Ilja Kukuj - Böcker

In 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued the resolution "On the Restructuring of Literary and Arts Organizations." This resolution put an end to the coexistence of aesthetically different groups and associations of writers and artists that had been common during the 1920s, and instead, led to the establishment of the monopoly of Socialist Realism in 1934. Ironically, this resolution unwittingly created a rich literary and artistic production of underground intellectuals, known as the Soviet underground, during an era of political and aesthetic censorship in the Soviet Union. The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture is the first comprehensive English-language volume covering a history of Soviet artistic and literary underground. In forty-four chapters, an international group of leading scholars introduce readers to a web of subcultures within the underground, highlight the culture achievements of the Soviet underground from the 1930s through the 1980s, emphasize the multimediality of this cultural phenomenon, and situate the study of underground literary texts and artworks into their broader theoretical, ideological, and political contexts. The volume presents readers with several approaches to mapping the underground that include chapters on nonconformist cultures in Ukraine, Belarus, Baltic countries, Central Asia, and provincial cities of Russian Federation. Finally, the volume also provides an analysis of groups shaped around religious and cultural identity, as well as queer and feminist underground circles.

Form and Transformation in Soviet Underground Writing examines the rich literary and cultural innovation that thrived under Soviet censorship in the post-Stalin era. Moving beyond the idea of the underground as merely oppositional, this volume presents it as a vibrant field of artistic experimentation and social imagination. Through close readings of writers such as Leonid Aronzon, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Olga Sedakova, and Elena Shvarts – alongside studies of Vasilisk Gnedov’s late poetry, the international circulation of Evgenia Ginzburg’s memoirs, and conversations about publishing Soviet underground writing in the post-Soviet era – the collection explores how underground works moved within samizdat (self-publishing in the USSR) and out to tamizdat (publishing abroad). As these texts crossed media, borders, and decades, they gained new meanings and reshaped ideas of authorship and community. Bringing together literary, historical, and sociological perspectives, the book centres the intermediaries – editors, readers, and translators – who sustained creative autonomy under censorship and fostered communication beyond state control. By linking Soviet-era artistic innovation to today’s contexts of digital culture and renewed authoritarianism, the book reveals how the underground’s independence and inventive energy continue to inspire new forms of creativity, resistance, and cultural resilience.

Der Band enthält zwei thematische Blöcke zu Osip Mandel’štam und Andrej Platonov sowie Aufsätze über die russischsprachige Literatur des 19. und des 20. Jhd. (Nikolaj Gogol’, Vladimir Nabokov, Dichter der OBERIU).　Des Weiteren sind Beiträge zur Pragmatik der literarischen Motive und Lexikographie der Umgangssprache enthalten. Der Band wird mit Rezensionen über aktuelle Neuerscheinungen in der ost- und westeuropäischen sowie der US-amerikanischen Slavistik ergänzt.

Band 89 des Wiener Slawistischen Almanachs enthält vor allem zwei thematische Blöcke, die sowohl slawische Kulturen selbst als auch ihre Rezeption auf einer Metaebene umfassen. Zum einen sind dies mehrsprachige Materialien der Tagung «Periodicals in the Slavic World. Contemporary and Historical Perspectives», die in München im Oktober 2021 unter der Teilnahme von Redakteur*innen mehrerer führender slawistischer Zeitschriften stattfand. Der zweite Block beinhaltet englischsprachige Beiträge des Online-Symposiums «Mad Fridays: Literature and Psychiatry in Late Imperial Russia» (2021). Neben diesen thematischen Blöcken enthält der Band einen Beitrag zur politischen Ökologie des Treibhauses in der russischen Literatur sowie fünf Rezensionen zu Neuerscheinungen in der europäischen Slawistik.