Search Results

This chapter examines the representation of Soviet terror in post-Soviet culture. It proposes a new concept, that of memory-dread, to analyze how Russians perceive the Soviet terror. It interprets the fearful visions of post-Soviet writers, fimmakers, and intellectuals as a territory of memory-dread, a space of the undead. Recognizing ghosts, spirits, vampires, dolls, and other man-made and man-imagined simulacra that carry the memory of the unburied Soviet dead, the chapter develops a theory of cultural memory as consisting of three elements that are intimately connected: monuments (hardware), texts (software), and specters (ghostware). It also discusses three stages in the Russian memory of the so-called “unjustified repressions”: denial, repression, and interpretation. Finally, it considers the carnivalesque dynamics of the post-catastrophic melancholia, along with Magical Historicism in the post-Soviet novel.

This article explores how the Russian émigré composers, no longer required to nurture the nation-constituting loyalties, forge, negotiate and sustain multi-stranded individual relationships both with the transnational powers and with their native country, reclaiming cultural rather than territorial attachments which grow from psychological constructs rather than social conditions. It is revealing to observe that most of them continue to remain culturally tied to their country of origin and to long for its aesthetic values, while at the same time building civic attachments and hybrid identities in the globalised world. Based on empirical studies, this chapter considers how the reflections of post-Soviet identity shape these composers’ creative output and how the composers form relationships with their old and new neighbours.

This chapter sets out to investigate how the implications and broader dimensions of the Soviet linguistic legacy is represented in two post-Soviet prose texts, Evgenii Popov’s novel Podlinnaia istoriia ‘zelenykh muzykantov’ (The True Story of the ‘Green Musicians’, 1998) and Vladimir Sorokin’s short-story ‘Monoklon’ (2010). Popov’s ‘novel in footnotes’ comments on a text from the 1970s (reproduced in the novel), using humour and satire to expose the emptiness of clichés and make links to the present-day language debates. Sorokin, in turn, invokes the historical memory of Soviet speak through fragments, slogans, words and concepts, creating in his text a ‘simultaniety of the non-simultaneous’ by juxtaposing elements from two very different parts of the Soviet past and showing the need to tackle this past (or these pasts) in present-day Russian society.

This introductory chapter begins by comparing the Russian term politkonkretnost (“polit-concreteness”) with the English “political correctness.” Both terms share two assumptions central to this book's study: that language not only reflects but also shapes perception, identity, and reality; and that language, culture, and politics are closely intertwined and mutually dependent on one another for meaning. Furthermore, the link between language change and politics is particularly critical during times of radical social change. This book thus examines the late- and post-Soviet political culture through the lens of language. The rest of the chapter outlines the methodological tools and framework best suited for this study.

This chapter examines evocations of the early Soviet avant-garde in new compositions of the post-Soviet period, investigating how contemporary Russian composers imagine the modernist culture of the pre-Stalinist past and its significance. It is based upon interviews conducted by the author with contemporary Russian composers and analyses of recent musical works. As we will see, composers relate to the early Soviet avant-garde in a variety of ways. Importantly, attitudes to the 1920s are not merely celebratory: even some of the individuals today most interested in the early Soviet avant-garde see a dark side to its legacy, finding within modernist art of the Soviet 1920s disturbing messages about Russia’s fate or the course of the twentieth century, or even more sinister prophecies of larger tragedies to come.

This chapter explores how Russian prose writers create fictional representations of a past, or a future, where language emerges as an essential theme. It offers close readings of two works, one portraying a fictional future for Russian – Tat’iana Tolstaia’s 2000 novel Kys’ (The Slynx), and one diving into the language’s past – Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Lavr (Laurus, 2012). The analysis shows how both authors challenge the standard language by stretching its potential and including a wealth of elements taken from non-standard varieties and older forms. Whereas Tolstaia’s novel depicts a brutal, destructive world of linguistic dystopia with, or so it would seem, no real past and no future, Vodolazkin’s text presents a smoothly created linguistic amalgam characterised by flexibility and multifunctionality. The chapter discusses the linguistic attitudes implied in the two approaches and their relevance to the post-Soviet language debates.

