In the summer of 1925, a debutant writer, Aleksandr Beliaev, published a `scientific-fantastic story', which depicted the travails of a severed human head living in a laboratory, supported by special machinery. Just a few months later, a young medical researcher, Sergei Briukhonenko, succeeded in reviving the severed head of a dog, using a special apparatus he had devised to keep the head alive. This paper examines the relationship between the literary and the scientific experiments with severed heads in post-revolutionary Russia, which reflected the anxieties about death, revival, and survival in the aftermath of the 1914--1923 `reign of death' in that country. It contrasts the anguished ethical questions raised by the story with the public fascination for `science that conquers death'.
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