The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture

by Lipovetsky, Mark; Engström, Maria; Glanc, Tomáš; Kukuj, Ilja; Smola, Klavdia

• ISBN13: 9780197508213
• ISBN10: 0197508219
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780197508237
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2024-06-17
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

In 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued the resolution "On the Restructuring of Literary and Arts Organizations." This resolution put an end to the coexistence of aesthetically different groups and associations of writers and artists that had been common during the 1920s, and instead, led to the establishment of the monopoly of Socialist Realism in 1934. Ironically, this resolution unwittingly created a rich literary and artistic production of underground intellectuals, known as the Soviet underground, during an era of political and aesthetic censorship in the Soviet Union.

The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture is the first comprehensive English-language volume covering a history of Soviet artistic and literary underground. In forty-four chapters, an international group of leading scholars introduce readers to a web of subcultures within the underground, highlight the culture achievements of the Soviet underground from the 1930s through the 1980s, emphasize the multimediality of this cultural phenomenon, and situate the study of underground literary texts and artworks into their broader theoretical, ideological, and political contexts. The volume presents readers with several approaches to mapping the underground that include chapters on nonconformist cultures in Ukraine, Belarus, Baltic countries, Central Asia, and provincial cities of Russian Federation. Finally, the volume also provides an analysis of groups shaped around religious and cultural identity, as well as queer and feminist underground circles.

Author Biography

Mark Lipovetsky is professor of Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University. His research interests include Russian postmodernism, New Drama, Soviet literary and cinematic tricksters, Soviet underground culture as well as various aspects of post-Soviet culture. He is the author of twelve monographs and more than a hundred articles. He also co-edited twenty collections of articles on Russian literature and culture of the 20th-21st centuries. Among his books are the following: Charms of Cynical Reason: The Transformations of the Trickster Trope in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (2011), Postmodern Crises: From Lolita to Pussy Riot (2017), and A Guerilla Logos: The Project of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (co-authored with Ilya Kukulin). Lipovetsky is also one of four co-authors of the Oxford History of Russian Literature (2018)

Maria Engström is Professor of Russian at the Department of Modern Languages, Uppsala University (Sweden). She is the author of numerous articles on cultural recycling, Russian queer visual culture, post-soviet neoconservative intellectual milieu, and imperial aesthetics in contemporary Russian literature and art. She is also co-editor of Digital Orthodoxy: Mediating Post-Secularity in Russia (2015).

Tom'aš Glanc is Professor at the Department of Slavic Studies, University Zurich (Switzerland). He is working on various aspects of samizdat culture, Slavic ideology, Russian and Eastern European literature and culture of the 20th-21st centuries, including performance art and underground film and recordings, theory of literature. Glanc is also working internationally as a curator of exhibitions (Poetry and Performance, contemporary Russian art).

Ilja Kukuj is the Coordinator for Russian Language Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is the author of numerous publications on Soviet unofficial culture and the editor of several volumes on underground poetry including Leonid Aronzon, Oleg Prokofiev, Anri Volokhonsky, and Pavel Zaltsman. Kukuj is a co-editor of Wiener Slawistischer Almanach and member of Editorial Board of The Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat (Toronto).

Klavdia Smola is Professor and Chair of Slavic Literatures at the Department of Slavic Studies, University of Dresden (Germany). She authored two books and (co)edited eight volumes on Russian, Jewish and Polish culture and literature of the 20th and 21st- centuries. Her research interests include Soviet underground, Socialist Realism(s), nonconformist literature and art of Putin era and Soviet minority cultures. She is co-editor of the Journal of Slavic Studies (Zeitschrift für Slawistik).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

About the Volume Editors

Contributors

Introduction

1. Theoretical Problems of Soviet Underground Culture
Mark Lipovetsky, Tom'aš Glanc, Maria Engström, Ilja Kukuj, and Klavdia Smola

