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This book provides an introduction to Sergei Dovlatov (1941–1990) that is closely attentive to the details of his life and work, their place in the history of Soviet society and literature, and of émigré culture during this turbulent period. A journalist, newspaper editor, and prose writer, Dovlatov is most highly regarded for his short stories, which draw heavily on his experiences in Russia before 1979, when he was forced out of the country. During compulsory military service, before becoming a journalist, he worked briefly as a prison camp guard—an experience that gave him a unique perspective on the operations of the Soviet state. After moving to New York, Dovlatov published works (in the New Yorker and elsewhere) that earned him considerable renown in America and back in Russia. Young’s book presents a valuable critical overview of the prose of a late twentieth-century master within the context of the prevailing Russian and larger literary culture.

Scholars have long noted the deeply rooted veneration of the power of the word—both the expressive and communicative capacities of language—in Russian literature and culture. In her ambitious book Silence and the Rest, Sofya Khagi illuminates a consistent counternarrative, showing how, throughout its entire history, Russian poetry can be read as an argument for what she calls “verbal skepticism.” Although she deals with many poets from a two-century tradition, Khagi gives special emphasis to Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, and Timur Kibirov, offering readings that add new layers of meaning to their work. She posits a long-running dialogue between the poets and the philosophers and theorists who have also been central to the antiverbal strain of Russian culture. Unlike its Western counterpart, the Russian philosophical and theological doubt of the efficacy of the word still grants the author, and literature itself, an ethical force—the inadequacies of language notwithstanding.

Identifies and examines a poetics of weakness in Soviet underground literature

Artists of the late Soviet era sought new, nonconformist ways of approaching literary fiction, arriving at weakness as a crucial principle of narrative and character formation. Julia Vaingurt argues that this counter-discourse of strategic weakness constituted both an aesthetic strategy and an ethical code, affording like-minded authors a feeling of recognition and commonality and uniting an international community of artists in resistance to the divisiveness of their worlds. Soft Matter: The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism explores the cultivation of weak subjectivity through modes such as gender subversion, queer holy foolishness, intoxication, madness, and writing disorders like graphomania and writer’s block. Identifying the poetics of weakness as formative for Soviet underground literature of the 1960s and ’70s, Vaingurt also traces the inheritance of a far older tradition within Russian culture of salutary weakness. As democratic deliberation continues to be under threat around the world, alternatives to the ubiquitous politics of force are an aesthetic, ethical, and ideological imperative.

By landmass, Russia is the world’s largest country, due largely to centuries of military expansion, imperial rule, and colonization. As a result, it contains people of many ethnicities, nationalities, religions, and languages. Yet Russia’s non-Russian, Indigenous, and minority communities have often been marginalized by state policy and underrepresented in scholarship. Soil and Soul explores how these communities sustain distinct forms of identity and belonging not only through discourse or state institutions but also through embodied relations with land, nature, and animals. These local practices complicate and unsettle state-centered narratives of Russian cultural superiority by showing how meaning and identity are created through relationships with the nonhuman world. Drawing on decolonial, anthropological, environmental, sociological, linguistic, and geographic approaches, this volume reframes minority agency as ecosocial practice embedded in local ecologies, everyday life, and postimperial power asymmetries.

Contributors: Megan Dixon, Yana Hashamova, Kristina Kovalskaya, Jesko Schmoller, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Laura Siragusa, Zoia Tarasova, Baasanjav Terbish

Pyotr Pavlensky turns state violence into his medium—now, in his own words, he reveals the theory behind the fire.

Pyotr Pavlensky’s Subject–Object Art Theory is both a manifesto and a method—an incendiary redefinition of what art can and should be in an era of increasing repression. Known for his radical public events, such as setting fire to government buildings, stitching his lips shut, or nailing his own body to the ground, Pavlensky has been called a provocateur. In this book, he offers his own framework: subject–object art, a practice that redefines the position of art with respect to power and forces state mechanisms to work for art.

Venturing past the confines of political art, he examines the historical intersections of art and power, situating his work within a lineage of radical avant-garde movements. Whether seen as a guide or an act of defiance in itself, Subject–Object Art Theory urges the reader to rethink artistic freedom but as a means of bringing art back to its true independence.