In the last two decades, the discipline of Russian music studies in Russia has undergone a profound transformation. The lifting of restrictions on access to hitherto inaccessible archival materials has made a wealth of new information available, and, in conjunction with the accompanying relaxation of censorship and increased contact with the West, has had far-reaching implications for scholarship. Open discussion of many aspects of the country’s musical past which were hitherto erased from standard Soviet accounts became possible, enabling the distortions and mendacities of Soviet scholarship to be corrected. The present chapter details some of the most significant achievements of Russian musicology in recent years, as well as the problems created by the challenging material conditions in which research on Russian music has to take place.

This chapter analyses explicit responses to the ‘language question’ in post-Soviet Russia by writers participating in surveys, interviews, roundtable discussions or conferences dedicated to the language situation. Such statements on the language situation illustrate the linguistic attitudes of individual writers towards some of the central topics in the language debates, while conveying the writers’ own assessments of their status as opinion-makers in this area.

This chapter offers an account of the circumstances in which contemporary composers have had to operate since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attendant diminution in state support for the arts which had been provided under the Communist regime. In addition to assessing the implications of these changes in practical terms, it also analyses the cultural, social, and historical factors which have caused new music to remain at the margins of general awareness. The second part of the chapter surveys the ways in which the principal stylistic tendencies evident in Russian new music today evince a lingering ambivalence in attitudes towards the West.

This chapter offers readings of two recent Russian novels, Valerii Votrin’s Logoped (The Speech Therapist, 2012) and Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Zakhvat Moskovii: natsional-lingvisticheskii roman (The Occupation of Muscovy: a national-linguistic novel, 2012). Votrin represents a linguistic dystopia governed by strict orthoepic norms. The story is told through the portrayal of two persons, a speech therapist representing the authorities, and a journalist, expelled for his oppositional views. Gigolashvili’s novel tells about a young German student of Russian and his encounter with the grammar nazi movement, a group of self-appointed language mavens who monitor, expose and ridicule linguistic liberties and orthographic errors in highly aggressive ways. Both novels can be read as responses to language legislation and language cultivation, highly topical issues in present-day Russian language culture.

This chapter explores the reactions of people working in the cultural field to the 2014 Russian ban on the use of verbal obscenity in film, literature and public performances, reactions that have not only taken the form of commentaries and statements in interviews or the social media, but have also provoked protest actions featuring linguistic and artistic practices (readings, performances), thus responding and commenting in ways bordering on the implicit and performative.

This chapter offers an overview of the principal developments in scholarship on Soviet music over the last two decades, highlighting notable achievements and the opening up of important new areas of study, in addition to assessing the extent to which perspectives on the period have undergone considerable change. It concludes with a discussion of the sizeable lacunae in knowledge that remain, and attempts to suggest potentially fruitful areas for further enquiry.

The book’s conclusion discusses the findings of Parts three and four and their implications for a general theory of what this book proposes to call performative metalanguage. Arguing that literary works may contain a metalinguistic dimension and intention, we maintain that a theory of performative metalanguage helps us understand this particular form of linguistic commentary, mapping out ways in which we can identify and assess such reflection.

The core of this chapter is documentation of the proceedings of the Eighth All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers in 1991, drawn from the eyewitness account and tape-recorded transcripts made by the author, the only Western musicologist who was accredited to attend. It provides a vivid snapshot of a critical moment in Soviet musical and cultural history, a time of political upheaval, regional and ethnic strife, and economic collapse. The Congress began hopefully, but quickly disintegrated into a debacle of monumental proportions. From the vantage point of twenty years later, the Eighth—and what proved to be the final—Congress of the USSR Union of Composers stands out as a turning point in a radical and unprecedented cultural transformation.