Anti-authoritarian Authorship in Russia from 1960 to the Present Day

• Applicant: Dr. Ekaterina Vassilieva
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 522279906

The planned project aims to investigate the phenomenon of „anti-authoritarian authorship“ as a special relationship between author, text and the reading public in Russia from 1960 to the present day, and to work out its role in the formation of an active political subject. The texts under consideration are understood not only as an instrument of resistance but as its very prerequisite, given that they produce a certain form of subjectivity that denies authoritarianism. In this context, the historical perspective enables a re-evaluation of the Soviet dissident movement and its continuing influence in today’s protest culture. Despite the clearly visible parallels between the dissident movement and the democratic reform process during Perestroika, as well as the post-Soviet protest culture, an investigation that systematically describes this connection is still missing. This research gap is to be filled by the present project. In recent research, there is generally a great interest in the political dimension of authorship and in the possibilities of artistic and literary reflections on, as well as interventions into politics. In 2021, I published the book Fantasie an der Macht. Literarische und politische Autorschaft im heutigen Russland (Imagination in Power. Literary and Political Authorship in Contemporary Russia). The focus of this work was on the ideological strategies based on the approaches borrowed from literature and art and designed to provide authoritarianism with particular flexibility. The present project is now intended to build on this work. It is dedicated to a counter-movement to the ideological appropriation of culture, manifesting itself in the phenomenon of „anti-authoritarian authorship“ and contributing to the development of alternative values in society. The project will analyze social conditions and aesthetic strategies of an anti-authoritarian textual practice in Russia since 1960. Although anti-authoritarian authorship is applicable to all media (visual arts, film, music and others), I will mainly focus on written texts, explicitly not drawing a sharp dividing line between literary production in the narrower sense and other types of text. The crucial quality of the texts in question is their participation in a discourse that directly or indirectly challenges the structures of an autocratic state and thus negotiates new, active subject positions. Since political subjectivation is an important factor in the development of a civil society, this work also aims to be understood as a contribution to the discussion about the possibilities of a future democratization of Russia. In view of the war of aggression against Ukraine currently being caused by Russian authoritarianism, this question is becoming increasingly important.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants