Russian postmodernism

• 1. Introduction

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  Russian postmodernism traces back to the 1950s, decades before the Soviet Union collapsed. For outside observers writing about post-Soviet Russia, the term refers to the economic and political uncertainty that followed communism's fall, and the way that uncertainty shapes Russian identity. Russian critics use it differently: for them, it describes contemporary Russian art and literature. Both uses share a single origin: the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its philosophical foundation, dialectical materialism. The artists and poets who built that cultural underground were already at work inside the Soviet era. They operated through unofficial networks that reached from Moscow into the small settlements on the capital's outskirts.

• 2. The Conceptualist Sabotage

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  Socialist realism had served as the Soviet state's tool of social control in the arts. Artists working in opposition to it made a radical choice. They took the official style's own symbols and turned them against the government that had mandated them. The Moscow Conceptualists were the organized form this approach took. What had begun as an underground political and artistic gesture grew, over time, into a full-fledged movement. Painters Ilya Kabakov, Irina Nakhova, Viktor Pivovarov, Eric Bulatov, and Andrei Monastyrski drove the visual work. The duo Komar and Melamid were equally central. Poets Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, and Timur Kibirov applied the same inversive logic to language. Writer Vladimir Sorokin was part of this founding circle from the outset. Another cluster of artists and poets had formed at the same time, working not in Moscow's official cultural spaces but around a location well outside the capital.

• 3. The Lianozovo Group

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  The village of Lianozovo, a small settlement just outside Moscow, gave its name to a group that formed in 1958. The Lianozovo Group brought together painters and poets who worked outside the mainstream of Soviet culture. Oscar Rabin, Lidia Masterkova, Vladimir Nemukhin, and Nikolai Vechtomov were the visual artists at the group's center. The poets of the group were Igor Kholin, Vsevolod Nekrasov, and Genrikh Sapgir. Lianozovo sat at a physical remove from Moscow's official cultural institutions. The group worked in that peripheral space, and the unofficial current they established there would carry into the following decades.

• 4. The Metarealists

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  Through the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, a poetry movement called itself Metarealism, or metaphysical realism. Its central technical contribution was the meta-metaphor, a complex layered figurative construction its practitioners considered more ambitious than standard poetic metaphor. Konstantin Kedrov, Elena Katsyuba, Elena Shvarts, Ivan Zhdanov, Vladimir Aristov, Aleksandr Yeryomenko, Yuri Arabov, and Alexei Parshchikov were the movement's named representatives. The Metarealists worked in the unofficial space of Soviet and then Russian poetry across a span of nearly three decades. That three-decade arc crossed the Soviet collapse itself. The Metarealists were among the few experimental currents to remain active from the Soviet era into the post-Soviet period. The meta-metaphor they developed under one system remained the movement's defining contribution after that system was gone.