Soviet unofficial culture in the Perestroika (1986-1991): pragmatics and aesthetics

• Applicant: Dmitrii Bresler, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 571764954

While previous research on the Soviet underground has primarily focused on the periods of the so-called “thaw” (1956-1964) and the so-called “stagnation” (Zastoy) (1964-1985), this project focuses on the Soviet literary underground of the perestroika era and proposes an approach that, in contrast to the dominant direction of perestroika research, does not emphasize discontinuity, the break with previous Soviet culture and politics, but rather continuity in cultural development. It assumes that the development of the underground in the years of perestroika (1985-1991), which has been neglected in previous research, is particularly relevant because the Soviet unofficial culture in this period was given the best conditions for the development of its own aesthetics and the reflection of its poetic principles due to political liberalization on the one hand, but on the other hand remained at a distance from the dominant, official currents and deliberately took up a marginal socio-cultural position. This has hardly been taken into account in the research literature to date; the most influential and original literary projects of this period have not yet been described or even known. By shedding light on the development of unofficial communities in the late 1980s, presenting the specific development of samizdat in this period and important archival materials to highlight the specificity of the biographies and social, cultural and literary practices of these years, and offering new interpretations of artistic works of the late 20th century, we hope to fill the gap in understanding this crucial aspect of Soviet culture. While previous accounts of the Soviet underground have often focused on and been limited to cultural resistance within closed communities, this study of the Soviet underground in the context of perestroika seeks to enable the poetics of nonconformism and samizdat not only beyond a critical or negative pragmatics in relation to Soviet cultural and ideological institutions and artifacts, but also contribute to the identification of the general cultural phenomenological and epistemological foundations that do not lose their relevance outside the Soviet context of everyday life or outside socialist realist art conventions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants