The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (Oxford Handbooks)

Description

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. Cover The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture Copyright Contents Acknowledgments About the Volume Editors Contributors Introduction 1. Theoretical Problems of Soviet Underground Culture PART I: PRECURSORS 2. Тhe Birth of Soviet Underground Culture in the 1930s 3. OBERIU and the Conversations of the Lipavsky Circle 4. Mikhail Kuzmin and the Underground 5. The Soviet Literary Underground during World War II 6. Between Modernism and the Underground During the Thaw: A Look at “Transitional Poets” Part II: Institutions 7. Major Events, State Interference, and Resilience: Practices in the Late Soviet Underground 8. Infrastructures of Soviet Underground Culture 9. The Voices of Samizdat and Magnitizdat 10. Tamizdat as a Literary Practice and Political Institution: Late Soviet Underground Abroad 11. “In-​Betweeners”: Navigating Between Official and Nonofficial Cultures 12. “Grey Zones” Between Official and Unofficial Cultures: Institutional Diversity, Klub-​81, and (Many) Others Part III: Mapping 13. The Ukrainian Underground: Aesthetics, Resistance, and Performance 14. Nearly Underground in the Near-​Abroad: Outliers in Soviet Baltic Culture 15. Belarusian Underground Culture 16. The Fergana School of Poetry: In Search of a Postcolonial Subject 17. Unofficial Art Outside Moscow and Leningrad 18. West-​and East-​European Sources and Contexts for the Late-Soviet Underground 19. Jewish Underground Culture in the Soviet Union 20. Queer Culture(s) 21. Dissident Feminism and Its Place in Soviet Women’s History PART IV: FORMS AND MEDIA 22. Performative Practices and Life-​Creation 23. “Here, Performance Art Is Performance Art”: The “Appearance” of Performance Art in Soviet Subculture 24. Soviet Rock Carnival: Times and Traditions 25. The Experimental Sounds of Russian Conceptualism: From Historical Musical Avant-​Garde to Cultural Underground(s) 26. Underground Visual Arts: Photography, Film, Photo-​Based Conceptualism Part V: Lifeworlds 27. GULAG Testimony Between Pluto and Orpheus 28. The 1950s: A Phase of Polarization 29. The Lianozovo School 30. Malaya Sadovaya in the History of Leningrad Unofficial Culture 31. Helenuctism and Leningrad’s Unofficial Culture 32. The Urbanites and the New Existentialism 33. The Neo-​Futurists 34. The Ultimate Underground Classic: Venedikt Erofeev and Moscow-​Petushki 35. Brodsky and His Circles 36. The Leningrad School of Neo-​Modernism 37. “Gazanevshchina”: Experimental (Life) Artists of Leningrad 38. Late-​Soviet Occulture: Evgeny Golovin and the Yuzhinsky Circle 39. Moscow Conceptualism 40. Young Conceptualists 41. The Circle of Metarealist Poets 42. Arkady Dragomoshchenko and Leningrad Cultural Underground 43. Timur Novikov and the New Artists 44. Neo-​Primitivist Art and Lifestyle: The Mitki and Others Index