Early Career Fellow in Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"

July–August 2025

Soviet Unofficial Culture in the Perestroika (1986-1991): Pragmatics and Aesthetics

The project is dedicated to the study of late Soviet unofficial cultural communities during the perestroika era. While previous research on the Soviet underground has primarily focused on the periods of the so-called "thaw" (1956-1964) and so-called "stagnation" (Zastoy, 1964-1985), this project proposes an approach that, in contrast to the dominant direction of perestroika research, does not emphasise discontinuity, i.e. the break with previous Soviet culture and politics, but rather continuity in cultural development.

During the perestroika period, the spatial heterogeneity of artistic expression—previously shaped by the dichotomy between official and underground cultural spheres—was supplanted or at least complicated by a temporal duality, marked by generational divisions within the underground itself. This period saw a heightened awareness of temporal distinctions within the "new" literature, which, during perestroika, defined itself through complex and ambivalent relationships of both historical distance and continuity with early twentieth century modernism and the avant-garde. Equally significant was its engagement with earlier formations of literary samizdat, particularly those emerging from the 1960s onwards.

While previous accounts of the Soviet underground have often focused on and been limited to cultural resistance within closed communities, this study of the Soviet underground in the context of perestroika seeks to enable the poetics of nonconformism and samizdat not only beyond a critical or negative pragmatics in relation to Soviet cultural and ideological institutions and artifacts, but also contributes to the identification of the general cultural phenomenological and epistemological foundations that do not lose their relevance outside the Soviet context of everyday life or outside socialist realist art conventions.

Dmitrii Bresler is an independent researcher, focusing on the literature and culture of the Soviet epoch, particularly the modernist tradition in Leningrad of the 1920s and 30s and the "underground" cultural movement of the postwar period. He has taught courses at the Higher School of Economics (St. Petersburg, Russia), at the Department of Art at Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic) and at the Department of Humanities at the University of Macerata (Macerata, Italy).