Abstract
This article introduces postmodernist trends in late Soviet thought through the prism of the three generations: the philosopher and writer Aleksandr Zinoviev (1922–2006), the poet, artist, and theorist Dmitrii Prigov (1940–2007), and the youngest Soviet conceptualist artistic group “The Medical Hermeneutics Inspectorate” as represented by Pavel Peppershtein (b. 1966; the group’s most active theorist), Sergei Anufriev (b. 1964), and Yurii Leiderman (b. 1963). The article shows how Conceptualism, an influential artistic and intellectual movement of the 1970s–1980–s, used the Soviet ideological system as a material for philosophical parody and pastiche, often characterized also by a lyrical and nostalgic attitude. Conceptualism was not merely an artistic trend: its metaphysical significance is revealed in Aleksander Zinoviev's “satirical” treatises, in Dmitrii Prigov's “shimmering” aesthetics, and in “heremeneutic” performances of younger artists who demonstrate the emptiness of all existing canons and the canon of emptiness itself.
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Notes
From another translation: “The aim of the experiment was to detect those who did not approve of its being carried out and to take appropriate steps” (Zinoviev, 1979b, p. 14).
Cited by Jon Elster from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (“Active and Passive Negation”). See Elster (1988, p. 123).
Another formulation of the same logical rule: “A distinction must be drawn between the absence of a standard and the existence of a negation-standard” (Zinoviev, 1979b, p. 618). One of the inclinations of the Soviet mentality was to believe that all social actions are either pre- or proscribed by the state, i.e., only assertions and active negations were legally admitted. It was hard to believe in “the absence of a standard,” whether positive or negative, and to behave accordingly.
“The population of a Communist country is on balance inclined to fight for its unfreedom against those who wish to free it” (Zinoviev, 1984, p. 257).
Suffice it to refer to a masterpiece of sots-art: Komar and Melamid’s series of paintings Nostalgic Socialist Realism (1981–1983).
The book was published in Russian only in 1994, already in the post-Soviet era.
The most comprehensive collection of Prigov’s theoretical writings is a volume of his collected works in five volumes (Prigov, 2019).
In Russian, the term “canon” refers not so much to a certain body of texts as to the rules or code of their organization, the underlying principles or stereotypes of a specific cultural epoch; for example, the “medieval canon” or the “realism canon.”.
The most comprehensive collection of Pavel Peppershtein’s early writings, both theoretical and fictional, is Peppershtein (1998).
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Epstein, M. Postmodernist thought of the late Soviet period: three profiles. Stud East Eur Thought 73, 477–493 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-021-09417-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-021-09417-2