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Soviet Culture Today
(Forms of Cultural Recycling in Russian Art and Aesthetics of the Everyday Life. 1990s — 2010s)
Popularity of the Soviet ‘retro-culture’ in the post-Soviet society is one of the principal and passionately debated topics in the current studies focusing on the cultural situation in Russia in the 1990s–2010s. The phenomenon of such popularity is frequently interpreted in terms of nostalgia, revanchism, trauma, destruction, and the recovery of traditions. The amount of literature referring to the phenomenon increases rapidly. At the same time, alongside with the present-day agitation caused by admiration of the Soviet art and by the aesthetics of everyday life, a set of authoritative methodical frameworks stays on the periphery of academic attention. However, the known established approaches to the phenomenon of the Soviet ‘retro-culture’ in the post-Soviet society are not sufficient and convincing. Carefully coordinated attempts to describe systematically, in a collective monograph, the forms of appropriation of elements of Soviet culture in the contemporary Russia by the group of experts from different spheres of humanities who share the analytical perspective have not yet taken place.
The purpose of the proposed project is to provide a fresh view of the abovementioned kind of retrospectivism and describe the aspects of reception of the Soviet culture in the post-Soviet Russia, which have not yet attracted careful scholarly attention. The research group will focus on the aesthetic practices, such as literature, theatre, cinema, music, visual arts, and architecture, related to the ‘educational canon’ in literature and music and to the aesthetic of everyday life. In the framework of the project, the research group chose the idea of cultural recycling as the starting point for exploration of the subject. Despite the fact that the concept of cultural recycling is intuitively appealing in the context of post-Soviet studies, it has been discussed and used very limitedly up to present day. The research group will concentrate its efforts on bringing to light the most significant trends that characterise the process of cultural recycling. At the same time, the project does not suggest the single theoretical scheme, even if it seems extremely promising. The idea of cultural recycling, as any interpretive pattern, has both strengths and weaknesses. The research group aims to revise analytical tools that are usually used to explain the post-Soviet culture. The results of the project will be presented in a collective interdisciplinary monograph, in articles published in prominent academic journals, and in a series of papers at authoritative international conferences.
The research group will concentrate its efforts on exploration of the following areas and themes:
– forms of cultural recycling of the Soviet art in today’s Russian fiction;
– forms of cultural recycling of the Soviet legacy in feature films and TV production;
– forms of cultural recycling of the Soviet legacy on the stage;
– forms of cultural recycling in music (both popular and ‘academic’);
– forms of cultural recycling in visual arts;
– forms of cultural recycling in the ‘educational canon’ related to literature and music;
– forms of cultural recycling of aesthetic objects in everyday life.