Maria Engström - 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.

This book examines how the Soviet past is culturally negotiated, reimagined, and recreated in new temporal regimes; how the Soviet project is “recycled” and used as a key component in the construction of a new Russian collective identity, and how it has metamorphosed from a historical dimension into the sphere of myth. These processes, conceptualized under the term “Soviet myth,” are crucial for understanding the growing nostalgia for the USSR in Russia, recent cultural and ideological developments, and current domestic and foreign policies. The scope of this study extends from the late Soviet period to the present, but most chapters examine the pivotal decade in the formation of the Soviet myth, 2012-2022. Written by experts in the field, the book presents a broad spectrum of examples of how the Soviet legacy has been transmuted into the realm of mythology in visual arts, film, television, urban narratives, music, and video games.Soviet Myth in Post-Soviet Russia is of value to researchers studying Slavic and Russian Studies, in particular post-Soviet culture, languages and literatures, anthropology and political science.

Thematic exercises in spoken Russian.