Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture

Front Cover

Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.

 

Contents

New Sectarianism and the Pleasure Principle in Postmodern Russian Culture
1
Part I The Making of Russian Postmodernism
21
From Modernism to Postmodernism
23
Chapter 2 Postmodernism Communism and SotsArt
51
Chapter 3 The 1960s and the Rediscovery of the Other in Russian Culture
95
Chapter 4 Perestroika as a Shift in Literary Paradigm
151
Part II Manifestos of Russian Postmodernism
167
Chapter 5 Theses on Metarealism and Conceptualism
169
Part III Socialist Realism and Postmodernism
247
The Aesthetics of Andrei Sinyavsky
249
From Andrei Sinyavsky to Vladimir Sorokin
261
Viktor Pelevin in the Context of PostSoviet Literature
276
Part IV Conceptualism
289
Liudmila Petrushevskaia and Tatiana Tolstaia
291
The Excremental Poetics of Vladimir Sorokin
333
Word and Image in Ilya Kabakov
363

Chapter 6 On Olga Sedakova and Lev Rubinshtein
177
Chapter 7 What Is Metarealism? Facts and Hypotheses
182
Chapter 8 What Is a Metabole? On the Third Trope
189
Dehumanization in the New Moscow Poetry
198
Chapter 10 A Catalogue of New Poetries
209
An Essay on the Essay
216
Chapter 12 The Ecology of Thinking
222
Chapter 13 Minimal Religion
227
Chapter 14 The Age of Universalism
236
Chapter 15 The Paradox of Acceleration
241
Chapter 22 The Philosophical Implications of Russian Conceptualism
410
Part V Postmodernism and Spirituality
429
From Apophatic Theology to Minimal Religion
431
Paradigms of Contemporary Culture
480
The Myth of Venedikt Erofeev
509
On the Place of Postmodernism in Postmodernity
542
Select Bibliography
555
Index of Names
564
Index of Subjects
571
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About the author (2015)

Mikhail N. Epstein was one of the main proponents of postmodernism in Russia and the founder of the Laboratory of Modern Culture, Experimental Center of Creativity, Moscow. He is S. C. Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University (USA) and Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory, Director of Centre for Humanities Innovation, at Durham University (UK).

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