Non-Conformist Movements in the Arts from the 1970s to the Present

In this course, we will examine the diverse traditions of dissident subcultures among Russians from the last few years of the Brezhnev era up to the present day. In the hands of these ‘underground’ writers, artists, and essayists, historical and cultural revisionism often becomes a strategy for imagining a way of life that transcends any clear-cut political philosophy. What often united these individuals and groups is a skepticism toward ideological clichés and conventional codes of behavior. In our discussions, we will address the influence of the Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde of the 1920s upon modern-day non-conformist groups and figures. We will take into consideration the creative engagement of non-conformist movements and circles with the practices of contemporary performance art and the playful yet emphatically countercultural orientation of international movements such as Situationism and Punk. Particular attention will be given to the legacies of the New Academicians and the Mitki in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, the Moscow Conceptualists, and the exponents of postmodernism in Moscow in the eighties and nineties. We will also discuss the seemingly disruptive ‘antiliterary’ minimalism of the work of poets such as Dmitri Prigov, the confrontational reactionary aesthetics of Eduard Limonov, the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot, and the strategies of political resistance manifest in the work of Sasha Skochilenko and other artists who protest against the invasion of Ukraine. Counts as a course in literature or culture and civilization.