Sincerity After Communism

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: Sincerity, Memory, Marketing, Media -- 1 History: Situating Sincerity -- 2 "But I Want Sincerity So Badly!" The Perestroika Years and Onward -- 3 "I Cried Twice": Sincerity and Life in a Post-Communist World -- 4 "So New Sincerity": New Century, New Media -- Conclusion: Sincerity Dreams -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

How have poets in recent centuries been able to inscribe recognizable and relatively sincere voices despite the wearing of poetic language and reader awareness of sincerity’s pitfalls? How are readers able to recognize sincerity at all given the mutability of sincere voices and the unavailability of inner worlds? What do disagreements about the sincerity of texts and authors tell us about competing conceptualizations of sincerity? And how has sincere expression in one particular, illustrative context – Russian poetry – both changed and remained constant? An Indwelling Voice grapples, uniquely, with such questions. In case studies ranging from the late neoclassical period to post-postmodernism, it explores how Russian poets have generated the pragmatic framings and poetic devices that allow them to inscribe sincere voices in their poetry. Engaging Anglo-American and European literature, as well as providing close readings of Russian poetry, An Indwelling Voice helps us understand how poets have at times generated a powerful sense of presence, intimating that they speak through the poem.

After Stalin died a torrent of Western novels, films, and paintings invaded Soviet streets and homes. Soviet citizens invested these imports with political and personal significance, transforming them into intimate possessions. Eleonory Gilburd reveals how Western culture defined the last three decades of the Soviet Union, its death, and afterlife.

Avant-Garde Post- follows seven Russophone poets as they reinvigorate leftist art in the wake of state socialism. Rejecting both the Putin regime--with its selective mobilizations of Soviet nostalgia--and Western discourses of liberal superiority, this circle is reviving class-based critique through experimental forms and global collaborations.

This book contends that the discourses of jihadism in Russia's North Caucasus, and their offshoots in other parts of the Russian Federation, are not just reflections of jihadi ideologies that came from abroad, rather that post-Soviet jihadism is a phenomenon best understood when placed in the broader cultural environment in which it emerged, an environment which comprises the North Caucasus, the whole of Russia, and beyond. It examines how post-Soviet jihadism is also part of global processes, in this case, global jihadism, explores how post-Soviet jihadism bears the imprint of the preceding Soviet context especially in terms of symbols, discursive tools, interpretational frameworks, and dissemination strategies, and discusses how, ironically, Russian-speaking jihadism is an expansionist idea for uniting all Russian regions on a supra-ethnic principle, but an idea that was not born in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Overall, the book demonstrates that Russian-speaking jihadism is a completely new ideology, which nevertheless has its origins in the intellectual and cultural heritage of the Soviet era and in the broader trends of post-Soviet society and culture.

Bringing together scholars from Russia, the United States and Europe, this collection of essays is the first to explore the slippery phenomenon of post-Soviet nostalgia by studying it as a discursive practice serving a wide variety of ideological agendas. The authors demonstrate how feelings of loss and displacement in post-Soviet Russia are turned into effective tools of state building and national mobilization, as well as into weapons for local resistance and the assertion of individual autonomy. Drawing on novels, memoirs, documentaries, photographs and Soviet commodities, Post-Soviet Nostalgia is an invaluable resource for historians, literary scholars and anthropologists interested in how Russia comes to terms with its Soviet past.

It is often argued that a new form of committed literature is needed. Embracing the 18th-century Romantic idea of aesthetic autonomy, literature is believed to have turned its back to everyday social and political reality. One of the central questions occupying contemporary literary debates is therefore whether literary autonomy is essential to modern literature ('autonomism') or should be abandoned ('anti-autonomism'). Aukje van Rooden argues that the debate between autonomists and anti-autonomists cannot be anything but a fruitless tug-of-war, because it is based on a distorted historical picture. In order to make sense of the social relevance of contemporary literature, a new theoretical paradigm has to be formulated. Literature, Autonomy and Commitment not only offers an historical-conceptual reconstruction of the Romantic paradigm and the theoretical impasse it has created, but also sketches the outline of a new paradigm, called 'the relational paradigm', based on the relational ontologies developed in 20th- and 21st-century philosophy.

Towards the end of the Khrushchev era, a major Soviet initiative was launched to rekindle popular enthusiasm for the revolution, which eventually gave rise to over 150 biographies and historical novels (The Fiery Revolutionaries/Plamennye revoliutsionery series), authored by many key post-Stalinist writers and published throughout late socialism until the Soviet collapse. What new meanings did revolution take on as it was reimagined by writers, including dissidents, leading historians, and popular historical novelists? How did their millions of readers engage with these highly varied texts? To what extent does this Brezhnev-era publishing phenomenon challenge the notion of late socialism as a time of 'stagnation', and how does it confirm it? By exploring the complex processes of writing, editing, censorship, and reading of late Soviet literature, Revolution Rekindled highlights the dynamic negotiations that continued within Soviet culture well past the apparent turning point of 1968, through to the late Gorbachev era. It also complicates the opposition between 'official' and underground post-Stalinist culture by showing how Soviet writers and readers engaged with both, as they sought answers to key questions of revolutionary history, ethics and ideology. Polly Jones reveals the enormous breadth and vitality of the 'historical turn' amongst the late Soviet population. Revolution Rekindled is the first archival, oral history, and literary study of this unique late socialist publishing experiment, from its beginnings in the early 1960s to its collapse in the early 1990s. It draws on a wide range of previously untapped archives, including those of the publisher Politizdat, of Soviet institutions in charge of propaganda, publishing, and literature, and of many individual writers. It also uses in-depth interviews with Brezhnev-era writers, editors, and publishers, and assesses the generic and stylistic innovations within the series' biographies and novels.