex combinations of meanings, such as
anxiety in the face of vague danger, or the erosion of common sense. Philip Smith
describes several similar mechanisms, such as Gothic imagery in popular discourse
and the attraction of uncertainty, which maintains the tension of lack of resolution
(Smith 2008, pp. 133–143). This tension is able to cause not only intellectual,
but also aesthetic riddles, like the miraculous attraction of the sculpture of Moses,
which Freud tried to solve in a ‘Sherlock Holmes-like’ way (138–9). Mystery is one
such cultural complex, based on the particular cultural mechanism of emotional
attraction.
General features of mystery: uncertainty and tension
The first general feature of mystery is uncertainty: mystery is built around the
unknown. However, not everything that is unknown can be a sufficient basis for a
mystery. We are tolerant of the lack of knowledge about some issues, whereas in
other cases, it drives us crazy. One might suggest it only works with what is immediately
important to our lives. However, this is not the case. For example, we often
114	D. Kurakin
don’t care how exactly the bank where we keep our savings operates, or what is riskier
today, going on vacation by train or by car, but for some reason, we might need to
know who was behind the John F. Kennedy assassination more than a half-century
ago. Similarly, (almost) none of the investigators from the Dyatlov case has anything
to do with the story personally; however, it does not affect their need to discover the
reasons behind the mystery.
Mystery is not about knowing or not knowing something. Neither is it about
keeping a secret, which has a stronger social and cultural effect the more valuable
the object of the disguise. It is not equal to a secret, even if the desirable knowledge
within a mystery is actually kept by somebody, and not just unknown. Importantly,
this distinguishes mystery from the notion of secrecy sociologically conceptualized
by Georg Simmel (Simmel 1906), and, correspondingly, from the wide scope of
related problems such as the interplay of governmental secret activities and leaks
(Bail 2015). Again, a lack of important knowledge is neither a sufficient nor a necessary
condition of mystery. This also distinguishes mystery as a sociological problem
apart from the studies of conspiracies, namely, those conspiracy theory studies
that aim to analyze the social and organizational construction of conspiracies themselves,
and not the discourse about them. The effect of mystery reaches far beyond
rational value and the utility of the missing knowledge, and it gains power from a
different source than the distribution of information. The uncertainty established by
mystery is based on the challenging of commonsense cultural structures by means of
the mechanism of emotional attraction described above.
Luc Boltanski defines mystery as an anomaly, a singularity and an abnormality
that takes place within the context of a stable, ordinary, and coherent reality of thetaken-for-granted,
tied in with clear cause-and-effect relationships. Mystery, thus,
provides a singular exception from this picture and, because of this, substantially
challenges the entire construction of reality. The central idea of Boltanski’s book on
mystery is that mystery and the literature genres based on it, detective and spy novels,
are only possible because of institutional and cultural settings, providing such
a worldview could be efficiently challenged. Partly sharing in this vision,11
I argue
further that the scheme he proposes, if translated into cultural sociological terms, is
not unlike the symbolic mechanism of a desecration (or, more generally, a transgression).
Thus, the local violation of the logical order works in the same way as when
a violation of an even seemingly minor taboo, such as a dietary one, threatens the
whole symbolic universum, and provokes intensive collective emotions.
This scenario brings us to another specific feature of mystery. It maintains tension
unless (and because) release is not likely to happen soon. In other words, mystery
depends on temporality. This factor distinguishes mystery from other types of emotional
attractors, such as the attractiveness of gambling games, or the drawing power
of investment in business, both of which are also built around the unknown. Mystery
is built around the unknown, which persists in time. For example, at this point,
11
  Following the argument of Boltanski about the close relationship between a worldview and the suitable
construction of a challenge to this worldview, I do not share his belief that mystery can only challenge
the rational sci-tech paradigm.
115The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional…
there is no clear evidence for any version of the Dyatlov case, and there is little hope
of obtaining new, decisive information. However, people continue to be fascinated
by the enchantment of the mystery; they think about it, look at the materials, and
discuss the details of the case again and again. I have argued elsewhere (Kurakin
2015) that the impure is a fundamentally unstable mode of the sacred, and it tends
to resolve ‘as musical dissonance resolves to consonance’ (Kurakin 2015, p. 389).
