The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

First edition
Author	Yury Dombrovsky
Translator	Alan Myers
Language	Russian
Genre	semi-autobiographical novel, philosophical novel
Publisher	YMCA Press
Publication date	1978
Publication place	Soviet Union

The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (Russian: Факультет ненужных вещей, romanized: Fakultet nenuzhnykh veshchey) is a novel by Yury Dombrovsky about the fate of Russian intelligentsia in the era of the Great Purge, written in 1964–1975. It completes a kind of dialogue begun by the novel The Guardian of Antiquities (published in 1964 in Novy Mir). The novel was dedicated to Dombrovsky's Novy Mir editor Anna Samoilovna Berser and published by YMCA Press in Paris; according to the popular version, the publication was the cause of Dombrovsky's death (possibly murder^[1]). In the USSR it was published in 1988.