The Post-Soviet Imaginary: Constructing New Russian Fantasies

"The Post-Soviet Imaginary: Constructing New Russian Fantasies" examines interviews and essays of one hundred seventy eight students (age 15-22), whom I met in April 1996 and April 1997 in Barnaul, Siberia (Russia). Using the texts of the students’ descriptions of such basic notions as “gender,” “nationality,” “man,” “woman,” and “Motherland” as my main source, I tried to understand how the young people in a post-Soviet Siberian city located themselves within the available symbolic representations of gender and national identity. The interpretation of the students’ texts was rooted in two major theoretical frames: structuralist and post-structuralist analysis on one hand and the psychoanalytic theory on the other. The former illuminated the main narrative mechanisms through which the students expressed their experience. As the first chapter argues, it was the logic of oppositions and binaries, the logic of cognitive inconsistency and supplementary negation that framed the students’ verbal constructions. In turn, the psychoanalytic approach (mostly in the forms of Melanie Klein’s and Julia Kristeva’s versions) was instrumental for grasping one of the key oppositions indicated by the students - the opposition between the new Russian woman and the new Russian man. These two figures were called upon to express the students’ anxiety caused by the loss of the symbolic sign-posts of the Soviet epoch. By using object relations theory, I detected a paranoid structure in the students’ fantasies about the new Russian man and the new Russian woman, which manifested itself first of all in such rhetorical phenomena as splitting, consolidation, and symbolic inhibition. My further analysis of the metaphors and associations used by the students led me to identifying these two models of national and gender identification as the object of abjection (the new Russian woman) and the object of narcissistic identification (the new Russian man)

"Не взлетевшие самолеты мечты": о поколении формального метода

Статья является введением к трехтомной антологии русского модернизма

Second-Hand Nostalgia: Composing a New Reality out of Old Things

In the last few years, the Moscow photographer Danila Tkachenko has produced several highly successful photo-series that creatively reworked and reframed important material objects of the socialist period. Using some of his projects as a case study, this article offers a methodological shift by approaching a second wave of nostalgia for communist past without relying on socialist experience as a key interpretative  and explanatory frame. As the essay shows, the decreasing prominence of the firsthand knowledge of socialist lifestyle is compensated by the increasing visibility and importance of (old) socialist things. The essay introduces the term ‘second-hand nostalgia’ to refer to this type of interaction with the material culture of the socialist period. Retaining the melancholic longing for the times past (typical for any nostalgia), the term points, simultaneously, to a condition of historical disconnect from originary contexts, which made possible the objects of current nostalgic fascination in the first place. Keywords: nostalgia, material culture, Russia, postcommunism, photograph

Postcolonial Estrangements: Claiming a Space between Stalin and Hitler.

In this essay, I follow debates about forms and sites of memorialization in post- Soviet Belarus. Begun during perestroika, the public discussions about Khatyn’ and Kuropaty eventually evolved into persistent attempts to realign the Soviet past along new narrative axes. Most prominently, this discursive reformatting of the socialist experience was reflected in various gestures of withdrawal and distancing. I suggest that these discursive and mnemonic moves—from commemorating victims to memorializing victimhood—could be seen as signs of the emergence and development of postcolonial reasoning in post- Soviet Belarus. The postcolonial estrangement that these historicist projects have produced is a consequence of a utopian search for sources of authenticity outside the power structures imposed by “occupation regimes.” So far, this retrospective quest for a safe place “in- between” has resulted in a series of dead ends. Instead of bringing the nation together, it has polarized the society. Instead of providing an attractive alternative to the moral duplicity of state socialism, it has offered a historical justification for ethical relativism. These deadlocks and false turns of postcolonial studies of socialism can be seen as reflecting the early stage of this intellectual movement. Alternatively, they may signify the emergence of a different—conservative and nostalgic—form of postcoloniality. In either case, these debates helpfully outline the uneasy process of the retroactive creation of colonial subjectivity, demonstrating how the act of reclaiming an important historical place can become indistinguishable from being beholden to this place

Language and Subjectivity: Theories of Formation.

The purpose of this graduate course is to examine key texts of the twentieth century that established the fundamental connection between language structures and practices on the one hand, and the formation of selfhood and subjectivity, on the other. In particular, the course will focus on theories that emphasize the role of formal elements in producing meaningful discursive and social effects. Works of Russian formalists and French (post)-structuralists will be discussed in connection with psychoanalytic and anthropological theories of formation

“Address your questions to Dostoevsky”: Privatizing Punishment in Russian Cinema. In: Russia’s New Fin de Siècle: Contemporary Culture between Past and Present. Edited by Birgit Beumers. Intellect: Chicago.

The chapter offers a close reading of two cinematic cases, Andrei Zviagintsev’s Elena (2011) and Govorukhin’s Voroshilov Sniper, in order to demonstrate in a reverse engineering move how publically executed punishments of the late 1990s were translated into quiet murders a decade later. This transition from ‘punishments outside the law’ to ‘crimes without punishment’, I suggest, is usually linked in Russian cinema to two important trends. First, the impotence of the existing legal system – the inefficiency of the regulatory functions of the state are often counterbalanced by the increasing prominence of networks of reciprocity and forms of loyalty based on family ties. Second, the privatization of punishment, the appropriation of extrajudicial authority is frequently achieved through the aestheticization of violence. The separation of moral issues from the distribution of force allows us to perceive violence as a “communicative phenomenon,” as Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky aptly put it (2009, 63), that is to say, as an artistic device, as a structural solution which is called upon to restore a necessary (narrative) balance

Second-Hand Nostalgia: Composing A New Reality Out of Old Things

In the last few years, the Moscow photographer Danila Tkachenko has produced several highly successful photo-series that creatively reworked and reframed important material objects of the socialist period. Using some of his projects as a case study, this article offers a methodological shift by approaching a second wave of nostalgia for communist past without relying on socialist experience as a key interpretative  and explanatory frame. As the essay shows, the decreasing prominence of the firsthand knowledge of socialist lifestyle is compensated by the increasing visibility and importance of (old) socialist things. The essay introduces the term ‘second-hand nostalgia' to refer to this type of interaction with the material culture of the socialist period. Retaining the melancholic longing for the times past (typical for any nostalgia), the term points, simultaneously, to a condition of historical disconnect from originary contexts, which made possible the objects of current nostalgic Fascination in the first place. Keywords: nostalgia, material culture, Russia, postcommunism, photograph

Totalitarian Laughter: Images – Sounds – Performers

Throughout its history, socialist mass culture actively employed satire, humor, and comedy to foster emotional bonds with its audience. Orchestrated by the state cultural industry, public laughter released social and political tension while maintaining a balance between ignoring and buttressing the institutions of power. In turn, late Soviet irony or the aesthetics of grotesque that evolved “from below” became instrumental in articulating a cultural distance from the values promoted by the socialist state. Despite the heterogeneity of their impact and scope, these cultures of the comic invariably reengaged the irrationality and ludicrousness of socialist life. Whether officially approved or censored, totalitarian laughter relativized existing practices and norms and suggested alternative models for understanding and embodying discourses and values of “really existing” socialism.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Totalitarian laughter: images: sounds: performers

The special (double) issue of "Russian Literature" is entitled “Totalitarian Laughter: Images – Sounds – Performers”. It discusses laughter, the comical, humour, irony, parody and related phenomena, and their roles in Soviet cultural life and politics