However, this instability can be limited by the purposed and pre-scripted release/
closure (which must happen more or less in time) or it can last for an indefinite
period. Mystery represents the latter type of ‘stable instability.’
Based on this understanding of mystery, I will try in the next section to ascertain
why the Dyatlov tragedy, which is seemingly not outstanding and which happened
long ago, continues to attract such enormous attention. To accomplish this task, I
will begin by asking which features of the Dyatlov case and the surrounding discourse
allow for the creation and the maintenance of the aforementioned two basic
components of the mystery—uncertainty and tension.
Mystery, narrative, and interpretation: the structure and dynamics
of attraction in the Dyatlov tragedy
The effects of inter‑versional configurations: The equiplausibility
of the versions of the Dyatlov case
One of the most remarkable and extraordinary facts characterizing the discourse
about the Dyatlov case is the relative ‘equiplausibility’ of the versions attempting
to solve its riddle. In addition to the minor ones built on rather exotic arguments,
there are several major versions supported by hundreds and sometimes thousands
of followers, attracting at least hundreds of thousands of commentaries on Internet
forums, and acting as the basis for books and films. It is important that there is no
single most probable and most popular version. It is no less important that all versions
have been the targets of substantial criticism; every version has inconvenient
facts among the major and well-documented facts of the tragedy. That is the single
most important way of maintaining the tension in the discourse about the case.
It is sufficient to say, as an illustration, that one of the most popular versions
(based on one of the Internet forum polls) argues that the hikers were killed by spies
who landed in the middle of the USSR from a warplane to orchestrate a seemingly
accidental encounter with the agent among the hikers. The agent was supposed to
deliver the sweater that was radioactively contaminated beforehand at one of the
Soviet secret factories producing nuclear weaponry to the spies. Following this
version, it was important for Western intelligence services to estimate how far the
Soviet Union had proceeded with the radioactive concentration. However, the Soviet
secret service controlled the supposed agent, and the delivery was fake. The spies
disclosed this conspiracy during the encounter, and killed the members of Dyatlov’s
group. The strangeness of one of the leading versions reflects the fact that the simpler
and more straightforward versions (such as a natural disaster, an attack by local
hunters from the indigenous ethnic group living in those mountains, or by escaped
116	D. Kurakin
convicts from the regional prison12
) contain much more substantial discrepancies
with the known facts of the case.13
The outstanding parity of the versions was one of the major reasons in selecting
this case as an illustration. The lack of domination of a single version is grounded
in a very specific configuration of the circumstances, preventing the most common
and first-thought-of explanations from being exhaustively convincing, and providing
room for increasingly sophisticated and exotic versions. To use another physical
analogy, the perception of the interpreter in the Dyatlov case is similar to a piece of
metal hanging in a magnetic field, that is, in a situation of balance among the acting
forces. The balance enables the maintenance of the tension, which is crucial for the
mystery. Certainly, if there was a single most-probable version, it would reduce the
tension, even given the uncertainty that still existed. Judicial cases are good examples;
if there is a clear motive that is plausible and fits the circumstances, the jury
readily brings the indictment in spite of the existence of alternative, hypothetically
possible scenarios.
Balance is important for the construction of mystery because it amplifies minor
representations and makes them observable, thereby preventing domination of a single
trope. Boltanski starts his reasoning on mystery and detective stories by retelling
the entanglement of Chesterton’s ‘The Blue Cross,’ in which Aristide Valentin, a
French detective, comes to London and tries to find a criminal, Flambeau, without
knowing anything about him and his possible misdeeds. ‘Valentin thus opts for an
approach that consists in paying attention to minuscule events that seem senseless
and thereby take on the character of mysteries’ (Boltanski 2014, p. 2). Unlike the
Dyatlov case, balance is provided here by the lack of explanations for the strange
events, whereas in case of the debates on the tragedy, balance is created by the competition
of believed-in versions. Thus, it is a situation of dynamic balance created by
the relatively plausible, but no single irrefutable competing versions that brings the
tension to the Dyatlov case. Balance, created by tension, amplifies otherwise indistinguishable
effects.
