The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture

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.

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). Tomáš 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).