Part I: Precursors

2. The Birth of Soviet Underground Culture in the 1930s
Maya Vinokour

3. OBERIU and the Conversations of the Lipavsky Circle
Eugene Ostashevsky

4. Mikhail Kuzmin and the Underground
Nikolai Bogomolov

5. The Soviet Literary Underground during World War II
Polina Barskova

6. Between Modernism and the Underground During the Thaw: A Look at "Transitional Poets"
Massimo Maurizio

Part II: Institutions

7. Major Events, State Interference, and Resilience: Practices in the Late Soviet Underground
Dirk Uffelmann

8. Infrastructures of Soviet Underground Culture
Valentina Parisi

9. The Voices of Samizdat and Magnitizdat
Ann Komaromi

10. Tamizdat as a Literary Practice and Political Institution: Late Soviet Underground Abroad
Yasha Klots

11. "In-Betweeners": Navigating Between Official and Nonofficial Cultures
Ainsley Morse

12. "Grey Zones" Between Official and Unofficial Cultures: Institutional Diversity, Klub-81, and (Many) Others
Ilya Kukulin

Part III: Mapping

13. The Ukrainian Underground: Resistance and Performance
Tamara Hundorova

14. Nearly Underground in the Near-Abroad: Outliers in Soviet Baltic Culture
Mark Allen Svede and Kārlis VÄ?rdiÅ?Å¡

15. Belarusian Underground Culture
Tatsiana Astrouskaya

16. The Fergana School of Poetry: In Search of a Postcolonial Subject
Kirill Korchagin

17. Unofficial Art Outside Moscow and Leningrad
Tatiana Sokhareva

18. West- and East-European Sources and Contexts for the Late-Soviet Underground
Tom'aš Glanc

19. Jewish Underground Culture in the Soviet Union
Klavdia Smola

20. Queer Culture(s)
Vitaly Chernetsky and Devin McFadden

21. Dissident Feminism and Its Place in Soviet Women's History
Alla Mitrofanova

Part IV: Forms and Media

22. Performative Practices and Life-Creation
Mark Lipovetsky

23. "Here, Performance Art is Performance Art": The "Appearance" of Performance Art in Soviet Subculture
Sylvia Sasse

24. Soviet Rock Carnival: Times and Traditions
Mark Yoffe

25. The Experimental Sounds of Russian Conceptualism: From Historical Musical Avant-garde to Cultural Underground(s)
Dennis Ioffe

26. Underground Visual Arts: Photography, Film, Photo-Based Conceptualism
Olesya Turkina

Part V: Lifeworlds

27. GULAG Testimony Between Pluto and Orpheus
Ilya Kalinin

28. The 1950s: A Phase of Polarization
Ilja Kukuj

29. The Lianozovo School
Mikhail Pavlovets

30. Malaya Sadovaya in the History of Leningrad Unofficial Culture
Ainsley Morse

31. Khelenuktism and Leningrad's Unofficial Culture
Stanislav Savickij

32. The Urbanites and the New Existentialism
Anastasiya Osipova

33. The Neo-Futurists
Kirill Korchagin

34. The Ultimate Underground Classic: Venedikt Erofeev and Moscow-Petushki
Oleg Lekmanov, Mikhail Sverdlov, and Ilya Simanovsky

35. Brodsky and His Circles
Denis Akhapkin

36. The Leningrad School of Neo-Modernism
Josephine von Zitzewitz

37. "Gazanevshchina": Experimental (Life) Artists of Leningrad
Klavdia Smola

38. Late-Soviet Occulture: Evgenii Golovin and the Iuzhinskii Circle
Maria Engström

39. Moscow Conceptualism
Daniil Leiderman and Mark Lipovetsky

40. Young Conceptualists
Tomás Glanc

41. The Circle of Metarealist Poets
Aleksandr Zhitenev

42. Arkady Dragomoshchenko and the Leningrad Cultural Underground
Evgeny Pavlov and Dennis Ioffe

43. Timur Novikov and the New Artists
Ekaterina Andreeva

44. Neo-primitivist Art and Lifestyle: The Mitki and Others
Alexandar Mihailovic

Index