What is challenged? Uncertainty and the hierarchy of narratives
As for the other crucial feature of mystery, uncertainty is mostly dependent on the
efficient challenging of common sense and dominant cultural structures. If there is
nothing to be challenged, there is no room for mystery. For the same reason, Boltanski
argues that the genre of detective stories is historically determined, and, for
example, the popular genre of ‘ancient detective’ is in fact historical nonsense; in the
absence of the sci-tech paradigm and the all-pervading idea of causality underlying
the basis of common sense and social and political institutions, the challenging of
12
  As an aside, the prison was previously a part of the Gulag system.
13
 Thus, an avalanche is not itself likely in that area, and, most importantly, this interpretation cannot
plausibly explain the injuries and spatial distribution of the corpses; local hunters or escaped convicts
would arguably have taken the money and the spirits from the tent.
117The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional…
those causalities wouldn’t have an effect (Boltanski 2014). The object of the challenge
is crucial for the construction of mystery.
However, there are two basic questions that arise when analyzing a mystery: what
is challenged on the one hand, and what challenges and how on the other. Boltanski
seeks major civilizational or even metaphysical entities to answer the former question,
and does not really deal with the latter. In contrast, following a cultural sociological
paradigm (Alexander and Smith 2003), I am trying to reveal concrete cultural
structures, considering them historically contingent (but without making wide
historiosophic generalizations), and to explain the ways of challenging those structures
in every particular case.
These cultural structures are not just researcher’s outlines of what people think
about life, but rather actual tools of thinking and feeling, deeply believed-in and
emotionally charged. They shape our intuitions and make one set of things and ideas
clear, essential, right, and beautiful, whereas another set is made to be confusing,
wrong, ugly, stupid, and evil.14
These cultural structures make versions attempting
to solve the mystery plausible.
It is because of this deep emotional charge that those narratives (and versions
based on them) can be challenged consequentially. Revealing these structures is the
first and necessary step for understanding the construction of any particular mystery.
In this section, I focus on the question of what is challenged within the mystery, and
postpone the analysis of what and how it challenges for the next section.
In the Dyatlov case, a number of powerful narratives are involved at the different
levels of generality. These narratives can be presented in a hierarchical structure
from more general narratives, which are shared by all lay researchers and are common
to all interpretations, to much more specific narratives, which inspire particular
versions. At the first, most general level, the humanistic narrative is employed, as the
basic fact (an elementary emotional attractor and a trigger of the humanist narrative)
of this tragedy is the death of the people. In the absence of death, the case could be
a riddle rather than a mystery, the difference between the former and the latter being
the difference between a lack of knowledge and uncertainty (in the sense that Mary
Douglas used this term). This primary truth about the story affects all versions, providing
the entire body of discourse with a moral dimension, and informing it with
the significance of the absolute event15
of death.
At the next level of generality, there is a narrative of rational action, which presupposes
both causal links connecting the events (in the same way as Boltanski
14
  As Clifford Geertz wrote, ‘We are concerned not with solving problems, but with clarifying feelings’
(Geertz 1973, p. 81), and further ‘… the point is that in man neither regnant fields nor mental sets can be
formed with sufficient precision in the absence of guidance from symbolic models of emotion. In order
to make up our minds we must know how we feel about things; and to know how we feel about things
we need the public images of sentiment that only ritual, myth, and art can provide’ (Geertz 1973, p. 82).
15
 I use the term ‘absolute event’ here, following the theory of social events developed by Alexander
Filippov (Филиппов 2005), in which absolute events are events that abolish the arbitrariness of the
observer. In Durkheim’s theory, sacred objects and events play the same role: the sacred transcends itself
above the profane because every particular participant of the ritual (the observer) is doomed to perceive
the object or event, collectively turned to sacred, as the sacred.
118	D. Kurakin
argues), and assumes that humans act reasonably. As Boltanski has shown in his
research, even a relatively unimportant fact that runs counter to this commonsense
order can have an enormous effect, as it, in his terms, creates doubt concerning the
very ‘reality of reality.’
A challenge, performed by a trigger, as we already have seen, does not necessarily
have to attack the core of the narrative, because culture is structured. In this
situation, affecting the part affects the whole. Thus, even relatively minor facts, such
as the ski pole, shortened by a knife, the tent cut from the inside, the absent tongue
of a severely injured body, or even a strange fabric band with saber knots at its ends,
challenge corresponding narratives, beginning from a rational action narrative and
moving to those more specific ones, such as body integrity, a ‘war echo,’ and others.
