Del i serien Studies in Russian Literature and Theory

Soft Matter

The Poetics of Weakness in Late Soviet Socialism

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

AvJulia Vaingurt

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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 weaknessas 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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-01-15
Mått152 x 229 x undefined mm
Vikt454 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieStudies in Russian Literature and Theory
Antal sidor320
FörlagNorthwestern University Press
ISBN9780810148161

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IllustrationsIntroductionChapter 1. A Typology of Weakness: Lacking Heroes in Literature and FilmChapter 2. Iulii Kim’s Cinderella in the Concentration Camp: Performing Kurt Vonnegut’s Gender Subversion in the USSRChapter 3. “What a Hero of Weakness!”: The Radical Orthodoxy of Evgenii KharitonovChapter 4. “Universal Chicken-heartedness”: Low Spirits and Immoderate Meditations in Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva-PetushkiChapter 5. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools as an Artist’s Guide to PsychosisChapter 6. The Weakling, the Genius, the Bomb, and the Globe: Writing as Weakness in Andrei BitovIn Conclusion: A ManifestoWorks Cited

“Soft Matter seems all too necessary in a world newly divided and threatened by aggressive populism, military invasions, climate change, and increasing socio-economic inequality. Vaingurt’s study of “weakness” makes an important contribution to ongoing conversations about Soviet culture after Stalin, the challenges of late modernity, the need to reconsider gender categories, and the ethical and political potentials of solidarity based on human vulnerability.” —Ann Komaromi, University of Toronto"Julia Vaingurt’s Soft Matter brilliantly elucidates a set of attitudes within late Soviet culture that opposed the dominant discourse of heroism and masculinity by embracing “weakness” as a desirable human condition. Not only is this a rich study in the intersection of literary and philosophical ideas, it is especially apt in an era when a Russian regime has once again resorted to masking its own weakness behind grotesque and exaggerated claims of masculinity."—Thomas Seifrid, University of Southern California, Dornsife