Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Dissents, Contradictions, and Ambiguities of the Soviet Unofficial Literature: The Impossible Community

Dissents, Contradictions, and Ambiguities of the Soviet Unofficial Literature: The Impossible Community

Chadov, Konstantin

Hardcover

Series: Crosscurrents: Russia's Literature in Context

Literary Criticism

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 1, 2026

ISBN10: 1666979880
ISBN13: 9781666979886
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Oct 1 2026
Pages: 224
Weight: 1.03
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

The book discusses the internal structure of the Soviet unofficial literary community of Leningrad in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on the concepts of Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Derrida, it describes the factors that contributed to the loosening of the community's stability - a task that requires tracing various forms of omission, contradiction, and ambiguity that constituted the community's life.

Dissents, Contradictions, and Ambiguities of the Soviet Unofficial Literature offers a reconsideration of two prevailing views of Soviet unofficial culture: first, that it was a series of friendship circles that turned their pariah status within the Soviet literary system into an artistic device; and second, that it was an alternative social space, a kind of public sphere that fought against Soviet monologism. As the book shows, tensions within the community arose when these two regimes - that of friendly endeavor and that of public activity - were juxtaposed. After certain events in the mid-1970s, the community definitively entered the public sphere, with the obligation to produce good enough works (a fact that can be reconstructed with the help of structural psychoanalysis). However, the structure of the community remained rather amorphous, unsuited to such a task: for most, cultural production was still a kind of bohemian entertainment, not something that required collective effort.

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All