The symbolic mechanism here is the same as in the case of the violation of a minor
taboo, which could have very serious consequences because it violates the entire
symbolic universum.
The Dyatlov case is full of major and minor facts that strictly contradict common
sense and are dramatically unaccounted for. Thus, when the hikers cut their own tent
from the inside in the dead of a winter night and run away undressed and unshod,
they perform many seemingly absurd actions which, to the best of their knowledge,
would lead to their certain death. The whole story clearly demonstrates, in Boltanski’s
terms, an enormous amount of the ‘missing mass of causality,’ that is, ‘the causality
without which events become incomprehensible and absurd’ (Boltanski 2014,
p. 144).16
These two narratives are common in all versions. However, there are also narratives
exhibiting the next level of generality, specific to particular versions. To illustrate
this, I will mention three groups of these narratives, which exist among many
others. First, the esoteric narratives often affect those who are impressed by the very
name and the supposed sacredness of the ‘Mountain of the Dead,’ the place where
the hikers died. They may subscribe to the mythologies of the local tribes, or UFO/
Yeti/parallel universe narratives, or the zombie narrative, employed, for example, by
the filmmakers who created a movie about the Dyatlov tragedy.
Another example is the broad ecological narrative that puts the strange fact concerning
the radioactive contamination of several belongings of the hikers into focus.
Radioactivity, as a dark sign of technology beyond the thinkable, coupled with a
magic-like imagery of the microcosm, is known to be a core of eschatological narratives
(Beck 1987; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982).
Finally, contemporary body narratives emphasize the injuries the members of
Dyatlov’s group sustained. These injuries, being elementary emotional attractors,
vividly animate people’s imaginations. These narratives tend to give special attention
to not only the most physiologically serious traumas, but rather the most mindboggling
(i.e., challenging dominant body models). The most illustrative example is
16
  An important difference between my approach and Boltanski’s theory is that he limits himself to this
level of the narrative structure, obviously out of his historiosophic theses, whereas I see it as only one of
the basic narratives.
119The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional…
the absent tongue in one of the corpses, which became a matter of multiple discussions
and probably was the basis of some versions.17
Following the analysis of the case, I can suggest that the dynamics of attraction
within a mystery expands from the narratives at more general levels of the proposed
hierarchy toward the more specific ones. The primary interest in the case is attracted
by the fact of the strange deaths (first and second levels), but then, it moves to more
specific narratives, following the process of the formation of interpretations.18
Even
before the version is built or chosen, the fascination experienced is already driven by
certain emotional attractors. Mystery, thus, is like the question posed that contains
an important part of the answer. However, there is no evidence that any mystery has
such a hierarchical narrative structure and the corresponding dynamics of attraction.
Thus, this suggestion forms a heuristic hypothesis.
How the challenge works, and what it has to do with version‑building
In the previous sub-sections, I have tried to show that mystery works within the context
of certain narratives. When I provided an overview of some of these narratives
in the context of the Dyatlov tragedy, one could mention that there have always been
particular singular objects or events, which focused attention and attracted an emotional
reaction, and those objects or events provided more or less clear references to
these narratives. Following the trigger-narrative model, I call these events or facts
triggers of the narratives.
Thus, the radioactive sweater as a trigger calls to the ecological narrative, so that
the core of the mystery appears to be the supposed link between two crucial, unnatural,
and disgusting events—the deaths of young and healthy people and the existence
of radiation in the heart of the wilderness. The coming out from the tent undressed
and unshod is a trigger of a general rational action narrative; when we imagine as
it happened, common sense and rationality appear to be dramatically challenged.
When we discover that the name of the mountain where the hikers died, by strange
coincidence, is arguably translated as ‘the Mountain of the Dead’ from the Mansi
language, we might think that it is not a coincidence. Then, the esoteric narrative
17
 These specific narratives, challenged within mystery, often reveal the most dominant cultural structures
for a given time and place. Thus, we can see the most socially important themes of Russian discourse
represented in the most popular versions of the Dyatlov case. The KGB, the GULAG, the CIA,
the echo of World War II, culpable Soviet authorities and an authoritarian state neglecting the lives of the
people, the test of a secret weapon of unprecedented power, super-agents and their extraordinary abilities,
not to mention UFOs and other esoteric miracles, are all invoked. Although it is not a focus of the current
research, the analysis of this and similar cases can reveal the most important cultural codes of national
discourses.
18
  As it follows from the theory of genres, it is the relationship and the distance between heroes and the
audience of the story that emphasize certain of these levels of narratives and defuse the others. Thus, too
close a distance between the heroes/victims and the audience would probably substitute curiosity with
despair. It is an important question for future research, if the center of the gravity must be distributed in a
certain way between the mentioned levels of narratives to keep it a mystery. It seems clear, however, that
the Dyatlov tragedy is only partly a tragedy, because otherwise, it could not be a mystery.
120	D. Kurakin
Table 1  TheTrigger-NarrativemodelinthecaseoftheDyatlovtragedy
Trigger(s)NarrativeNarrative’shier-
archicalposition
Version
DeathofthehikersHumanisticThemostgeneralAllversions
Comingoutfromthetentundressedandunshod;cuttingthetentfrom
theinside
RationalactionGeneralAllversions
RadioactivesweaterEcologicalSpecificSpyversion;weapontestingversion
Zolotarevasabnormalcompanion(olderage,fakedname);thefabric
bandwithsaberknotsattheends
SocialstructureSpecific‘Warecho’version;spyversion
‘TheMountainofDead’asthesupposedtranslationofthenameofthe
mountainfromtheMansilanguage
EsotericSpecificZombieversion;UFOversion;Mansishamansversion
Theabsenttongue;otherstrangeinjuriesEnclosedbodycanonSpecific‘Warecho’;alternative‘otherpeople’versions
FireballsSci-FiSpecificUFOversion;weapontestingversion
121The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional…
gains force; the sacred land should not have been transgressed, and this violation is
connected to the tragedy.
In these and many other cases, we can see that the narratives underlying this or
that version correspond to meaningful symbols, events, or facts. The effects of the
mystery thus stem from the trigger-narrative pairs. In Table 1, I provide an overview
of several pairs of triggers and their corresponding narratives.
In the previous analysis, we have seen that the challenge a trigger poses to a narrative
attracts attention and emotional excitement. However, the table shows that at
least in many cases, the triggered narrative also becomes the basis for constructing
a version. This implies that the emotional effect might not be the only result of the
trigger-narrative relation. The other crucial effect is the dynamics of interpretation
that seem to flow along the lines the trigger-narrative pair has shaped. How exactly
are mystery and solution related? How are the dynamics of the movement from mystery
to interpretation organized? What does the model I have constructed to explain
the mechanism of the challenge tell us about that?
To answer these questions, it is helpful to employ Rene Girard’s theory of the
sacred and violence, and in particular, the notions of tragedy and mythical elaboration
(Girard 2005). Following Girard, the nature of (broadly understood) violence
is ‘indifferentiation,’ i.e., erasing the distinctions within cultural structures. Culture
and order consist of distinctions (and stem from the basic distinction of the sacred
and profane). Violence, thus, destroys culture, and provides an unbearable vacuum
of meanings distinctive for such situations as a sacrificial crisis, a situation of
uncontrollable anger, violence, and other liminalities. In other terms, what occurs
when we deal with violence is named transgression.19
The vacuum of meanings and
indifferentiation create the impure sacred, which, importantly, later tends to be transformed
into the new pure sacred. A disorder, thus, participates in the emergence of
a new order. Many rituals employ this fundamental feature of the sacred, which is
called the ambiguity of the sacred, when, for example, the violence of the ritual sacrifice
turns into the purity of a renewed sacred order (Kurakin 2015). The new order
is built upon a narrative, which reinvents cultural distinctions; Girard calls it ‘mythological
elaboration.’20
I propose that the version-building has the same nature; it
stems from, though is not determined by, the transgression against a narrative.
To describe this progress from the vacuum of meanings to the new order, Girard
employs the notion of tragedy. He thus uses the literary genre of tragedy as a method
for solving anthropological problems (Girard 2005, p. 58). Tragedy, being critically
rethought, appears to be a convenient base for this method because, as Girard shows,
19
  As I mentioned earlier, the mechanism of challenging of cultural structures can be characterized as a
form of transgression, the basic symbolic mechanism of violating the prescribed boundaries that ostensibly
keep the sacred and profane separated (Kurakin 2015). As Mary Douglas has exhaustively demonstrated,
this mechanism in fact can take many particular forms that can be analytically distinguished,
such as getting out of a place, confusing existing structures, providing ambiguity concerning the placement
of elements into a structure, etc. (Douglas 1966). However, all of these forms are forms of transgression,
as they operate in respect to the basic opposition of the sacred and the profane.
20
  It is important to stress that the term ‘mythical’ does not mean ‘untrue’; quite the opposite, it refers to
a ‘collective representation,’ a socially defined truth.
122	D. Kurakin
it is built upon indifferentiation. Girard finds that the struggling antagonists in classical
Greek tragedies are in fact symmetrical figures, and the differences (such as
the difference between good and evil) are only later superimposed as a result of the
process that Girard denotes as mythological elaboration.
Tragic drama addresses itself to a burning issue—in fact, to the burning issue.
The issue is never directly alluded in the plays, and for good reason, since
it has to do with the dissolution by reciprocal violence of those very values
and distinctions around which the conflict of the plays supposedly revolves.
Because this subject is taboo—and even more than taboo, almost unspeakable
in the language devoted to distinctions—literary critics proceed to obscure
with their own meticulously differentiated categories the relative lack of difference
between antagonists that characterizes a tragic confrontation in classical
drama (Girard 2005, pp. 58–59).
Tragedy stands in opposition to mythical elaboration as mystery opposes its solution.
Mystery (as well as tragedy) is beyond the thinkable. It maintains uncertainty
and tension, and thus, creates and holds fascination. Who are the Dyatlov group
members: are they all victims, or are some of them in fact aggressors, as some versions
suggest? Who is Semyon Zolotarev—a war hero or a Nazi collaborator? What
if the tragedy resulted from a massive rampage, and, if so, doesn’t it imply that our
minds are not as reliable as we would like to think? Should we firmly exclude the
UFO, zombies and other supernatural entities from our worldviews or might the
world turn out to be something unfamiliar? The tragic mystery thus casts doubt on
many distinctions that we take for granted. A solution (as well as a myth) is the
return to the thinkable and it demolishes the mystery, because it releases the tension.
Mythological elaboration returns the names and labels to the previously undifferentiated
world. Every version aims to be a mythological elaboration and its ultimate
domination over the alternative versions signals the end of the mystery.
There remains an important question, namely, if a triggered narrative enabling
the emotional effect of a mystery is necessarily the same narrative that serves as a
base for an emerging version. Mystery and its solution are related as a question and
an answer. An answer begins from and within a question as the question contains a
substantial part of the answer. Following this lead, one might suggest that the narrative,
challenged (and thus thematized) by the trigger, not only provides the conditions
for establishing a mystery, but also provides a scenario for the solution. If we
compare the ‘Narrative’ column in the table with the ‘Version’ column, we can see
that in many cases, they correspond to each other. Those who are fascinated by ‘the
Mountain of the Dead’ as a trigger tend to build a version within the same esoteric
narrative.
If we turn to mystery as a literary genre, however, we can easily see that this is
not necessarily the case. The coincidence of the narrative that is basic for the perception
of the mystery and the narrative that is basic for the solution of the mystery
is just the simplest (and thus, probably, the more common) structural option. It is
easy to provide examples, though, in which they do not coincide; a classical detective
story often raises fantastic imagery, but the answers are always this-worldly.
Conan Doyle’s ‘The Speckled Band,’ ‘The Hound of Baskervilles,’ and many other
123The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional…
stories are good examples of solving the mystery within the resolution of the detective
in favor of causality and common sense.
Sometimes the pair is connected differently in real-life mysteries as well. For
example, one of the esoteric versions of the Dyatlov tragedy asserts that the absence
of the tongue resulted from a supernatural weapon that destroyed the astral base of
the body, so, the material component necessarily had to disappear later. In these
examples, we can see that the trigger-narrative relation appears to be not as symmetric
as in the cases I analyzed before. Strongly believed narratives might be less
structurally dependent upon triggers, so the triggers are appropriated and colonized
by the narratives; thus, a sexually obsessed mind finds a trigger of desire in any arbitrary
object, and a religious mystic finds a god’s signs in everything.
If there is something in common between the two exemplified exceptions from
the supposed prevalence of the conjunction of the challenged and version-generative
narratives, it is the mastery toward the story-telling/version-building, which
author of the novel and the believer, strongly obsessed with a single idea, share—as
opposed to the mindset of the respectful to the facts investigator. Future research
might shed light on whether this distinction between a symmetrical and asymmetrical
trigger-narrative coupling makes a substantive typology and is connected with
structural opportunities within the trigger-narrative scheme and with resulting narrative
genres.21
Conclusion
In this paper, I follow penetrative leads while critically addressing some statements
and conclusions from Luc Boltanski’s theory of mystery (Boltanski 2014), and try
to develop further Philip Smith’s theory of clues and genres (Smith 2006). In his
major research on mystery, Boltanski reveals a fundamental link between mystery
as a singular anomaly, often manifested through seemingly minor and unimportant
events, and the modern worldview that pictures reality as a law-governed system.
This solves a paradox of mystery by allowing us to explain how small and isolated
events sometimes gain an enormous and disproportionate emotional effect. If reality
is seen as a system, then affecting a part leads to affecting the whole. The mystery
of mystery lies in the hidden relations between a mysterious case and the broader
context.
However, Boltanski links the nature of mystery to an exclusively sci-tech
paradigm, whereas I argue that the principle he describes becomes, under a
21
  There are at least two debates in cultural sociology that provide clues for taking the next steps in solving
this problem. The first is Isaac Reed’s work on causal explanation in the interpretive social sciences
(Reed 2011). Reed shows that the relations between theory and evidence (which in our case, correspond
to the narrative-trigger relations) take different forms depending on the epistemic regime. The second
is the debate concerning iconicity (Alexander, Giesen, and Bartmanski 2012). Should an iconic object,
as an elementary emotional attractor, be seen as the origin of meaning (which in our case, corresponds
to the ‘respectful to the facts investigator’ mindset) or its mere representation (which corresponds to the
‘triggers, colonized by strongly believed narratives’ vision).
124	D. Kurakin
cultural–sociological revision, applicable to a much broader range of narratives. If
culture is somehow a system, as Durkheimian cultural sociology insists, then the
principle of mystery, revealed by Boltanski, works not solely for the sci-tech paradigm
but for a variety of cultural narratives, because all of them, being internally
structured, can be effectively challenged in such a way (affecting a part affects the
whole). I argue that it is a symbolic mechanism of transgression against existing cultural
structures that stands behind such a challenge, and the distortion of causality
Boltanski focuses on is in fact just a special case of this more general mechanism.
A ‘sci-tech’ paradigm, which implies causal links between events, informs only
one (the middle) level in the ‘hierarchy of narratives’ I have reconstructed with
regard to mystery. Meanwhile, in the Dyatlov case that I have used for illustration
of my theory, there is also an upper moral humanistic level involved, which only
provides this mystery with the coloring of a tragedy (we are dealing with people’s
deaths), and a range of lower ‘specific’ narratives, from esoteric UFO/zombie narratives
to this-worldly ecological, historical, political, and many other narratives.
Thus, in the Dyatlov tragedy, there is not only the ‘missing mass of causality’ (Boltanski
2014, p. 144) that shapes a mysterious perception, but also a repertoire of
specific narratives, triggered by the ‘sacred mountain,’ the echo of the war, spies,
radiation, the missing tongue of the dead girl—all in the greater context of human
death.
To build a cultural sociological theory of mystery, I introduce the notions of
elementary and complex emotional attractors and develop the ‘trigger-narrative’
model. I argue that mystery is a complex emotional attractor, shaped by elementary
emotional attractors, ‘strange’ things, or events. Mystery thus works at two distinct
levels: by means of the singular effects of elementary attractors and by the effect of
their configuration. At the elementary level, mystery embodies a relational nature,
and its emotional effect is based on concrete pairs of master narratives on the one
hand and their triggers—events or symbols, which challenge, and by challenging,
thematize them—on the other hand. These trigger-narrative relations are not necessarily
symmetrical; in certain cases, they are dominated by powerful and expansive
narratives, whereas in others, ‘facts’ come to the fore. These pairs, in turn, shape
certain configurations, which themselves affect the perception of mystery. Thus, in
the Dyatlov case, it is the relative equiplausibility of the versions and a lack of domination
by a single one, which reinforce uncertainty and tension and thus, inform the
entire mystery with such an outstanding emotional effect.
The trigger-narrative model, which connects a (quasi) static picture of cultural
structures to the dynamism of the events of social life, and which pushes cultural
theory toward the vague and controversial problem of cultural causality (see, for
example, Reed 2011), contributes to Philip Smith’s theory of ‘clues’—symbols or
events that are able to switch the genres of a discourse, and thus, lead to real consequences
in social world. In comparison with Smith’s theory, the trigger-narrative
model deals with narrower cultural entities, because multiple narratives can belong
to a single genre. My model, thus, aims to move forward and sharpen Smith’s original
development.
A central promise of the strong program of cultural sociology is that it can
overcome a flat rational action-dominated vision of disenchanted social life.
125The cultural mechanics of mystery: structures of emotional…
Mystery is another widely spread form of re-enchantment, which is tightly intertwined
into the fabric of modern life. In contrast to major forms of the ‘return of
the sacred’ through new religious movements, including civil religion phenomena,
neo-tribalism, new fundamentalism, etc., mystery is built into everyday life.
It reveals itself in people’s passions and devotions, and in the discovery of new,
unexpected dimensions at the heart of habitual life.
Mystery is a permanent challenge to our ability to understand contemporary
life. Studying mystery offers us a chance to think about the sacred core of social
life differently, and to recognize its influence beyond special zones habitually
marked as ‘sacred.’
An important feature of mysteries to be considered in future research is their
growing prominence in crisis periods. Thus, Edward Tiryakian has shown that
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era of far-reaching cultural and political
changes, an extraordinary ‘occult revival’ took place in the United States and
other Western countries (Tiryakian 1972). Similarly, after the collapse of the
Soviet Union, in the times of anomie, when many people lost their reference
points in terms of worldview, ethics, and aesthetics, the obsession with esoteric
mysteries became disproportionately salient. It is sufficient to say that one of the
most popular weekly TV shows in 1989–1994 was called ‘UFO: An undisclosed
visit.’ One might suggest that a phenomenon such as mystery, and especially esoteric
mystery, manifests the least-ordered and least-controlled forms of the sacred
corresponding to unsettled times (although not exactly in the sense Ann Swidler
uses this term). This provides another dimension for the further development of
cultural–sociological research on mystery.
Mystery is a phenomenon of the microcosm of social life. In physics, the discovery
of the microcosm has changed the landscape of the discipline. The energy
hidden in matter, which only seems unobservable within ordinary (Newtonian
mechanics) interactions (but in fact conditions the physical features of matter),
powerfully reveals itself at the macro level under certain conditions, for example,
in chemical transformations of matter or in phenomena related to nuclear power.
Similar to the physical microcosm, mysteries and other emotional attractors,
often hidden under the surface of social life, only seemingly remain unengaged,
and in fact, are deeply involved in the flow of events, effectively energizing social
life and steering it away from any kind of disenchantment.
Acknowledgements  I would like to thank Philip Smith, for his insight and encouragement, and Jeffrey
Alexander, for his suggestions, which helped me to advance this research forward. I am also grateful to
Werner Binder, Eleanor Townsley, Daria Khlevnyuk, and all the members of the Fall 2015 Yale Center
for Cultural Sociology Workshop where this paper was first discussed. Most importantly, I am grateful
to Ronald Jacobs and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful, detailed, and supportive comments,
which made for an immeasurably stronger paper.
Funding  Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School
of Economics is gratefully acknowledged.
126	D. Kurakin
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Dmitry Kurakin  is a Leading Research Fellow at the Centre for Fundamental Sociology and the Director
of the Centre for Cultural Sociology and Anthropology of Education at the National Research University
Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia). He is also a Faculty Fellow at the Yale Center
for Cultural Sociology. He works in the fields of sociological theory, Durkheimian cultural sociology,
focusing in particular on the theories of the sacred, cultural sociology of the body and cultural sociology
of education, and has published widely on these topics.